2666 : roman

Okay, so this book took me most of July to read. This is, I cannot stress this enough, due to bulk only. (A hardback clocking in at around 1050 pages is a slow read for other reasons than the length itself too – the format makes one hesitant to bring it along for all those occasions where you

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might find time to read just a few pages) It’s not a difficult read (apart from emotionally at times), nor is it boring. For pure page turning reasons, there is really nothing standing in the way of anyone picking this up. Just saying, since I’ve seen fellow LT:ers hesitating from the impression Bolaño is too hard.

2666 is really five books, forming a pattern around the lost German writer Archimboldi and the (fictive?) Mexican city Santa Teresa, a hub for manufacturing industry and illegal activities close to the US border. It is also the stage for hundreds of brutal unsolved murders of women. The five books are only loosely connected in characters, places and themes, and the book is in no way forming a closed unit. Even in themselves, the books often feel like slices of life rather than storylines, and all of them have numerous sidetracks and disconnected anecdotes.

The first book is about four European literary scholars who share an expertise on the mysterious Archimboldi, which forms the foundation of a complicated friendship. They receive a strange tip that Archimboldi, vanished from the public light for most of his career, has been spotted in Santa Teresa for unknown reasons. Their journey there is a discomforting one, and one that changes their relations forever. This book is written in a laid back, casually intellectual sort of style, and it’s kind of hard to pinpoint what makes it such an engrossing read. But it is.

The second book deals with Amalfitano, a minor character from the first book. He’s a college professor in Santa Teresa, who is extremely worried about the endless murders of young women. His young daughter is beginning to break free, staying out late, getting high and drunk, and the anxiety pushes him over the edge. One day he hears a voice in his head, saying “I’m here now”. This book is not driven by story at all, but is a pretty chilling account of what it might be like to go into psychosis, from the early attempts of trying to ignore it, then to hide it and finally to give in to it. It all ends kind of abruptly though, and we hear nothing more of this character.

The third book’s main character is an American reporter, sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, a sport he knows virtually nothing about. He soon gets to hear about the killings though, and tries to convince his magazine back home that there’s a story here. At the same time, things around him grow stranger and stranger in a subtle sort of way, and more threatening as he hooks up with Rosa Amalfitano. This book is written in sort of noir style, without really being a crime story.
The fourth book is the one people warned me about. It deals with the numerous murders, and the tired, detached police working with the investigations. It’s not easy reading, consisting mostly of endless accounts of who the victims are, where they are found and in what state. It’s stark, but dulls the reader down, and a couple of hundred pages in you have the same sense of hopelessness and overwhelming as the officers in the book. The pattern that forms is that of a masculinity gone mad, with killings inspiring more and more killings, devaluating women further. The law is by no means innocent. This book is in the form of a gruesome calendar, but under way storylines develop: a very young police is trying to improve on the sloppy investigations, political forces very much want all the killings to be the work of a single culprit, a parliament member is on a private crusade, and the man the rampage is hung on is establishing himself in jail and giving a series of strange press conferences. The fourth book is probably about hundred pages too long, but it’s major flaw is that 2666 isn’t really a book about the killings in Santa Teresa – they form a gruesome backdrop, an ambience. Bolaño has no real interest in tying up the knots, and ends the fourth book very abruptly. Which, even having had a feeling it might be that way, feels more than a little disconcerting.

The fifth book is about Archimboldi himself. It’s about his growing up, his time in the Nazi war machine, the horrors of the crumbling eastern front, about his finding a secret diary in a cottage in Ukraine that changes his life. It’s about his love, his work and his disappearance. It’s a sort of post-war epic, feeling very European in its style, and contains a lot of the book’s most gripping scenes. It finally also gives us the explanation on why he went to Mexico, bringing the book to its closure.

There’s so much richness in this book, truly, so many stories. And the pages mostly fly by. In the end though, what stops me from calling it a truly great book (in the grand sense of the word) is that it is just a little bit too open, too disjointed. There is too much left hanging. I’m all for mysteries, gaps and missing pieces, but here the balance between questions and answers isn’t quite right to me. Nevertheless, it’s not often I read a book as rich and captivating as this, and if you are up for the slight frustration that comes with being abandoned by a writer, I heartily recommend 2666. I’ll probably reread it at some point, and for a book of 1050 pages, that’s saying something.

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Like--well, no, more than, in many cases--any book this big and oblique, there's a lot here, and you could build any number of readings on it. I went up and down a few times reading it. The first book is a goodnaturedly arid look at some, like, thoroughly postmodern professors and their prejudices

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and their craving for love, and it ends with a cliche that I think is meant--goodnaturedly--to mock. The second part turns some of our assumptions on their heads--the born supporting player from the start, this picaresque Amalfitano, turns out to have a spirit like Van Gogh, and when we break him open he's full of pain and beauty--full of the past, full of a story--but crucially, no resolution, no present.


