2666 - Roberto Bolaño & Natasha Wimmer

2666

By Roberto Bolaño & Natasha Wimmer

  • Release Date: 2013-07-09
  • Genre: Literary Fiction
Score: 4
4
From 72 Ratings

Description

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

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 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 SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Reviews

  • A brilliant effort, but flawed

    3
    By One Suitcase
    I enjoyed much of the writing of ‘2666’, but I found the novel weak as a lengthy coherent story. A note to the first edition states that in the last months of his life Bolaño insisted that the grand project of '2666' be transformed into a series of five novels corresponding to the five parts into which the work was divided. His heirs chose not to do this. I am not sure what the experience would have been had I read each of the five parts on its own, but reading the five parts consecutively left me unsatisfied and looking forward to the novel’s ending. I even imagined different permutations of the sequence of the five parts, but I do not believe a different sequence that I imagined from the way the five parts were ultimately sequenced, would have improved the experience for me. In the end a disappointment.