Synopsis
Four years after his death from liver failure, Roberto Bolano burst into the English-speaking literary world with the 2007 translation of his sprawling tour de force, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. In 2008 came the translation of his posthumously published epic, 2666, which he wrote feverishly up until his death, and which exceeds even THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in the ambition, scope, and complexity of its narrative structure. Made of up five interlocking novellas, 2666's plot swirls around a mysterious German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, and his connection to a series of gruesome murders in an impoverished Mexican town. As poets and critics collide with boxers and Black Panthers in the desolation of the Sonora Desert, Bolano shows his rare ability to blend the literary puzzle-boxes of Borges--Bolano's literary hero--with gritty and quixotic adventure and crime stories. 2666 takes the kaleidoscopic insanity of contemporary literature and culture, and applies it to the globalized world--the result is a 21st-century masterpiece in the tradition of Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE or David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. The New York Times Book Review selected 2666 as one of its 10 Best Books of 2008 and Publishers Weekly named it a Best Book of 2008.
Four years after his death from liver failure, Roberto Bolano burst into the English-speaking literary world with the 2007 translation of his sprawling tour de force, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. In 2008 came the translation of his posthumously published epic, 2666, which he wrote feverishly up until his death, and which exceeds even THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in the ambition, scope, and complexity of its narrative structure. Made of up five interlocking novellas, 2666's plot swirls around a mysterious German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, and his connection to a series of gruesome murders in an impoverished Mexican town. As poets and critics collide with boxers and Black Panthers in the desolation of the Sonora Desert, Bolano shows his rare ability to blend the literary puzzle-boxes of Borges--Bolano's literary hero--with gritty and quixotic adventure and crime stories. 2666 takes the kaleidoscopic insanity of contemporary literature and culture, and applies it to the globalized world--the result is a 21st-century masterpiece in the tradition of Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE or David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. The New York Times Book Review selected 2666 as one of its 10 Best Books of 2008, Publishers Weekly named it a Best Book of 2008, and it won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2008-11-11 |
| Size | | Length: | 898 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 43.5 oz |
Publisher's Note
A posthumous masterwork by a prize-winning founder of the infrarealist poetry movement finds such characters as an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interacting in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared. Simultaneous.
Industry Reviews
"Throw your hats in the air....A supreme capstone to [Bolano's] own vaulting ambition....A landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world."
(11/09/2008)
"[Bolano's] ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void....Nothing is ever finished, nothing answered, nothing solved. Bolaño is too smart, or too sad, to attempt to piece it all together."
(11/09/2008)
"[2666] is...a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year....There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolaño than Bolaño himself, which is a shame because he's dead."
(11/10/2008)
"Bolaño's urgency infuses literature with life's whole freight: the ache of a writing-workshop aspirant may embody sexual longing, or dreams of political freedom from oppression, even the utopian fantasy of the eradication of violence, while a master-novelist's doubts in his works' chances in the game of posterity can stand for all human remorse at the burdens of personal life, or at knowledge of the burdens of history."
(11/12/2008)
"Bolaño's final novel, 2666, published roughly a year after his death in 2003 and just now released in English, is the prime example - maddening, inconclusive and very, very long; hideous in parts and beautiful in others; exerting a terrible power over the reader long after it's done."
(11/14/2008)
"Knowing that his liver ailment would probably kill him, Bolaño pulled out all the stops for his last novel and threw out the rulebook for conventional fiction. A catch-all for many of his concerns, 2666 is at heart a fascinating meditation on violence and literature..."
(11/23/2008)
"[2666] is a sprawling triumph, technically brilliant on the level of the individual sentence, eerie and emotionally honest in a way that belies Bolano's reputation for modernist trickery."
(03/01/2009)
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