The third part, I gotta say, feels like a waste of time for the most part. It introduces us to some context, I guess, for the fourth, but it mostly feels like it does in a sour and insulting way what the part about the critics did with a sense of fun--brings a foreigner down to have a cliche "one night in Ciudad Juarez--and it was a night he'd never forget"-type go-round, forcing Mexico back into the role of stage, "pastiche of a pastiche".


The fourth part is the oasis if horror in the desert of boredom, as the epigraph will have it. It is about the kilings of more than 400 women in Ciudad Juarez, which is called Santa Teresa in the book, and the killings, which are fictionalized but real and still going on, and, as has been astutely observed, how you deal with the 300-page assault of grisly details--with disgust, sadness, ennui, interest--raises any number of further problems. It's the flipside of the professors and their sexy anomie, their desire to float through life and study and couple and the search for the writer Archimboldi that gives them a story, a quest--this is the constant obscene fulfilment of desire as its own story, the dreary repetition of slaughter that means nothing at all, certainly not that it will ever have any meaning or that the killer will be caught. It's Lacanian--the desire itself as the fulfilment of desire, the compulsion to keep desiring, and the murders as nothing more than the site on which the desire can be born.


And then the fifth part is a straightforward, smoothly written, gripping, playful, etc., postmodern novel. (Bolaño can really write when he puts his mind to it--this books full of little artgasms that are somewhere between an imploding lightning bulb and a bloodflower). It does require you to suck up a surfeit of the Babel (the film)-esque cod-cosmopolitanism he falls into that just tries too hard (my other main criticism of him is the way he treats sex--I know all this stuff with how long the professors can do it and how much Hans and Ingeborg can do it and the priapism of the Romanian general is partly a windup, partly a contrast with part four, where sex is a nervous tic on the part of traumatized people at best and an adjunct to hell at worst. But there's still something sweaty palmed about it). But no, it's good, it steals from Thomas Mann and Günter Grass (again, not an original observation, but it's quite blatant, you'd see it too) and tells us one more story about the tired old war, and there are some happenings, and it's well done. It's horror narrativized, and that to me is the point of the allegory here: the Europeans, the Americans, all get stories. WWII is narrative through and through--the killings in Mexico are barely known (I'd never heard of 'em). Foreigners get to be good and evil and kill or search for a reclusive writer or have a whirlwind life all up and through the twentieth century--Mexicans get to sit behind their fence, work at their maquiladora, and hope they're not gonna get murdered. I'm not trying to support this argument so much as just put it out there and see if it strikes a chord in you when you read the book: 2666 is surplus narrative, and we all know what happens to surplus value, right? It accrues to the wealthy. This is a story about how the same rich world that exploits the poor world in so many ways is depriving it of its own stories, leaving nothing but dust and a succession of moments to be filled however you can, but without forward motion. Amalfitano, with his book on the clothesline and his nonsense diagrams, becomes, perhaps, the mad mage, the one who sees what nobody else does? Archimboldi, with the compassion of his final gesture in going to help his nephew, becomes an acknowledgment on the part of the author that systematic oppression, while it implicates everyone who benefits from it, doesn't implicate us completely.


Of course, it's a dark ending too, because a lot of how we read that gesture depends, and I'm trying not to spoil things for you, on who we think killed those women. Because that shit's real. And it's still going on. And the killer is probably just about everybody.

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I bought this book as soon as it came out with huge expectations and boundless excitement. Within the first few hundred pages my expectations came crashing down around me. What the hell? Pointless and rambling with fits of interesting narrative and characters that almost threaten to go somewhere

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but then abruptly fall off. I just couldn't make it through. It sits, dusty on my shelf, as one of the few books that I have ever begun and not finished. Perhaps one day I will try again. Those of you who loved this: you see something that I just cannot.

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Considered by most it seems as Roberto Bolano's masterpiece--2666 certainly ranks as one of the most ambitious works that I have ever read. Split into 5 different sections with mostly different characters, plotlines and at times differences in technique and style--Bolano in effect attempted to take

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5 developed stories and turn them into one.

In the first part an obscure German fiction writer--Benno von Archimboldi becomes the obsession of a number of translators and literary academics. Over a period of years after countless articles and conventions and conferences von Archimboldi's name is definitely in the public spotlight to the point that he's an annual Nobel literary candidate--yet there is almost no biographical detail on the writer, no ideas of his whereabouts and no photographs--what is known is that he was born around 1920 and he is an unusually tall man. The first part focuses around 4 particular translators and academics--these are the keenest Archimboldi fans right from the beginning. They eventually track him to a city--Santa Teresa in northern Mexico where his trail peters out.

