Product Description

'Not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel.'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1044 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Review
'Now's the chance to immerse yourself in his labyrinthine portrait of the violence of the 20th century and the possibilities of literature.'
--Guardian

`Roberto Bolaño's posthumous masterpiece... It establishes the Chilean as one of the giants of Latin American literature' --Sunday Telegraph

`The late, great Chilean novelist made his grand statement in this, his last book... Anarchic, lyrical and hugely ambitious'
--Metro

`With The Savage Detectives having already been proclaimed Roberto Bolaño's "masterpiece", a new superlative is needed for this, the Chilean author's colossal final work... All five parts are wonderful but the crowning glory is the last, where the many threads come together in a satisfying conclusion --Observer

`Grand in scale and ambitious in scope, as interested in characters' dreams as their loves and obsessions, it's a book to immerse yourself in' --Mail Daily

`'2666 is a convincing attempt to debate the purpose of fiction in a world of pain. Natasha Wimmer's top-notch translation from the Spanish bears few signs of the labour it must have taken'
--Daily Telegraph

'My favourite book of the year... Whereas so much long contemporary fiction is a struggle to get through, Bolaño is always interesting. If the first and foremost requirement of fiction is that it be interesting, then there is no other contemporary writer as pleasing and successful as Bolaño.' --Edmund White, Books of the Year, TLS

'This year I was so fascinated by Natasha Wimmer's fine translation of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño that straight away I read it again... Built in five colossal semi-autonomous parts, the work more resembles a melancholy wreath of novels, brimming with incident and fable - a remarkable achievement.'
--Angus Trumble, Books of the Year, TLS

'My reading this year was dominated by Roberto Bolaño's two massive novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The first is the superior, but 2666, for all its occasional longueurs, is still quite magnificent. Bolaño links seamlessly South American, US and European traditions; modernism with gritty realism and the crime thriller. These are both important works and the advent of Bolaño as a significant moment in the history of modern fiction.'
--Kazuo Ishiguro, Books of the Year, Observer

Review
'The Chilean is being canonised by critics as the first great writer of this century.'

Review
'A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year. 2666: The Best Book of 2008.'

Customer Reviews

Bolano's Masterpiece
Bolano's 1100 page (Spanish Edition) magnus opus is mesmerizing and hypnotic; full of magical stories, violence, sex, meta-fiction, and lies--a lot of lies and a great deal of misdirection.

When I finished the novel I started again; it was the only thing to do; there was too much to absorb on the first reading; too many themes--writing, violence, detectives, murder, identity, travel, death, books, libraries, biographies, success, failure, race, fascism, Nazis, and war.

The writing in itself is beautiful, a poet's book, written by a poet, and translated beautifully by Natasha Wimmer.

The story, in a nutshell, is the life story of a German soldier by the name of Hans Reiter, who, in mid-life in the bombed-out city of Cologne, after the Second World War, changes his name to Benno von Archimboldi and writes his first novel. This story seems to be a conflation of several writers' biographies--Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, and surely Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau (I don't think you will see this in any other critique of the book but Bolano gives a brilliant clue at the end of the novel and the parallels between Benno and Prince Herman are quite interesting to trace. Why did he chose him? Because he is better remembered for the ice cream named after him than the books he a wrote and the life he lived.)

From this brief synopsis grows a story of the world in the Twentieth Century. It begins with Reiter's birth in Prussia and ends in the present day. The book contains hundreds of characters and their stories, each told by the same voice, a narrator, who Bolano once said was the fictional poet, Arturo Belano, a character in his brilliant novel--"The Savage Detectives."

So, we have a story told, not shown, which covers eighty years.

The novel contains five parts, which are almost self-contained, but when read together fit perfectly. The five parts are: (1) The Part about the Critics; (2) The Part about Amalfitano; (3) The Part about Fate; (4) The Part about the Crimes; and (5) The Part about Archimboldi.

Part One tells the story of four academics reading, studying, and writing about the reclusive Archimboldi, who is being considered for the Nobel Prize. Their study leads them ultimately to Sonora, to Santa Teresa (a conflation of Jaurez and Heroica Nogales), where a serial killer is operating.

