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2666: A Novel

by Roberto Bolano

ISBN13: 9780374100148
ISBN10: 0374100144
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Awards

2009 Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee

Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)

"Well, it's not dead yet. The modernist idea, which is really a Romantic idea, that the truest art comes from the margins, from the social depths, from revolt and disgust and dispossession, from endless cigarettes and a single worn overcoat....A young man can still get up in a Mexico City bookstore and declare war on the literary establishment, give the finger to coffeehouses and Octavio Paz, plunge like a burning wreck into willed obscurity, toil in poverty for twenty years, and wind up forging, at the cost of youth and health and finally life, works that mark a time and point a new way forward....This was Roberto Bolano's story, and beyond his works' particular merits — which are indeed great, though not quite as great as generally claimed — their value is just this: the tremendous courage that they bespeak." William Deresiewicz, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño'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 Santa Teresa — a fictional Juárez — on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Review:

"Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolao (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolao originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in 'The Part About Amalfitano,' a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. 'The Part About Fate,' the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy 'Fate' Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. 'The Part About the Crimes,' the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano died in 2003 at the relatively young age of 50, but since then a steady stream of English translations has introduced American readers to the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of our time: politically engaged, formally daring and wildly imaginative. The Savage Detectives, a huge novel published last year to wide acclaim, looked like his masterpiece, but now comes a monstrous... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) novel twice as long and daring, and one that should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist.

Knowing that his liver ailment would probably kill him, Bolano pulled out all the stops for his last novel and threw out the rulebook for conventional fiction. A catch-all for many of his concerns, "2666" is at heart a fascinating meditation on violence and literature, on how writers "turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive." At its simplest level, "2666" leisurely follows a handful of characters who are drawn, like vultures to a rotting carcass, to the northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa in the 1990s. For "Santa Teresa" read Ciudad Juarez, the killing fields since 1993 for over 400 girls and women — most of them raped, mutilated, then dumped into the nearby desert — with justice for none due to official corruption, incompetence and macho indifference to women. ("The Daughters of Juarez," by Teresa Rodriguez, provides an informative overview of this tragedy.)

While the murders of Santa Teresa occupy the center of the novel, the perimeters make for the most satisfying reading. In the first of the novel's five semi-independent parts, we're told how three European literary critics became obsessed with the work of a mysterious writer named Benno von Archimboldi — think B. Traven or Thomas Pynchon. They travel to Santa Teresa after hearing the elusive writer may be there researching his next novel. Part 2 concerns an Archimboldi expert currently living in Santa Teresa and watching over his daughter, who seems destined to be another victim in the femicide epidemic. In part 3, a black American reporter travels to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and becomes embroiled in the ongoing murders. Part 4, the longest of the novel's five parts, is a numbing chronological account of individual murders from 1993 to 1997, narrated in police-report fashion, along with digressions on various officials, policemen, lawyers and reporters involved in the cases. And finally, part 5 is a mesmerizing account of how a strange Prussian boy became the enigmatic Archimboldi, an author neglected at first but considered Nobel-worthy after he's rediscovered by the scholar-detectives of part 1. We also learn his real reason for going to Santa Teresa.

Archimboldi never meets his critics, the reporters never solve the crimes, and nothing is resolved at the novel's end. (Even the title is left unexplained, though an editor's note offers a clue.) This is not because Bolano didn't finish it but because he was more interested in conveying the culture of violence and how writers respond to it than in telling a tidy story. In one of many self-reflexive comments on his work, he has a character sneer at a reader who prefers short, well-made works of literature, "afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown."

"2666" is just such a work, with a historical reach extending back to the bloody rituals of the Aztecs, to the horrors of the Eastern front during World War II, to the Black Panthers of the '60s. Countless fascinating subplots blaze paths into unknown corners of 20th-century culture, and there are enough references to Greek mythology to give the whole work a timeless quality. Uniting the sprawling work are moments and metaphors where sex and violence collide.

This is a delightfully bookish novel, filled with writers, critics, publishers, copy editors, reporters — all illustrating how reading and writing help make sense of the world. Archimboldi is a grim, humorless character, but we're told "he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer"; Bolano likewise exults in his indefatigable storytelling skills and his mastery of an arsenal of styles, from factual to frivolous, from plain to purple. In this he is expertly partnered by Natasha Wimmer, whose translation is fluid and faithful. The novel is probably longer than it needs to be, but there isn't a boring page in it, and I suspect further study would justify everything here.

With "2666" Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolano has joined the immortals.