The second part concerns one Amalfitano--a Spaniard and a professor now living in Santa Teresa with his daughter Rosa. Introduced towards the end of Part I--being the contact person between the group in Part I and the local university. Bolano uses this part mainly to flesh out more about Santa Teresa.

In any case part III introduces a black American journalist--Oscar Fate working for an obscure and struggling african american magazine. His expertise is mainly in the political and hard news arena but when that magazines boxing reporter unexpectedly dies--he is diverted to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between two light heavyweights--a young and upcoming african american vs. a young and upcoming Santa Teresa native. While in Santa Teresa waiting for the match--he hears all kinds of rumors about the murders of young women in the area. He also hooks up with Amalfitano's daughter Rosa. Convinced there's a big story he tries to convince his editor to let him stay and cover it but he's pulled away.

Section IV revolves mainly around the deaths of the women--most of which are fairly gruesome--are written out in the terminology of police reporting and in descriptions of the detective work much of which is inept. As well suspicion revolves around a young German shopkeeper named Klaus a shopkeeper who is suspected of being a serial killer--he is arrested and put in prison to await trial. Much of this part describes as well Klaus's prison experiences. Claiming his innocence--and as well while murders continue to frequently occur at the same time he is well enough off where he can build a gang around him which enables him to insulate himself against the normal violence from within. Whether or not Klaus is a serial killer--in any case it's obvious as well that he is a scapegoat of mostly unseen forces. Being in northern Mexico--Santa Teresa is located very near the Arizona border and is home to many maquiladora's all of which are intent on exploiting it's laborers (the majority young and female) to the nth degree. Many of the murder victims (some very young teenage girls) work in these factories and sweatshops. Surrounding the maquiladora's are the territories of the narco and human trafficers, the coyotes who lead illegals across the border into the United States, a class of super wealthy hedonist bankers, industrialists and politicians who set up orgies and corrupt judges and policemen who look the other way and allow everything to happen--each group enabling the perversions of all the others.

The final part--part V--clears up the missing biographical detail about who actually is the Benno von Archimboldi of the first part. His actual name as it turns out is Hans Reiter. He is a German WWII Eastern front veteran. It details his life from birth onward. Reiter is a somewhat strange child--his father a crippled WWI veteran. His mother blind in one eye. He has a much younger sister Lotte. After the war he settles down and works odd jobs--eventually he starts to write and finds a publisher who is very enthusiastic about his work. His girlfriend dies and he drifts--going here and there--once again surviving on odd jobs and continuing to write. Mainly he stays out of contact with his family and does not build close relationships with others. As for his sister Lotte--she eventually marries and has one son--Klaus--who in his late teens starts to have the odd run in with the law. He eventually emigrates to the United States and soon after disappears for a number of years. Eventually Lotte and her husband try to trace him from his last know whereabouts in the United States but the investigation goes nowhere. One day some years later though Lotte receives a phone call from a lawyer in Mexico representing the Klaus of Part IV--her missing Klaus who is the one sitting in the Mexican prison. Over the next few years as the case goes back and forth Lotte makes occasional visits to him. Eventually as well she reconnects with her older brother Hans who in the books final pages she enlists to help her son.

Anyway I think I've more or less got the gist of it. In the end this is not neatly wrapped up by any means. Whatever Klaus is guilty of is still open to interpretation. If the reader is looking for completeness here he or she may feel a bit disappointed. To say though that the book kind of peters out would be incorrect IMO however--it's just left open ended--well many great books are. Joyce's Ulysses for one. What I'll say is that Bolano has an extraordinarily powerful writing style. His use of language and linguistic technique is extremely subtle. His prose might seem ordinary at times but it draws the reader in--it is never boring. In a way Bolano seems to be commenting about any person's right to live and breather freely--about borders and people not in the limelight who are just trying to surviveas best they can--often becoming victims of the societies and bureaucracies that they live in and/or that surround them. It is a great book though I'm not sure I'd claim it was better than his Savage Detectives. I think that is open to debate. I definitely would recommend it though.

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So as I'm reading 2666 I begin to shudder in a way that few works of art can make me do, thoughts of David Lynch and Italo Calvino on a two year bender in Mexico producing the love-child that is 2666 percolating in my mind. Then, a few pages later, some of the characters begin discussing David

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Lynch...whoa indeed. For a novel without closure, there are so many stories here, stories within stories, stories that diverge, converge, twist upon each other...hell, it's as if Bolano came upon Robert Frost's roads diverging in a yellow wood, said screw the laws of physics and took both at the same time. The more I think about 2666, the more disturbing it becomes. Sure, it's a treatise on death and the mortality we all face, but at the same time it juxtaposes this morbidity with the creation of art. More importantly, the criticism of that art is torn asunder. You can almost see Bolano laughing as he toys with critics, who will wonder what certain passages mean only to discover...well, I'll leave that to you. Simply put, 2666 is the best novel I have ever read. And, I will never feel at ease in a hotel room again.

