2666: A Novel

Must read contemporary saga.

bolano's last novel, is better than any novel he has written and amazing translation from natasha

high brow Espanyol stuff, since the start relies heavily on the understanding of what is being alluded by the German of it. Well written. The cigarettes get expensive as you go away from New England. That is one good example of Eufrasian insight I found. :)

Bolano, the master. Nothing more can be said about him than what has already been said. He was a true genius and artist. Got a very good deal on the book from Goodread seler.

An amazing book. A modern classic that is fun to read. Bolano made literature sexy.

I would liked to get a hardback copy as the book is so thick

This is not about the content of the book. But beware of buying from Repro-books on demand seller. This is a pirated/faulty copy, which ends suddenly at the 500th page. Also the book cover is cut at weird angles.

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Literature that makes one think

This is one of the most mesmerizing novel I have read for a very long time. Despite being a massive 900 page novel, it is a page turner which keeps you captivated and restless. And the prose is absolutely magnificent. Well, at least the English translation is magnificent. This is a masterpiece, truly

本書は２００３年に亡くなったチリの作家ロベルト・ボラーニョの遺作の英訳版である。遺作ではあるが、未完ではない。約９００ページの超大作で、全体が５つのパートに分けられている。個人的には、パート１の書き出しを「なか見！検索」で読み、一気にその世界に引き込まれた。それはこう始まる。 The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn't realize at the time that the novel was part of trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D'Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him. このフランス人青年が、やがて他の研究者３人とともに謎の作家Benno von Archimboldiを探しにメキシコのサンタテレサという町を訪れるというのがパート１の筋である。マイナーな作家を発掘していくという設定は、私にとってはそれだけでもう十分に面白い。パート１からパート４までは、多少相互に関係しあってもいるが、独立した話として読むことが可能である。その中でも圧巻なのは、メキシコのサンタテレサを中心に次々と起こる女性連続殺人事件が延々と描写されていくパート４である。そして、最後のパート５では謎の作家Archimboldiについて徐々に明らかにされていく。非常に興味深い章構成である。これらがどう絡むのか、また絡まないのか？また、はたして題名の「２６６６」は一体何を意味しているのか？ この作品は今年の全米批評家協会賞も受賞している。他の候補作のことは知らないが、文句なしの受賞だったはずである。日本語の翻訳は出るのか出ないのかは知らないが、少しでも興味がおありの方にはぜひ強く薦めたい小説である。見返しに印刷されているある推薦文にはこう書かれている。 Do not be put off by the length or apparent strangeness of this book; it is a work of stunning originality. If you read only one book this year make it this one.

ESTE LIBRO LO PREFIERO LEER EN CASTELLANO, FAVOR ENVIARME ETIQUETA PARA HCER LA DEVOLUCION POR CORREO GRACIAS

As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here). Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant). This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did. The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly. I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter. Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.