2666: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Roberto Bolano
Creator: Natasha Wimmer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $17.49
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 101
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 912
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.9
ISBN: 0374100144
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780374100148
ASIN: 0374100144
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
bAmazon Best of the Month, November 2008/b: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolano's novel iThe Savage Detectives/i 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: i2666/i, 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 iThe Savage Detectives/i is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, i2666/i, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of imaquiladoras/i and ila migra/i 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. i--Tom Nissley/i
Product Description
DIVTHE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM #8220;ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS#8221; (JAMES WOOD, ITHE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW/I) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolano#8217;s life, I2666 /Iwas 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#8212;a fictional Juarez#8212;on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared./DIV
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Along for the Ride January 6, 2009
This work, by one of a handful of brilliant writers, spans the whole of the imagination. Clearly without equal, the late Robeto Bolano, has made concrete dreams and razor edged light seem commonplace. Pervasive, funny and savage all at the same instant
Year's best novel 2008 here's why........ January 4, 2009
I bought this book because most of the reviews were interesting but ambiguous. The reviews just left me curious. Really, the scope of this book is large and hard to decribe but the reason I would suggest it is that it is completely fascinating. Bolano's characters are spellbinding, odd and they hold your attention so well it's almost hypnotic. Reading this book has the effect of driving up on a bad car accident where bodies are strewn in the road: you keep looking whether you mean to or not. Another thing that I love about Bolano's writing is that he does not give you the option of becoming bored. He writes in short, vivid scenes. Scenes where something could go wrong, someone could get hurt, the character is scared or lost. Everything makes you want to stay. If you pick this up it will speak to you no matter who you are and you may have trouble putting it down.........
Not for everyone, but if for you, then DO. January 2, 2009
I agree that this is absolutely not for all. You need to be open minded, I want to say intellectual but I suppose I here am the exception as I cannot think of the word and hardly am calling those who dislike it dumb. An academia of sorts? Perhaps one who likes to be intellectually stimulated but has yet to find their own counterpart to fit that role... but in a sort of Chuck Palahniuk but not quick as raunchy way. lol. WOW ... did that make sense?
Those Who Toil December 31, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Perhaps Bolano's own words best describes this work: br /br /"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." br /br /Bolano's final, colossal work is just that. Weaving five disparate narratives that brush, grate, and engage in shadow play with each other around the still turning point of this work- Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), Mexico- Bolano has undoubtedly attempted to impart upon the reader those feelings most essential to Death and Man's existence within a Universe dictated by Nature, Chance, and Uncertainty. The words painted across this ambitious masterpiece are unmistakably those of a dying man. After reading this work, I am left with more questions than when I began. Counterintuitively enough, that is a good thing. While this work by no means exhibits perfection, it spurs us on, coaxing us through its multitudes, to excavate and face our own questions, whatever those may be. br /br /On a lighter note, the obscure literary, philosophical, and historical references make for interesting detective work as the novel is read. This is not a work to be missed and these sort are few and far between.
The Whole Universe Falling on Your Head December 24, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Suppose you were lucky enough to be alive in Paris when Joyce's "Ulysses" first appeared or when Proust's Marcel arrived; wouldn't you feel blessed and lucky and amazed? Well, here's your chance: you are alive when the novels of Roberto Bolano are first appearing, the most important literary event in South American and world literature since the arrival of Gabriel Garcia Marques. Unfortunately, Bolano is not alive to share in your excitement but in his great novel, "2666" he clearly anticipated the posthumous career of a creator who can reveal himself only through his creations.br /br /Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) began as a poet; his magical novel, "The Savage Detectives" described the hopeless search for the founders of a bizarre Mexican literary movement, one of whose leaders is Arturo Belano, the unnamed narrator of "2666". The latter novel, only recently detonated in the English-speaking world, is the author's masterpiece, a great baggy word-intoxicated book with all of the ambition, and some of the mechanics, of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". Like Proust, the set pieces move at a speed one might call "real" time in that it takes as much time to read about the event as it probably took to experience it in real life. Like Proust's great work, Bolano's books are arriving posthumously, year after year, volume after volume. Concerned about the financial security of his family after his premature death, Bolano intended for the five long novellas of "2666" to appear one after the other. His heirs decided to print the five novels as a unified whole, a decidedly wise decision. It is only through the compression of reading the entire 893 pages in one sitting that one can detect the correspondences between the different sections and note the transformation in the writer's strategy from the omniscience of Proust to the dogged Thomas Mann of "The Magic Mountain".br /br /In section V, The Part About Archimboldi, the novel's locus moves from Mexico and North America to Germany and time steadily speeds up from the Second World War to the present, exactly the time-lapse strategy of The Magic Mountain's final pages. Section V solves the identity of the writer chased by the critics in Part I and, in a chilling description of how ordinary townspeople could shoot Jews in pits during the Second World War, explains the banality of evil underlying the multiple rapes and deaths of young Mexican women in Part IV. In its restraint and quietude, Part V is the most moving and dramatic literary explanation of the Holocaust ever written, a triumph achieved without sentimentality and without a single description of the camps. In section III, The Part About Fate, Bolano brings a black reporter from Detroit to Santa Teresa, the town where the murders are occurring, and stretches his canvas to cover all nationalities and ethnicities. To my taste, Section II, concerning the removal of one of Archimboldi's critics from Spain to Mexico, is the weakest part of "2666", though the writing, as always, is detailed and poetic in the best sense of the term. The drum beat of rapes and murders in Part IV, each of which carries the plot outline for an entire novel by a lesser writer, creates an inexorable tension, one that is relieved by the more conventional narrative flow of Part V. br /br /Bolano's novels are as much about writing per se as the poems of Wallace Stevens are about the art of poetry. Both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" are set up as a type of detective fiction because life and creativity are fundamental mysteries; that the novels end somewhat inconclusively is consistent with the profound difficulties of such mysteries. Part 1 is an extended set piece on academic life, the pretensions of critics, and the mysterious explication of a writer's life and the meaning of his work. It is the most humorous part of the book and tenderly sexual in a way that the rest of the novel is not. That an unknown author might be a candidate for the Nobel Prize is a painful irony that the dying Bolano understood only too well; Death is introduced as an explicit character in Part V. One must remember that Bolano gave up the chance for a life-saving liver transplant in order to complete "2666".br / br /The novel eschews ordinary plot development, standard grammar and the use of quotation marks to break up the solid blocks of prose. This is simply another way of saying that although Bolano stopped writing poetry in order to feed his family from his fiction, "2666" reads like an extended poem. When the mysterious writer of Part I is uncovered in Part V standing beneath a sky lit by stars burnt out long ago, he and his girlfriend are described returning to a village "while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads." In this encyclopedic novel, you will feel that way too, alone and connected to everything. br /
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