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My words will not be able to do 2666 justice or even begin to be able to describe the experience of reading it. Absolutely incredible. Mindblowing. Brilliant. An intricate weave of seemingly (at first blush) unrelated stories. Layer upon layer of stories within stories. Like scurrying down a rabbit

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hole with random, diverging and converging paths. Or peeling an onion. Or playing with a seemingly endless matryoshka doll to find the next doll more fascinating than the last. Perhaps the only helpful thing I can add in this unhelpful review would be a recommendation to buy the version of the book that is broken down into three separate volumes rather than one large book. The ~900 pages are somehow less daunting that way. 2666 is a masterpiece. Truly.

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[2666] by [[Roberto Bolaño]]

This book is divided into five sections, and Bolaño had actually given instructions that it should be published as five books, thinking that would be more financially successful for his children, as he knew that he was dying. I am glad that the book was not divided up,

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as I suspect that the whole is stronger than the sum of the individual parts, depite that, in some ways, they are very loosely associated.

The center of the novel is Benno von Archimboldi, a German novelist, whom we do not meet until the final section and only know that he is very tall, and that his novels are now receiving some recognition.

Section one revolves around four people who become friends through their interest in the novelist. There are three men (Espinoza, Pelletier and Morini), Morini is ill and eventually confined to a wheelchair, and one woman (Norton). The section is about their relationship, although that is given a context by thier interest in Archimboldi. At one point they go to Mexico, the town of St. Theresa. I don't know if this town truly exists, but it is, in the novel, near the border with the U.S. and is macquilador town - macquiladors being factories that exist for the purpose of producing goods for export. They may have existed before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but many sprang up as a result of that to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor to produce goods for export to the U.S. The events of this section have mainly to do with the relationships, some sexual, between the four of them, who are together in groups of four, two and three. It is engrossing throughout. There is one incident where Espinoza and Pelletier behave savagely, while Norton witnesses and protests, but does not intervene decisively. Although intrigued, I didn't find myself feeling getting caught up in the lives of these four people. It was really only in the final section of the book that my feelings were really caught up and I cared about the characters. That may be overstated, but it wasn't until then that my feelings were very strong. Yet, I was compelled by the entire book, and never felt like abandoning it. The depictions of the characters were deep and expressive, despite the sense of a little distance, perhaps as if the story is being told from a distance in the future.

While they were in Mexico, their guide was a man named Amalfitano, and the second section is anchored by his story. I say anchored because throughout the entire book there are numerous inter related side stories throughout the novel. The side stories never detracted from the whole for me, but seemed to enrich it even more. Thinking, perhaps of [100 years of Solitude] where there seems to be a story that repeats itself with different characters, I would say this novel is not like that. The characters, even minor one, maintain their distinctness. The second section tells the story of how Amalfitano came to be in Mexico with his daughter, Rosa, and what happened to his wife earlier when they lived in San Cugat (near Barcelona) in Spain. Parts are told from the point of view of his wife, Lola, who has a someone unstable personality, and part from Amalfitano's, who is also having some unusual experiences now that he is in Mexico with his almost grown daughter.

Part three begins with a writer who works for a Black newspaper, Fate, hearing about the death of his mother. He deals with that in rather a low key manner, though not emotionless, more with a sense of detached emotion. Later we see him on an assignment in Detroit involving a former member of the Black Panthers. This section connects with the earlier ones in that the sportswriter for the paper dies, and while Fate is in Detroit he is recruited to cover a boxing match in Mexico for the paper. While there he hears about a series of murders of women that have taken place in St. Theresa. This is through a female reporter who is to meet with a German, very tall, arrested for the murders - and still awaiting trial, though the murders have continued while he waits in jail. She asks him to come with her. She didn't choose to cover the murders, but was assigned by her paper, and she is terrified. Fate, hanging out with other sportwriters he also meets some of the powers of the town of St. Theresa, and through them he also gets involved with Rosa, the daughter of Amalfitano. At the end of the section Fate is fleeing from St. Theresa with Rosa, whose father has asked Fate to take her to the U.S. and then put her on a plane to Spain.

Part four is about the murders of women in St. Theresa. A great deal of the chapter simply tells, murder by murder, what is known of the stories of these women. Some are more involved than others. It is as if the section is saying that these lives and deaths cannot pass without at least an enumeration. Intertwined are a number of stories, mostly about policemen who are involved in the case. There is one about a policeman who initially investigates someone who is desecrating churches, eventually killing some people who try to stop them, and this policeman's involvement with the head of a mental hospital whom he encountered during his investigation. There is another about the tall German arrested for the murders, who owned a computer store. Another is about a young recruit to the police. Some of the murders told about are not the work of the serial killer or killers, but jealous husbands, etc. There are numerous accounts of investigations of the murders that are, most likely, those of the serial killer(s), but there is little sense of resolution. Within it is a sense of the power structure of St. Theresa, and some sense of a menace or hostility towards women that is independent of the murders (or perhaps creates the climate of the murders).

