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: #410963 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 912 pages

Review
'Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño...vital, thrilling and life-enhancing.' --Christopher Goodwin, The Sunday Times Culture

'The late Roberto Bolano's novel 2666 comes on the back of US reviews hailing it as a towering masterpiece.'
--The Times

'As consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be... An astonishing whole.' --Jonathan Lethem - The Scotsman

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

Epic
Well, 2666 is certainly an epic. Nearly 900 pages of very full text, I reckon it took me in the region of 50 hours of reading time. That's a pretty major investment of time.

In return for the time, you will find a loose story that keeps returning to a spate of murdered women in Santa Teresa, Mexico. Alternatively, you'll find five separate stories, depending on how you look at it. There was some idea that the novel might be sold as five separate novels, but in truth, it wouldn't have stood up in that way. The first three parts serve mostly as back-story to the final two parts. In particular, the Part about The Critics (the first 160 pages) is weak, offering little character development of the four literary academics who do little more than enter into various permutations of coupling. Instead, it serves to pique interest in Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German writer, and introduces the idea that Archimboldi might be connected with the brutal killings in Mexico. Similarly, the next two, relatively short Parts serve little more purpose than to prime the reader for the catalogue of killings.

And what a catalogue!

The Part about The Crimes is a long list of all the women in Santa Teresa who have met untimely deaths in a period of several years. Some of these are murders committed by the serial killer, and others are simply lovers quarrels gone wrong. Some of the crimes and victims are described in detail - others are recorded simply as unidentified bodies. This feels more like a reference book than a novel. It can be repetitive - perhaps hypnotic, if one were being charitable.

And finally, there is the Part about Archimboldi. Listed on the index page at the front of the book, the reader is left wondering whether this Part will be the key that unlocks the significance of the four previous Parts. Unlike the previous 630 pages, this Part has good, full character development and a strong story line, albeit time can sometimes pass unnoticed. This is a relief; the first third of the novel is not strong and the middle third drags a little. The final third had to be something special, and it was.

In the end notes, it appears that Bolaño intended to spend another few months polishing the novel. We are told that most of the novel was already polished, but some sections had obviously not been. It is interesting to speculate on which sections these might be - perhaps more would have been done to add a little more depth near the beginning.

So, what did Roberto Bolaño do with the space he created? Mostly, he built intrigue and suspense. Using 160 pages simply to create an impression that Archimboldi is a significant and mysterious writer is a huge luxury. To use the Part about Fate to offer some sense of public feeling (or lack of feeling) towards the murders is similarly luxurious. The Part about Amalfitano didn't seem to have a purpose at all. So much of the joy with 2666 lies in the satisfaction of having read it; stuck with it. Some of the actual reading was hard going.

Scoring is tricky. For most of the novel, it felt like a three star affair. But the effect by the end is quite stunning - a clear five stars. It would be easy to split the difference, but that would be the coward's option.

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 biggest murder mystery novel in the world
First, this novel is immense...literally and conceptually (900 pages divided into 5 parts! all linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved serial murders), so I really wouldn't even bother if you're not into or haven't got the time for long reads. Second, although ridiculously well-written, you need to bear in mind that Bolaño (now dead) was basically a bohemian poet/literary enfant terrible/heriod addict-type famed for having a pretty baroque and cryptic world vision. One of this novel's 5 parts is even about literary critics who have forged their careers around an elusive German novelist! So best avoid if you only like a 'straight-ahead' style. I don't, but I still appraoched with caution. And yet.... this is basically a compellingly readable murder mystery novel! It's not inpenetrablly poetic. It's very very dark (substantially concerned with violence and death) and extremely well conceived and, on balance, feels a lot like the masterpiece all the newspapers are calling it.