Parts Two, Three, and Four take place in Sonora and involve--a university professor, an American journalist, and many detectives. These three sections all involve the killings in Santa Teresa from one view or another.

Part Five is a chronological telling of the life of Archimboldi, which precedes the action in Part One.

Throughout the telling of the story hundreds of books are mentioned and discussed. Some are real books; some are made up; and others are simply conflated. However, ultimately, it is a writer's book or perhaps just a book for readers, real readers, readers interested in mystery and games, language games, and ghastly murders.

The plot of the novel is driven by mysteries: where is Archimboldi, who is Archimboldi, who is killing the women of Santa Teresa? However, the beauty of the book is in the slow telling of the stories and the minutia of the details.

I cannot do the novel justice; it has to be read closely to appreciate it, but there is a clue to its most fundamental theme: throughout the novel people are buried in mass graves, the graves are hidden because more often than not the murderers are trying to hide their crimes. However, in each instance, the graves are discovered and the bodies uncovered; just as stories are told and the secrets revealed. And herein lies the meaning of the title and I think the fundamental theme of a book full of themes and ideas; it arises or it is hidden in a quote from the "Savage Detectives:" "Guerreo, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."

In other words, our world is more like an uncovered cemetery of the future, full of violence and death. The science of the Twentieth Century devised ways to systematically kill thousands of people. But even now, after the war, the killing continues in the bizarre nightmare milieus of border towns, the situs of the maguiladoras, in refugee camps in Africa, in race wars all over the war, the Fifth Ward, in Compton, in our back yards.

Santa Teresa is supposedly modeled on Juarez where there are 340 maguiladoras operating. Here is the future, stranger than we can imagine, which makes the book in my mind slipstream.

The Heart of Corruption
On a recent trip I passed through Manchester airport and was amazed to see copies of 2666 piled high in the bookstore at the departure lounge. Who did they think the target audience was for this lengthy literary novel?

Part 1, The Part About The Critics, tells a mostly self-contained story about a quartet of academics who specialise in the obscure German author Benno von Archimboldi. Each of the four gets their own back-story, and we follow their quest to find the author, a trail which leads to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juarez). The story has highly stylised sections (do academics ever beat up taxi drivers?) and appears to end inconclusively - perhaps a meditation on the strange paths of love, or the fickle ways of women? Or Santa Teresa's powers of deflection.

At this point of my journey, I'm wondering where this story gets us, noting that not a whole lot has happened, and that I'm only on page 159 of an 893 page novel.

I grit my teeth and continue.

The shorter Part 2, The Part About Amalfitano, takes a minor character from the first part - a Chilean literary academic at the University of Santa Teresa and his daughter Rosa - and fills out their back story, mostly concerning the runaway wife, Lola.

Part 3, The Part About Fate, describes an American reporter, Oscar Fate who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. While there, he gets involved with the local narcos and meets Rosa from part 2. Oscar by some miracle manages to escape Santa Teresa with his life. In this part we begin to circle around the increasing numbers of sexually-violated and murdered young women found in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the desert: crimes which the police seem unable to solve.

Part 4, The Part About The Crimes, takes us directly into the unending horror of underclass life in Santa Teresa. This is by far the longest novel in the collection. We meet the police: uneducated, casually violent, brutally chauvinistic and content to tiptoe around the atrocities of the powerful. We meet the suspect, a German businessman banged up for years while the crimes continue. And we discover the private lives of the narco lords: drug and sex-fuelled parties in their desert ranches with no inconvenient witnesses afterwards.

Part 5, The Part About Archimboldi, takes us back to the mysterious German author who was the subject of the quest in part 1. We now learn his life story, his wartime exploits and why, in his late life, he finally found himself for the first time in Santa Teresa.

In the Notes to the First Edition at the back of the book, Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano's literary executor, tries to account for the title. He looks to an earlier novel of Bolano, Amulet, where a seedy, downbeat avenue at night in some Mexican town is described as like a cemetery: "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 or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."

Santa Teresa may be the physical centre of this interlinked novel-set, as Echevarria observes, but it is also a symbol - a submerged, carnivorous, tentacled thing that draws in the powerless and horribly consumes them. Omnipresent corruption, where the powerful use ordinary people for their money or their bodies, then dispose of them with casual, lethal brutality. The murderous events depicted in 2666 actually occurred in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 400 women have been the victims of sexual homicides.