It is in part five, that the book actually becomes about the story of Benno von Archimboldi, who starts out with another name. Although, the style of writing doesn't change - there is still perhaps the sense of a slight remove, perhaps in time, and the intertwining of stories - but in this section I really became engrossed in the main characters and what happens to them. This is Archiboldi himself, and Ingeborg, with whom he falls in love. Some other characters we learn a lot about are the Archiboldi's book publisher, and his sister, and we meet again the German in the prison in Mexico. Ingeborg is actually present only in part of this section, very small in proportion to the whole, yet, for me, she was the heart of the book and the one that I cared the most about. I don't know how I would have reacted to the story of section five without the rest. I suspect it still would have been engrossing and have captured me, but all the rest provides depth and reverberation.

The novel is 900 pages long, but well worth it. I expect I will read it again before too long, a lot more slowly. This was a library copy with the need to finish before the three weeks was up. I highly recommend it.

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Spanish writer Javier Cercas, a contemporary of Roberto Bolaño, once described an overly adulatory critic: “[H]e more or less said there was an immense gulf in universal literature between me and Cervantes.” That kind of reaction is only a slight exaggeration of the well-deserved response 2666

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has enjoyed from the international critical community. It’s already taken a place among “the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown,” an extremely dark, violent, confrontational book that “struggle[s] against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench,” as a much-cited self-descriptive passage from the novel puts it. It’s an allusive and literary book strongly concerned with the role and function of art, but it’s also deeply engaged with the mundane world, from global politics to the smallest domestic detail. Bolaño is occasionally lyrical but more frequently direct, demonstrating a facility with styles and tones from broad comedy to blackest despair. The five discrete sections that make up 2666 could stand as novels in their own right, twists on different genres from academic satire to clinical police procedural to bildungsroman. Each chapter is itself a tantalizing buildup toward an unrealized revelation, and the collective narrative, tied together by minor plot threads and larger thematic concerns, eventually circles back to where it started. Seeking a fuller exegesis of the complexities on offer will be more than worth your time, but in this brief overview I’ll mention just one interesting effect of this structure. It creates an almost suspenseful narrative movement, not forward with time’s arrow but along a downward spiral toward the abyss at the center of the novel, the cloaca that is the fictionalized city of Santa Teresa, around which all the characters revolve and from which all the world’s evil threatens to emerge. The underlying horror at the heart of the book remains a suggestion rather than a clear manifestation, however. The unsettling sensation produced by continual approach without arrival is evocative of the Shepard scale, an auditory illusion involving overlapping scales that appear to rise endlessly in pitch without actually getting any higher. It’s the sound of Munch’s infinite scream, the whine of the plummeting rocket above Pynchon’s theater that hasn’t quite hit us when the last page turns. You’ll be amply rewarded if you listen closely to it.

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Embarrassed in light of the many expansive and positive reviews here, I cannot continue reading this book. I am constantly bored with the third-person narrative describing the most common everyday events of the characters in detail and describing interesting events in sparse, six word sentences. I

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struggled to continue reading from about page 40 to the end of the first book. Each character that had at first been interesting became tiresome. The absurd aspect of the writing where the characters act out extraordinarily under ordinary situations is only cute the first few times. I truly have nothing good to say about "The Part About the Critics" and I find it most displeasing to hear other reviewers favorably compare Bolaño to Proust and Nabokov.

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I've finally finished this, and the only reason I did is because I hate giving up on a book.


Nearly nine hundred pages and I couldn't tell you with any certainty what this book was about. There was something about an author and lots of women being murdered in Mexico, a few of which were committed

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by the author's nephew. Some of the victims in time honoured tradition were murdered by their boyfriend or husband. Most of the murders are never solved, most of the victims are never identified and the local police couldn't care less even when the vicitms are children.


All in all I fail to see, as usual, why the critics have raved about this. I would not recommend it.

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This work has gotten tremendous press, and good feedback from LibraryThing members. I found it a disappointment.

The biggest problem in the book is its tone. Bolano uses an omniscient, detached narrative voice. This would be perfect if the author had a sense of humor, but he has none on display.

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Instead, this style serves to keep you distant from the characters, who seem like cardboard authorial constructs. You never care about them.

The book is long, and some parts really feel it. The book is divided into five parts, and as it becomes clear that they are loosely related, but not building to anything, it becomes a real slog. I think this may be Bolano's point -- something about how we can't know each other or the truth or something "deep" but it really hampers the novel as an artistic work. You should never wonder "why am I reading this?" but you do.

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Oh what a magnificent book. The sort of book we should be reading as this bruised and battered decade draws to its close. Meta-fictive, mulit-layered, profound, desperate. I just loved it.