Steven Moore, the author of several books and essays on modern literature, is writing a history of the novel.

Reviewed by Steven Moore, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

“Bolaños masterwork . . . An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novels narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, in the Sonora desert near the Texas border.” FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, The New York Review of Books “Not just the great Spanish-language novel of [this] decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature.” J. A. MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, La Vanguardia “One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time . . . to see . . . a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his lifes work but redefines it and raises it to new dizzying heights.” RODRIGO FRESÁN, El País

"Bolano's savoir-faire is incredible ... The exploded narrative reveals a virtuosity that we rarely encounter, and one cannot help being bowled over by certain bravura passages--to single one out, the series of reports describing murdered young women, which is both magnificent and unbearable. We won't even mention the 'resolution' of this infernal 2666, a world of a novel in which the power of words triumphs over savagery." --Baptiste Liger, L'EXPRESS

"Splendid ... The jaw-dropping synthesis of a brief but incredibly fertile career." --Fabrice Gabriel, LES INROCKUPTIBLES

"The event of the spring: with 2666 Roberto Bolano has given us his most dense, complex, and powerful novel, a meditation on literature and evil that begins with a sordid newspaper item in contemporary Mexico." --Morgan Boedec, CHRONIC ART

"Including the imaginary and the mythic alongside the real in his historiography, without ever dabbling in the magical realism dear to many of his Latin-American peers, Bolano strews his chronicle with dreams and visions. As in the films of David Lynch (with whom Bolano's novel shares a certain kinship) these become a catalyst for reflection ... In such darkness, one must keep one's eyes wide open. Bolano invites us to do just that." --Sabine Audrerie, LA CROIX

"An immense moment for literature ... With prodigious skill and his inimitable art of digression, Bolano leads us to the gates of his own hell. May he burn in peace." --TECHNIKART

"Bolano constructs a chaos that has an order all its own ... The state of the world today transmuted into literature." --Isabelle Ruf, LE TEMPS

"To confront the reader with the horror of the contemporary world was Bolano's guiding ambition. He succeeded, to say the least. Upset, shocked, sometimes even sickened, at times one is tempted to shut the book because it's unbearable to read. Don't shut it. Far from being a blood-and-guts thriller meant to entertain, 2666 is a 'visceral realist" portrait of the human condition in the twenty-first century." --Anna Topaloff, MARIANNE

"On every page the reader marvels, hypnotized, at the capacity of this baroque writer to encompass all literary genres in a single fascinating, enigmatic story. No doubt many readers will find 2666 inexhaustible to interpretation. It is a fully realized work by a pure genius at the height of his powers." --LIRE

"His masterpiece ... Bolano borrows from vaudeville and the campus novel, from noir and pulp, from science fiction, from the Bildungsroman, from war novels; the tone of his writing oscillates between humor and total darkness, between the simplicity of a fairytale and the false neutrality of a police report." --Minh Tran Huy, LE MAGAZINE LITTERAIRE (Paris)

"The book explores evil with irony, without any theory or resolution, relying on storytelling alone as its saving grace... Each story is an adventure: a fresco at once horrifying, delicate, grotesque, redundant, and absurd, revealed by the flashlight of a child who stands at the threshold of a cave he will never leave." --Philippe Lancon, LIBERATION

"If THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES recounted the end of a century of avant-gardes and ideological battles, 2666, more radically, evokes the end of humanity as we know it. Apocalyptic in this sense, wavering between decomposition and totality, endlessly in love with people and books, Bolano's last novel ranges over the world and history like the knight Percival, who in Bolano's words 'wears his fool's motley underneath his armor.'" --Fabienne Dumontet, LE MONDE DES LIVRES (Paris)

"A work of genius: a work of immense lucidity and narrative cunning, written with a unique mixture of creative power and intimate existential desperation, the work of a master whose voice has all the authority and seeming effortlessness that we associate with the great classics of the ages ... It is impossible to read this book without feeling the earth shift beneath one's feet. It is impossible to venture deep into writing so unforgiving without feeling inwardly moved--by a shudder of fear, maybe even horror, but also by its need to pay attention, by its desire for clarity, by its hunger for the real." --Andres Ibanaz, BLANCO Y NEGRO

"Without a doubt the greatest of Bolano's productions ... The five parts of this masterwork can be read separately, as five isolated novels; none loses any of its brilliance, but what's lost is the grandeur that they achieve in combination, the grandeur of a project truly rare in fiction nowadays, one that can be enjoyed only in its totality." --Ana Maria Moix, EL PAIS