These five novels are five journeys into the heart of corruption, starting from afar and gradually taking us closer to its centre. If anyone thinks a corrupt society is just about the venal sin of taking bribes, this novel will make them think again.

'the world is a strange and fascinating place'
Near the end of The Savage Detectives we are told of an encounter with the poet Cesárea Tinajero, holed up in Santa Teresa, armed with a knife, in fear of her life and with a detailed, hand-drawn plan of a factory on the wall,

`Cesárea spoke of times to come, and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn't help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could barely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.'

It is a doom laden close to the novel and a prophetic date which has appeared elsewhere in Bolaño's fiction. The book which carries this date like a brand on the front cover is weighted down with expectation, not only as a potential master-work but its very real position as his final work. It is laden with so many different characters, styles, symbols, portents, images, thoughts, and ambitions driven by a fierce wave of creativity and fear that it's little wonder that your feeling on finishing it might be similar to mine and indeed his presumably when he finished writing it. Relief.

It's worth mentioning that I found treating each section as a separate entity incredibly useful (if only to give you a mental breather during this mammoth book). I shall try to make some kind of an impression on a book which readers will no doubt be unravelling for years to come.

The picture used on the cover of the book is Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau, French Symbolist painter. According to the myth the mortal Semele, lover of Jupiter, asked him to appear to her in all his divine splendour (after having been given some bad advice by Juno, Jupiter's wife!), thus bringing about her own violent death in the face of his divine thunder. It is a brilliant painting to have chosen, encompassing some key themes from the book: sex, death, regeneration, fear and adoration of women, and what it means to be human (it also neatly symbolises my experience of reading the book - a bit overwhelming). Moreau himself commented on the painting: 'At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life'. This book is steeped in both of those; from the serial murders of women in Santa Teresa, to the battlefields of the second world war, mortality and the characters awareness of it seems to drive so much of what they do. Oscar Fate is still clearly reeling from the death of his mother and even a character like Morini, ill and confined to his wheelchair, acts like a living reminder of our fate and yet becomes the man that Norton allies herself with at the end of part one. All four of the critics use sex as the means to connect with one another, above and beyond the dry academia that initially brings them together, filling the void left in their lives by the mystery of Archimboldi's whereabouts. Archimboldi himself, in his fevered couplings with Ingeborg, shows their defiance at her illness and the slaughter that has surrounded them - sex as regeneration in the face of death.

The strengths of the work are closely related to its weaknesses. The epic structure of the book is bookended by the two sections dealing with Archimboldi, the first a neat novella, the second a sprawling personal history with plenty of dead ends. In between we have a portrait of mental degradation, sports reportage combined with creeping paranoia and a mind-numbing macabre litany. Each section differs stylistically recalling the work of Haruki Murakami, Denis Johson, Herman Melville, Don DeLillo and David Lynch. And those are just the styles I can give name to. There are startling images, piercing moments of perception, long runs of page turning prose, humour, insight and learning. But, and it's a big but, with all this variety there is confusion, inconsistency and spirit-sapping pages of tedium. The editors feel that this is as close to being a final text as could be hoped for. It means that there are times when the writing flows with the energy of a man driven to get his final thoughts down, but also moments where a red pen and a firmer editing hand were clearly needed. That said there is one person who deserves unqualified praise and that is Natasha Wimmer for her brilliant translation. I don't say this from having any experience of reading the Spanish language version (ha ha ha) but from the clear skills employed to bring out the different styles, character voices and idioms. Bolaño couldn't have asked for a better interpreter of his final words.

Flawed masterpiece. It's a phrase you hear a lot. I guess what it means is that you forgive those authors whose books dare to reach that little bit further, whose ambition has them attempting to name the unnameable, forgive them those moments when they don't quite pull it off, or do so in an ungainly fashion. It is often books like these which seem to endure through time; nobody would describe War and Peace or Moby Dick as flawless (or short - and some wouldn't describe them as masterpieces either), the question only remains does it accomplish enough? 2666 didn't quite come together enough for me and whilst it remains a book that I admire, and am still slightly in awe of, it isn't a book which is easy to recommend.