This book is consuming, long, exhaustive, boring, easy to read, extreme, excessive, intimate, etc. It's everything and that's not surprising weighing in at 898 pages.

By turns this book is funny, tender, horrible, but always surprising and there's never a compromise with the truth. It has much to say about violence, corruption, incompetence, and frail human best efforts, which include writing and reading. Magnum opus!

Really great. Uneven at points, but none of it bad. It's novels like these that the term "tour de force" was invented for. I don't understand the reviewers who say it's difficult - painful, yes, because the subject matter is so dark, but the style is clear and unpretentious.

Bolaño's 2666 has received monumental praise. Much of it is justified, but some of it, I think, is exaggerated due to the fact that he died soon after completing the book.

I found parts of the book incredibly interesting, but other parts felt disjointed and I found them difficult to get through. I

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guess my main complaint is that this did not feel like one cohesive work. The introduction states that Bolaño wanted it to be published as 5 separate books, but after his death, his family and publisher decided to publish it as one final work. As some other reviews mention, it doesn't feel like 2666 was complete at the time of Bolaño's death, and if that is truly the case, then perhaps bringing cohesion and tying all five parts together was one of the final steps that Bolaño did not reach.

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When I opened the LT ER package with 2666, my heart sank just a bit. It's SO big, I thought. It sat on my TBR pile for a month. I'm usually right on top of ER books -- I feel responsible to those who send them to me. However, my life at this point in time just does not have room for a 900 page

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tome. so I gifted it to a friend. I promise, I shall return -- sometime before 2666.

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Finished Vol. 1 on 11/25/09

The first volume of this epic novel is very good As a hopeless bibliophile, I am drawn to fiction that is literary in both subject and style. I love novels that talk about and obsess over books. Like the rest of Bolaño's work, there is a lot of that here, and it is

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wonderful. I hope I am not the only person who dreams of von Archiboldi being real.

But books and literature are not the focus of this novel. Violence is the focus of this novel. The center of gravity is Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez), and the center of gravity in Santa Teresa is a pattern of torture, abduction, and murder of hundreds of women. The city name is changed, but the murders are very real and still happening. Bolaño paints them in a terrifying light, though they remain just out of focus. In the subsequent volumes of the novel, they will be thrust forward, forcing us to stare into the inhuman, if only on the safety of the page.

(Some complain that this novel is fragmented and sloppy, but I disagree, so far.)

Finished Vol. 2 on 1/11/2010

The second volume of 2666 might be the most intensely disturbing book ever penned. It chronicles the rape and murder of countless women in Santa Theresa (Ciudad Juárez), one after the other, in the dry, detached style of a newspaper article or police report. Each murder is investigated or not investigated by the police. Evidence is lost. Men are arrested, interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned. The murders continue.

Between these deaths we follow the lives of policeman, a Mexican politician who friend disappears, the first man charged and imprisoned for the murders, local reporters, and others. It becomes clear that the state and the narcos are responsible for the murders (or at least responsible for covering up whoever is responsible), but the violence against women is so generalized it is hard to pin down any single culprit.

This is the oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. Bolaño's prose is masterful, and the novel continues to hold together, despite its length and scope and brutality.

Finished vol. 3 on 1/17/2010

Holy shit. The final volume of this novel moves from amazing to astonishing. We return to von Archiboldi and follow him through WW2, Nazism, and post-war Germany. We go through the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist purges. And it all comes back to Mexico and the killings in Santa Theresa.

The scope of this novel is ridiculously large, but it never breaks apart or becomes incoherent. It bridges the 20th and 21st centuries. It marks out a radicalism devoid of hope or false solutions and sets the bar really fucking high for every other writer this century.

With only slight hesitation, I can say that this is the best work of fiction I have ever read

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Took me a while to finish this monument but it was totally worth it. Bolano generates a very special world that is sometimes very cruel but very often full of love to literacy. I would lie if I wouldn´t say that I wished after a hundred pages describing rape and homicide that I can skip some of

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these murders but maybe it´s the school of hard knocks that you need to totally understand it (I guess I had the same feeling at American Psycho).
In the end i totally felt rewarded and i can totally recommend this book to every book lover that is also up for a little bit of mystery. If you like Murakami you will also like this one.
It´s a bit sad that Bolano died shortly afterwards.

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The impression given by much of the talk about this book makes it seems like it is concerned solely with the murders of women in Mexico. Well that is certainly a pertinent subject in the book, and "The part about the Crimes" meditates on it heavily and in graphic detail, this work is more like a

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collection of thematically interconnected and interdependent novellas, with the city of Santa Teresa serving as a sort of psychic anchor that permeates the mood of the work. That said, read this book from beginning to end and savor it. it is sprawling in the best possible way. It reads easily, for all of its profundity and staggering lyricism. It meditates on violence, on art, on love, on all of those abstract matters in the most human and pervasive manner imaginable. I said before that The Savage Detectives was one of the best novels of the last twenty years, and I can easily say the same about this work. Bolaño by these two novels alone, by this novel alone, is a master of the form.

