| 2666: A Novel | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 71 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2663
Category: Book
Author: Roberto Bolano
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Second edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 912
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.9
ISBN: 0374100144
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780374100148
ASIN: 0374100144
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Release Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
THE POSTHUMOUSMASTERWORK FROM ?ONEOF THEGREATESTANDMOSTINFLUENTIAL MODERNWRITERS?(JAMESWOOD, THENEWYORK TIMESBOOKREVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolano?s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa?a fictional Juarez?on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives last year and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolano's true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: 2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolano's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of The Savage Detectives is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, 2666, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there--he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders--but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane. --Tom Nissley |
| Customer Reviews: Read 66 more reviews...
 Bolano, the Giant June 15, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel is a nightmare. It will haunt your subconscious long after you put it down. If you do not enjoy great literature--yes, I mean truly great literature--then leave and spend your time on something else. There is no mass delusion towards this work. You have to be willing to understand and remember. You have to be able to let yourself succumb to this work and realize the implications it brings with it that are truly horrifying. I have yet to read a writer like Bolano. I feel truly honored to be able to read any work by him. We will not soon be forgetting any of his work.
Strange and Wonderful (3.5 stars) June 14, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
2666 took me a long time to read. I found it difficult to take in large doses but worthy all the same.
It had a very cinematic effect on me in that I pictured the scenes very much like I would view a film. The first part had a very European art film feel, the second through 4th a very raw "No Country for Old Men" feel and then the final part was less visual for me and more like a standard novel.
The novel is very well constucted, the 5 parts are well connected and it's very original.
The first part concerns 4 academics who are obsessed with the enigmatic and secretive author Benno von Archiboldi. They are joined by their obsession and as they search for Archiboldi, they develop interesting relationships and connections. This is the very European art film part.
The second part is a good connector but was relatively uninteresting on its own.
The 3rd and 4th parts are the heart of the novel and take place in an industrial city in the north of Mexico. There are a wide variety of largely suspicious characters. These chapters take place in a time when many, many women are being murdered in the city. The police are largely trying to prove that there are not serial murders although it's obvious that something out of the ordinary is going on. These chapters contain many subplots and most, like the murders, are not resolved. The atmosphere of these chapters is paranoia and fear. I find them to be absolutely brilliant.
The 5th and final chapter, I found to be largely self indulgent with many pointless subplots and much philosphical meandering. I enjoyed it far less than the first 4 chapters.
In all, this is a strange and at times violent book that I can understand why people love. On the other hand, little is resolved, most plots lead nowhere and parts of the book are actually a bit boring.
I enjoyed the novel but I encourage others to read more reviews before choosing whether to purchase it.
This is a long book...but worth taking the trouble to read it all. June 10, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read a review of 2666 while sitting in the Dentist office, and being impulsive I pucahsed the book. It took a long time to read, and at some tmes I felt I was plodding through something. But end the end i am glad I stuck it out. You can read thee books in any order, and I even switched between book 4 and 5. I cn see that this is a unfinished piece of work, and maybe someone has done some editting after Bolano died. These books cross reference each other, some characters in one book stay in the same hotel room as characters in another book.
For those of you who make comments about lack of punctuation and paragraphs running togather. Stop being petty. Life is not simple, neither is his book. Read it if you can dedicate the time.
 I'm baffled by the hype. May 28, 2009
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Maybe I just don't get this book. Like many, I bought this on the strength of the reviews, and it's the positive reviews that forced me to plow through this relatively incoherent mess.
It seems that most reviewers readily acknowledge that the book doesn't have much by way of plot. Fine, I'm a pretty highbrow sort of person. I watch PBS. I do the Sunday crossword. I'm willing to accept the premise that a great work of literature doesn't necessarily need a plot. I'm a fan of Beckett, for instance. I'm a grown-up, more or less. I don't have to get a rip-roaring tale from everything I read.
The great disappointment isn't just the plotlessness, it's that this book provided nothing much of anything else, either. There is not a single character to care about here. Not the critics, not Archimboldi, not the dead Mexicans, nobody. The prose, while definitely competent, is nowhere near as engaging as the author clearly thought it was. There are no grand ideas introduced. There is no new light shed on the human condition.
Maybe I'm supposed to delight in the wicked send-up of literary academia. Maybe the ossified ineptitude of the Mexican bureaucracy is supposed to raise my dander. Maybe the dispassionately related saga of Reiter cum Archiboldi is supposed to fill me with awe. Maybe it's something else that makes this the greatest book written since the dawn of time.
Whatever it is, I just don't get it. I did not enjoy this book. I did not grow as a result of reading it, except in the sense that whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Let the academics and posers wax lyrical over the merits of this book, such as they are. But if you're just, say, a typical college-educated person who loves books, move on. There's nothing to see here.
2666 Read if you dare! May 14, 2009
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an incredible novel of sweeping scope and mesmerizing story line. It is dark and rich. Maybe not for every gentle reader, but to those connoisseurs that abandon themselves to the enthrallment of the 900-something-pages the rewards are commensurate. It is difficult to describe without resorting to magical terms. To emerge from the novel at the end is as if to awaken from a spell, a bewitchment cast upon the reader in the late hours of the night. You, brave reader, will definitely, breathlessly forge forward in the wee hours of your reading journey across continents, academia, war, time, art, and crime. You will visit McCarthy's country not for old men or in Roberto Bolano's case, young women.
As in life, Bolano's characters' paths cross and recross, entangle sometimes. Some run parallel for a time and some are introduced to disappear and never appear again. The resolutions of the great mysteries of the novel, like life, are never fully satisfied. But,--the questions, --the questions posed are satisfying and lingering. Be courageous! Have fun! Read this book.
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