2666 (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition) |  | Author: Roberto Bolano
Publisher: Vintage
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  93 reviews
Sales Rank: 32787
Media: Paperback
Pages: 1136
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 2.1
ISBN: 0307475956
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780307475954
ASIN: 0307475956
Publication Date: September 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolaño'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 Bolaño'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 Bolaño'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
Uno de los 10 libros del año del
New York Times Book Review
Cuatro académicos tras la pista de un enigmático escritor alemán; un periodista de Nueva York en su primer trabajo en México; un filósofo viudo; un detective de policÃa enamorado de una esquiva mujer âestos son algunos de los personajes arrastrados hasta la ciudad fronteriza de Santa Teresa, donde en la última década han desaparecido cientos de mujeres.
Publicada póstumamente, la última novela de Roberto Bolaño no sólo es su mejor obra y una de las mejores del siglo XXI, sino uno de esos excepcionales libros que trascienden a su autor y a su época para formar parte de la literatura universal.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 93
Dark, flawed and brilliant. Truly a capstone to a writer few can equal November 22, 2009
Allison M. Perkel (Boston)
finishing 2666 leaves you both glad its over and wanting more. Bolano's final work is a true capstone; worthy of the praise heaped on it and yet still imperfect, flawed in some ways that almost make the book better. But I get ahead of myself.
The book is divided into 5 sections; each one orbits around parts of the story. Santa Teresa, and to a lesser degree, the enigmatic author Archimboldi for the center of the mass.
The first book, "The Part About the Critics", is, by far, the "happiest" part and, to me, the most enjoyable. Bolano is laying the groundwork for his apocalyptic story. Here we see 4 critics slowly loose themselves; first in the work of another and then in general. We also hear whispers of the the deaths of women.
The second book, "The Part about Amalfitano" deals will a character introduced in the first part; a professor in Santa Teresa. Here, the hell is different, its the mind that goes.
The third book, "The Part About Fate" holds up the funhouse mirror to the world; what we find important (or don't). It's as much a critique on society as it is our introduction to the anti-christ character (or as close as one can come in literature without coming out and naming a person as such). Klaus Haas is this person. Maybe a killer, maybe not. Detached and cool he takes control, he is control and he may or may not be beyond human. Its also in this book that I began to feel that the 2666 was incomplete. The third book felt like parts were missing.
The fourth book, "The Part About the Crimes" is the where the book both comes into itself and begins to drag on. Here we learn all about the murder of women in Santa Teresa. Almost every entry reads like a police blotter. Interspersed are stories that meander and eventually get lost or simply die out. This book is both numbing in the way death becomes present in everything, and almost too much; too rich in detail. Throughout it all we keep coming back to Klaus; he is the murders even if he is not the murderer. You feel that he, and no one else, controls all. Still, this book was too long and to a degree, too much. It feels like another pass with an editor would have done wonders.
The fifth book, "The Part About Archimboldi" ties together some of the threads (only a few) and leaves even more left open. Here we go back to WW2; revisiting hell in both Germany and Russia. Again we have the almost workmanlike, reportage style of writing. In some ways this distance feels good; we aren't getting our hands too dirty. Then, in this chapter, you remember this is true (in the grand scheme if not in the actual fact).
2666 is a powerful book. Its truly deserving of all the hype and was better than I expected. However it's not without flaws. A good edit would help a lot. Still, even with that, this is a book not to be missed. Its dark, its a vision of the earth that leaves no room for hope, and it's compelling.
 Incredibly Boring November 16, 2009
E. Ball (Detroit, MI)
This book would make a great table leg, coaster, or booster seat for a small child. I could not force myslef to finish it; I am simply not that masochistic. Last night I read seven pages that described a woman walking, sleeping, standing, walking, spending money, walking, laughing, sleeping, walking, and then ultimately dying. In short, the author puts far too much effort into describing banal situations that have nothing to do with the plot... wait, what is the plot?? The interconnectedness of the 'books' is abstract at best. Another major turn off is the fact that multiple pages are spent describing dreams. "She looked in the mirror and was horrified. The fog rolled in and loud penny-colored drops rolled down the walls. The smell was terrible and her reflection smiled." PAGES of this drivel folks, pages. I would rather stick forks in my eyes than read one more page of this nonsense.