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Day after day, you keep reading as the spent words and pages continue to mount. The better part of a month will pass before you finally finish this massive, sprawling novel and it will leave you in a very different frame of mind than you were in when you started. Over the course of 900 pages,

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Roberto Bolaño’s remarkable writing will show you the very face of evil and force you to contemplate sorrows and depravities of almost unspeakable dimensions. Throughout the entire experience, one thought keeps occurring to you: Welcome to Hell.

The structure of 2666 is straightforward enough, even if nothing else about the book really is. The narrative is divided into five distinct sections—The Part About the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi—all of which are connected, although frequently in a loose and tangential way. The main action in the book is set in Mexico in the fictional border town of Santa Teresa, a thinly veiled replica of Ciudad Juarez. The first and last sections bookend the novel’s central themes with story arcs based in Europe, both in the present day and during World War II.

The plot ostensibly involves the search for Benno von Archimboldi, a prolific yet reclusive German novelist who has been mentioned as a possible Nobel Prize winner. This quest leads a group of three scholars from their respective universities in England, Spain and France to Mexico City and, eventually, to Santa Teresa where the trail goes cold. (In fact, we will not learn about more about Archimboldi until the last part of the book, which fills in a considerable amount of his backstory during the war years.) Despite their association with Amalfitano, a Chilean ex-pat on the faculty of the local college, the critics remain largely unaware of the brutal murders of an alarming number of young women that are taking place in the area.

These murders are the real focal point of the book and they are presented to the reader in an interesting way. In The Part About Amalfitano and The Part About Fate, these horrific crimes are always just beneath the surface as the author describes the effect that being in Santa Teresa has on two of his protagonists and their families. This leads to The Part About the Crimes, by far the longest section of the book and the one in which the discovery of more than 100 tortured and murdered women are listed in a dispassionate, almost clinic, style, as if they were facts to be reported rather than heartbreaking stories to be told.

This was easily the most difficult portion for me to get through, especially given the mind-numbing and repetitive nature of material. Bolaño’s detached approach to chronicling the on-going brutalities was no doubt intentional; it actually ends up being an eerily effective way to underscore the corruption and lack of regard amongst politicians and law enforcement professionals in the city toward the femicide that was taking place in their midst. In fact, the closest we come to being “witnesses” to the crimes occurs in the third part when Oscar Fate, an African-American sportswriter in town to cover a boxing match, saves Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa from being yet another victim.

Needless to say, this was not a particularly easy novel to read and it was certainly one that required a major commitment to both start and finish. However, I would also have to say that it was one of the most challenging and rewarding books that I have ever read. For all the intensity of its content, I found Bolaño’s writing style to be quite accessible and engaging. He manages to weave into the main plot line literally scores of short passages and side stories that add a great deal of depth to the overall experience. Above all else, he was a marvelous storyteller and an author with an impressive talent for creating realistic dialogue. He also possessed a unique vision of the human condition, although I cannot pretend that a single reading of this complex work was sufficient for me to fully appreciate all of its many nuances.

Finally, much has been made about the cryptic nature of the novel’s title, given that the number (or date) 2666 does not appear anywhere in the book. Fortunately, the thoughtfully written Afterword provides a critical clue to the mystery by citing a passage from Amulet, an earlier Bolaño book in which a street in Mexico City is described as follows: “[A]t that time of night, it is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse…that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else”. No image could be a more appropriate way of summarizing such a magnificently harrowing story.

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2666 was a massive undertaking that took me about 4 months to complete. Bolano's writing is extraordinary, but my problem is that much of it went straight over my head, circumnavigated the globe, and went over my head again. Quite frankly, the IQ of this book is higher than mine. To truly

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understand much of the novel I think you need to be well educated in ALL of the following: Philosophy (all schools), Literature (global), Art, Geography and history. With a solid background in all of these areas of study, this book is likely magnificent. The parts I understood were enjoyable, but unfortunately that was probably only half of the 900+ pages contained within.

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This review will be edited as I continue my reading. I have just finished part 3 and decided to post a progress report review. As I finish parts 4 and 5, I will add reviews for each of them and for the book as a whole. One thing that I've been curious/confused/hopeful, etc. about as I've been

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reading is the extent to which the 5 parts are related (either thematically or plotwise). So far, there have been some interesting overlaps, mirrors, and a steady, well-executed buildup to actually facing the murders, which I assume will happen in part 4 "the part about the crimes". I've heard many people say each of the 5 parts could stand on its own, but if they don't come together more than they have so far, I have to admit, I'll be disappointed, but the overarching stuff is what I'll try to come back to at the end.

