2666
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Description
Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, 2666 has been hailed across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary.
Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town. As in the real town of Juarez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate . . .
As 2666 progresses, as the sense of conspiracy grows, as the shadow of the apocalypse draws closer, Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century European history.
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Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town. As in the real town of Juarez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate . . .
As 2666 progresses, as the sense of conspiracy grows, as the shadow of the apocalypse draws closer, Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century European history.
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Product details
- Paperback | 912 pages
- 131 x 197 x 54mm | 598g
- 04 Sep 2009
- Pan MacMillan
- PICADOR
- London, United Kingdom
- English
- Unabridged
- Unabridged edition
- 0330447432
- 9780330447430
- 14,443
Review Text
Encuadernación: Rústica
One of the most talked-about novels of 2008: the visionary epic from a Latin American genius
Written with burning intesity in the last years of Roberto Bolaños life, 2666 has been greeted across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary.
The best book of 2008 . A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year Time
Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño Sunday Times
Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world Guardian
show more
One of the most talked-about novels of 2008: the visionary epic from a Latin American genius
Written with burning intesity in the last years of Roberto Bolaños life, 2666 has been greeted across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary.
The best book of 2008 . A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year Time
Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño Sunday Times
Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world Guardian
show more
Review quote
A work of genius: the work of a master whose voice has all the authority and seeming effortlessness that we associate with the great classics of the ages. * Blanco y Negro * Endlessly in love with people and books, Bolano's last novel ranges over the world and history. * Le Monde des Livres * Not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature. 2666 is a magisterial and inimitable. * La Vanguardia * Bolano's masterwork. An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel's narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery) * New York Review of Books * One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time. * El Pais * The best book of 2008 . . . A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year. * Time * Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. * Guardian * Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano. * Sunday Times *
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About Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by The New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.
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Our customer reviews
What a most awesome literary experience this book is. Bolano is a true master-craftsman of the written word, his literary style in this book is literary eloquence juxtaposing magnificently with the subject lines.
A most captivatingly grandiloquent description of the mundane, the mediocre, and the macabre, with some singularly outstanding sentences that carry through half to three-quarter pages remaining coherent, contextual, and clever.
The "unfinished" portion ~ that part completed by his family ~ stands as stark testimony of Roberto Bolano's pure literary genius.show more
by Barry Kevin Newton
I have frequently heard this book described as a flawed or unfinished masterpiece, but if you didn't know the author died before he considered the project complete, it would hardly be obvious. In terms of coherence, it compares well with other recent novels of similarly wide scope and size - Infinite Jest, say or Against The Day.
The narrative has two primary and intertwined concerns - the life and works of a reclusive novelist, and an epidemic of murdered females in a city on the US / Mexico border. 'The Part About The Crimes', a three-hundred-page account of these murders and their investigation, is relentless, clinical, hypnotic and altogether disturbing. I don't know how it compares for grisliness with popular psych-crime procedurals, but it is not for the faint-hearted.
In the other parts, we follow a young man whose artistic temperament is formed through the German experience in WWII and after. an incestuous clique of academics trying to track down their literary hero, and a pair of misfits trapped by the endless alienating spaces in and around the border city.
There are many mysteries, but little satisfaction for a reader looking for orderly resolution or deeper significance. However, I felt it a generous work - the prose is sometimes rich, sometimes spare, but never opaque and always allusive. It is learned and literary, but embraces the details of countless ordinary lives whilst guiding us on a rare and memorable journey.show more
by Sholto Spradbury