 Consider: maybe this book is not for you... November 9, 2009
Mark Nadja (New York City)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A massive novel in five parts but compulsively readable once you overcome your resistance to large bricks of paper and actually start reading. *2666* is not the sort of book for lovers of tidy conclusions or linear narrative, for those unwilling or unable to let go of their preconceptions of what a novel is or isn't, should or shouldn't be. Characters are introduced, developed, disappear, and occasionally reappear again in different, sometimes enlightening, new contexts. Some mysteries are answered; many more are not.
This is a big gangly tarantula spider of a book, hairy and unpredictable. The plot reaches from present-day Mexico to Hitler's Germany. The centerpiece of *2666* is a section dealing with the ongoing murders of a veritable holocaust of young women--and the corrupt, violent, indolent detectives trying to catch what they presume must be a serial killer. The opening of the novel is haunted by a reclusive author, Benno von Archimboldi, the final section of the novel locates Archimboldi and recounts his picaresque adventures.
In fact, the story "ends" in what might be considered medias res and continues on in the speculative imagination of the reader. For that reason, among others, it will be as supremely unsatisfying to one sort of reader, as exhilarating to another. Bolano isn't so much concerned with getting from point a to z, as he is in combining and recombining all the letters in between. *2666* puts the adage "it's the journey not the destination that counts" into novelistic form.
If you demand to have control over a story, then I would say *2666* is not for you. But if you're willing to put yourself into the hands of a master and let him carry you away, you'll want to give Bolano's magnum opus a try.
Life's too short, people... November 5, 2009
Scott Alic (Toronto)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'd like to think of myself as reasonably literate, but I find myself stupefied by the critical circle-jerk which has fomented around 2666. I appreciate that taste is subjective, but I was hard-pressed to find a single passage, clever parallel, insight into any facet of the human condition or turn of phrase -- in over 800 pages -- that made me feel like the reading experience was worthwhile. (That, in itself, is almost impressive.) In all honesty, I've never experienced a book which was so devoid of reward. I don't need the bad guys to get comeuppance, I just want a sense that my life has been somehow enriched by the time spent in the world offered by the book. Or even a sense. Of anything. All I found were endless culs-de-sac, bloated streams of consciousness which negate themselves, multiple interpretations of the dreams of distant relatives of unimportant side-side characters. There is the slimmest interconnection between the five books here, and even the title which unifies them is of nil significance: it takes the editor's note, appended to the end of the book, to explain that Bolano makes a reference to the year 2666 in an earlier novel. How anyone but the most devoted Bolanophile would pick up on that is anyone's guess.
I barely made it through, fueled only by some masochistic sense of completism, and a rapidly ebbing hope that there was some reason for the whole endeavour. Is there really that much demand for a sprawling, formless, utterly pretentious bloated drudge? Is it merely that the backstory of the author's awareness of his impending mortality as he wrote imparts the book itself with some credibility? If anything, I think that there's a morbid comedy to be found in the idea of Bolano racing against time to pack his novel with as many red herrings as possible - really, that's all I felt there to be here. Even books which I've found frustrating reads -- Eggers' "You Shall Know Our Velocity", Sebold's "The Lovely Bones", Easton Ellis' "Glamorama", Ballard's "Crash" -- have had some quality which propelled me onwards. Guess I'm destined not to get Bolano, like I don't get Jean-Luc Godard...
Sorry - just had to vent.
Just so you know I'm not a full-on hater, I'd like to give props to Daniel Alarcon's "Lost City Radio", which I read last week and whose unpretentious style I found exquisite. In my opinion, a young talent worth following...
No Country For Young Women October 26, 2009
T. Karr (MO USA)
When I finished this 898-page mammoth I thought, "What a relief! Now I don't have to read about any more murdered women." I felt beat up after spending a week reading my way through this brutality-filled book.
"2666" is divided into five distinct parts that are all related to one another and in some way touch on the murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa.
One section is about a group of European literary scholars who are tracking a reclusive German author. The second section is about a Spanish college professor in Santa Teresa. The third section is about a New York City reporter who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. The fourth part focuses on the murder victims and people around the murders. The final section is the life story of a boy who grew up in Germany.
"2666" has grown on me tremendously since the initial relief of turning the final page. I find myself wondering if my perceptions would change if the sections were read in a different order. I've started seeing new connections and similarities between the sections. How many stories were there in this book?...hundreds at least. Bolano's imagination takes the reader all over the world.
This is a book that begs to be read again and would be ideal for a discussion group if you could find a few other people willing to fight their way through to the end.
Much of the experience of this book is very unpleasant which is why I would rate it three stars. However, the contemplation of the book afterward is very interesting and worth five stars, for an average of four stars overall.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 93
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