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2666: A Novel | 
| Author: Roberto Bolano
Creator: Natasha Wimmer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $18.00
You Save: $12.00 (40%)
Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 68
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
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Amazon 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
Product Description
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 A writers novel November 20, 2008
60 out of 67 found this review helpful
`2666` is a writers novel, best appreciated by academics (or so inclined) and other writers, often commenting on itself, the craft of writing and the creative process. For the average reader the ending lacks coherence, seemingly 900 pages of often depressing anecdotal tangents about death. It's a generous work in that regard, there are 100s of stories, within stories, most of them entertaining and worth reading, but characteristic of Bolano, they don't really "end" in any traditionally satisfying way - one doesn't read this novel to find out what happens - although paradoxically, mystery is what drives the book forward.
Bolano successfully breaks one of the basic rules of fiction writing - rather than showing what happens, he tells what happens, like a journalist. Thus he is able to say as much in one paragraph that others take in a chapter. Bolano says as much in 900 pages that might normally take 2500. He does not use line breaks and quotes for dialog (except in book 5), so there are often long blocks of text with no white space - it's a 900 page novel of high word count, but smooth reading. Ironically I never felt I was wasting my time, as if every detail mattered, even though I guess none of it did, all of it did.
The novel is certainly an investment of time and energy. I would recommend it to anyone interested in European avant-garde literature, Latin American literature, literature in translation and a sprawling kind of dreamy (strange) ambiguous work resistant to classification and open to interpretations.
 Bolano's Masterpiece - "a steaming cup of peyote." November 12, 2008
39 out of 44 found this review helpful
According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?"
Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolano, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolano's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives."
Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolano, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juarez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began.
With Bolano, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolano their first time they tried to pay attention:
"It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote."
His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and absence of quotations is a turn off) and the story itself is superb. If this was unfinished. If this novel was not how Bolano envisioned or felt represented him, help us all what a complete "2666" would look like. Nevertheless, this is Bolano's masterpiece. The hype is for real.
The Great World Novel! November 16, 2008
37 out of 46 found this review helpful
As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).
Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).
This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.
The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.
I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.
Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.
 Buyer Beware December 22, 2008
36 out of 77 found this review helpful
This is not an enjoyable/pleasurable book to read. Do not be misled by the 1st 100 pages or the other reviewers who would lead you to think it's a beautiful masterpiece. I am hard pressed to believe that the other reviewers even read this book. They gush on an on about how great it is, but every one of them fails to mention the overriding fact that this book is a GRUESOME and HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT book. The largest section of the book is basically 300+ pages of autopsy reports. You will read the words "vaginally and anally raped" over and over and over, until it runs through your mind day and night. I don't know what's more disturbing, the book itself or all the people who claim to love this book but somehow overlook or just never mention the brutal and gruesome violence which is the core of the entire work. If a masterpiece is a book to be reread again and again, then this book fails to be so. I could NEVER stomach this book for even one more read.
2666 April 26, 2007
13 out of 20 found this review helpful
2666 es la última novela de Roberto Bolano. Literatura de signo magistral que prefigura la aparicion y constitucion de un nuevo clasico latinoamericano. La médula espinal de esta obra postuma es el escritor desaparecido Benno von Archimboldi. La vida de cuatro criticos se entrecruzara en la pasion y búsqueda de tal escritor, camino que los conducira a la ciudad mexicana de Santa Teresa. Conoceran en la segunda parte a Amalfitano, el nuevo protagonista, que ha viajado, sin ninguna justificacion aparente, a México, en donde se entrelazara su relato con el de los criticos. La historia gravita, ademas, sobre la fuerza de escenarios reales, en especial el de la frontera, Santa Teresa, contexto en donde transcurrira también la historia de Fate, periodista estadounidense que involuntariamente se vera involucrado también con la ola de crimenes que atestan la ciudad. Por último, la biografia errante de Archimboldi (Hans Reiter), desembocara del mismo modo en México, y en el mismo desierto fronterizo que sentimos respirar a lo largo de toda la novela. 2666: atmosfera de descomposicion y arbitrariedad que parece regir el destino de todos sus personajes, y el de sus testigos.
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