I - Part about the Critics -
Some academic satire and some unpleasant, but human characters. Four European literary critics (A Spaniard, and Italian, a Frenchman, and an Englishwoman) are all fixated on the mysterious German author Archimboldi and on each other. This part follows their romantic entanglements and their quest to find and understand the author. Some parts of the story (the romance, the vision of the enlightened intellectuals capable of such violence and depravity) pay off within the story. Bolano mixes the brutal and the sophisticated in fascinating ways. Other elements, like the search for the mysterious self-mutilating painter, and the foreboding dreams, would seem extraneous to me if this were standing on its own. We'll see where they go. Their quest for Archimboldi eventually brings them to Santa Teresa, which seems to be a unifying setting for the book.

II - Part about Amalfitano
This part takes a seemingly minor character from the first part (a local professor who aids the Europeans. His daughter goes on to be an important character in part III, but not a lot happens, plotwise in this story. Much of this part tells the story of his wife and includes interesting echoes of the subplot of the insane painter from part I. On its own, this part would have been frustrating and felt incomplete, and parts of it still did, but the last few pages made it feel like it came together.

III - Part about Fate
Fate here is not the abstract concept of destiny (though I'm sure it's that, too); it is the last name of a reporter who focuses on social issues in the Black community who gets enlisted to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. He also becomes involved in covering the murders that have been hanging over Santa Teresa for the first two parts of the book. Fate's outsider's perspective opens up Santa Teresa to the reader more than the first two parts did. I suppose it makes sense that the reporter would be best one to observe and show us the setting. The intellectuals were much to focused on their own ends and their own interests to pay real attention to the locals.

more to come...

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I first became acquainted with the work of Giuseppi Arcimboldo (Italian, 1527 - 1593) when I was a kid in Denver, Colorado. For some reason the Denver Art Museum has his painting Summer in its collection. I remembered it for its audaciousness and being a bit clever (at least to a 13 year old kid)

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and not so much for its interpretation of life. Never-the-less, as I made my way through Bolaño's 2666, it became the icon of the novel for me. There are some other helpful models, but I will save them for some future comments. Arcimboldo didn't just fly into my consciousness for no reason at all, but rather is suggested by a central character in the novel. The constructs of this painter, who takes distinct and discrete things - in this case vegetables, grains, and fruits, forms an entirely different and identifiable entity from these disparate elements. While the observer can see the pear, he or she is also drawn to see the chin, and the face.

2666 was intended to be published as five separate parts of an all-encompassing work. At least this was Bolaño's intention - he thought it would provide a better income stream for his heirs following his (imminent) death. The heirs, however, decided to publish it as a whole, and I am grateful that they did. It is only at the end, however, that I was convinced, and indeed not a little bit minded, to pick up the novel at any point and have it make sense. Well into the final segment, I smiled as I realized what was coming - that I was coming to the beginning again, or was it the middle? Indeed - in the paragraph following my instincts were proven correct. I wanted so much to have some kind of revelation at the end - and was worried that that might not happen, and was pleasantly surprised when it did. The framework deemed to snap into place. The details, however, are the subject of further work and rading.

Möbius strip
The other image, or metaphor, that comes to my mind about this work is the Möbius Strip (having only one surface and one boundary component). One can travel this surface, this single surface, and yet have the sensation of having been on many surfaces in many orientations. With that thought in mind, I suspect I will want to revisit this novel frequently to interject my attentions to it at any point, and to make new connections and relationships.

There is another aspect to Bolaño's writing that I find attractive. I have long been a fan of Umberto Eco, and find his ability to serve up the arcane and the unknown in a realistic environment that draws the reader in. Bolaño writes in a similar fashion, or should I say, in a similar world - where everything is fascinating and everything has some kind of suasion on the action at hand. (It is this style of writing that Dan Brown so wants to emulate and simply cannot handle). At points I read either Bolaño or Eco with a computer at hand - looking up unusual references, places, or names. The process of reading becomes an education well beyond the points of the stories.

When I was still teaching an Adult Group at Saint Francis Church in San Francisco, I loved going off on a tangent. Such excursions always afforded additional learnings and points of view. So it is with Bolaño. The line (if indeed there is such a thing in his writing) is interrupted often and artfully with "tangential stories" complete within themselves that yet draw the reader through the experience of the novel - more Möbius and more Arcimboldo. Reading this material makes one pause and wonder about bouquet, finish, mind or ear (as opposed to mouth) feel. I guess that this work is Wagnerian in that it encompasses and displays so much - total novel, like unto total theatre.

To say anything more, I shall need to talk with others, and to write any more will require some revisiting the novel. Let me, however, recommend it to you - all 893 pages. It's quite addictive. And now that I've cut my teeth on this, I may have to go back and have another try with Infinite Jest!

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