"Make no mistake, 2666 is a work of huge importance ... a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out. Bolano inspires passion, even when his material, his era, and his volume seem overwhelming. This could only be published in a single volume, and it can only be read as one." --EL MUNDO

"An absolute masterpiece ... Bolano writes almost without adjectives, but in his prose this leads to double meanings. The narration is pure metonymy: it omits feelings in favor of facts. A phone call or a sex act can express real tragedy, the sweep of the vast human condition." --Andres Lomena, LA OPINION DE MALAGA

About the Author

ROBERTO BOLAÑO was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

NATASHA WIMMER's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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: lwsupremacy, July 1, 2009 (view all comments by lwsupremacy)
The novel 2666 spans several continents, though most of the story, or I should say stories, take place in Europe and Mexico. I don’t generally get too excited about North or South American writers because the culture is too familiar or mundane. For that reason Europe satisfies me more, at least from a literary perspective. In contrast to some Latin American authors I’ve read, Bolaño’s writing moves flawlessly through a variety of geographical and cultural backdrops, and he never falls into that “quaint little town” cliché.

2666 contains five “books” in total, all connected but each following a slightly different thread. The first book (The Part About the Critics) tells about a four European professors / critics / bibliophiles who are trying to track down the elusive German author, Benno von Archimboldi.Their search eventually leads them to city in northern Mexico where, in books three through four (The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes) we learn about a series of violent murders that have been occurring in the area for several years. Finally, book five (The Part About Archimboldi) brings the novel to a conclusion with the story of the mysterious author himself.

This is one of the few books I’ve read recently that stands up to all the hype surrounding it. I thoroughly enjoyed 2666 and highly recommend it, especially to anyone who likes novels about European history, literature, or crime. My only caution is that it can get a little graphic in certain sections, notably “The Part About Crimes” which goes into detail about the murders (which incidentally are based on the very non-fictional femicides taking place for the past ten years in Ciudad Juárez).
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: Yonathan, April 27, 2009 (view all comments by Yonathan)
A shocking compelling book. The 900 hundred page novel written by Robert Bolano is the story of a violent, sexist Mexico that I, a naive tourist would never associate to the smiling people and lavish resorts of a all inclusive Americanized Mexico. The book is written in 5 parts. With a underlying thread of violence that connects them all. The story is both shocking and tender. The violence of part 4 is at times almost unbearable to read. I loved this book! I was deeply touched by one page and thoroughly disgusted by another. This is a difficult book to read but well worth every moment spent. I ended the book feeling connected to the writer and the country. The next time I visit Mexico I want experience the real country and the people. If you love long emotional tempestuous novels you must read it! Unfortunately Robert Balano died in 2003, but his legacy is a masterwork. This was for me one of the rare books that filled my mind with possibilities.
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: Eleanor Wynn, January 10, 2009 (view all comments by Eleanor Wynn)
I would have liked to read this in Spanish and probably will. The translation is good but there were places where I was left wondering what he really said. Bolano has to be the ultimate postmodern writer or maybe more post than that. There is certainly a hint of Cortazar, and a literature student will pick up many echoes from Bolano's extensive literary background.

He reflects the condition of a world divided between hypercivilization in the form of the literature professors and their interpersonal indulgences and intensive self-characterization, and the cultural degradation of nearshore border capitalism. The final book takes a look back at perhaps where things began to fall apart, in WWII; and everything loops together to wind up in the maquiladora town of Santa Teresa, south of Juarez.

The section on the murders of women in that town is based in fact, and the he meticulously describes the known but scant details of each case as from a police blotter, interweaving several other plotlines. First the accounts are morbidly fascinating, then overwhelming; then a dullness sets in, similar to the desensitization of the casually evil powers in that town, a mixture of narcos, politicians and academics on the edge of nowhere.

This is a truly cutting social commentary pulled along by a narrative pace that keeps you turning pages despite the density of detail and ideas that almost seem like brush to be cleared before you can solve the puzzle, yet are in fact themselves the substance. It is truly a shame that we lost Bolano.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780374100148
Author:: Bolano, Roberto
Publisher:: Farrar Straus Giroux
Translator:: Wimmer, Natasha
Author:: Bolao, Roberto
Author:: Wimmer, Natasha
Subject:: General
Subject:: General Fiction
Subject:: Literary
Edition Description:: Trade Cloth
Publication Date:: November 2008
Binding:: Hardcover
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Pages:: 898
Dimensions:: 9.25x6.39x1.77 in. 2.70 lbs.

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