Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 91-95 of 113
 Engrossing, disturbing, an amazing authorial feat January 19, 2009
Jessica R. Manley
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't read this book before sleeping. Like the characters it chronicles, you'll receive disturbing violent dreams. This was the best book I've read in a few years. Haunting, raunchy, violent, funny, at times light and airy, at times heavier than one can bear.
Meeting expectations January 19, 2009
A. Fox (Colorado)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm now reading 2666 and if it weren't so heavy, I would have gobbled it up much faster. The story is compelling and his style is savvy. I can't wait to read more.
 we should be grateful to have it, but this is an UNFINISHED work January 19, 2009
boudu (eastern united states)
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
the fact is that to suggest that bolaño "finished" this book is basically untrue. he finished the first draft a wildly complex and ambitious 1,000+ page novel a matter of weeks before he died. extraordinarily few published writers would say that having completed a first draft, even of a short story, would qualify the work as "finished." the bottom line is that bolaño is probably the best writer of the period straddling the two centuries and because of this, critics and academics sort of assign masterpiece status to a grand final magnum opus long before it has had any time to be digested. this book was being called his masterpiece in the american press more than a year before the first english language version appeared.
having said all that, i will now say that '2666' is an impressive piece of literature and there are moments of actual brilliance in the book. the first and final books (especially the final book)--the two which are focussed mainly on writers, bolaño's favorite subject and the one at which he is most adept--are very strong and tight and are likely the most successful in the novel. the third book ("the part about fate") starts really weak--i literally found myself thinking, okay, bolaño has finally bitten off more than he can chew in attempting to write a story about a black american in an american idiom--and i was almost ready to give up on it but then, just when you least expect it, it redeems itself and the middle and ending sections of this part are amongst the most affecting and powerful in the novel. what, then, can one say about "the part about the crimes." first of all, one can say that just about every reviewer has gotten it wrong. it is neither the nihilistic, but no less impressive narration of an unspeakable nightmare, nor is it simply a collection of one autopsy report after another. look, the book is clearly about death and particularly bolaño's own looming demise. but bolaño has always shoveled his symbolism down his readers' throats (a somewhat ironic trait in an otherwise deceptively subtle craftsman). there is a lot of death, there is a lot of parody and there is also a lot of humanity and a real presentation of the almost insurmountable challenge that an honest law-enforcement or government official faces in the northern mexican states.
perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the novel and one that would escape all but those very sensitive readers who have not just read, but read, re-read and savoured each of his other works, is his approach to archimboldi in the novel's final part. the bolaño of "savage detectives," "nazi literature . . . ," "distant star" and even "by night in chile" would likely have simply labelled this former german soldier and quasi-nazi as a fascist and thereby dispensed with any discussion of human redemption or the actual complexities of war and human choices. bolaño's sympathetic approach to archimboldi can be read, perhaps, as his final act of making peace with his turbulent and life-and-art-defining past.
Literature Insight January 13, 2009
Richard I. Cronkhite (Great Lakes States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It is an excellent book to understand the lives of artists and the faculty involved in the arts. It spans the globe with modern problems and lives in transition. Bolano makes the world in this work of fiction seem current and real.
2666 - A novel January 13, 2009
MMae (USA)
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
This was given as a gift, but the recipient says that it is an outstanding book and sure to become a classic.
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