The opening fourth of this epic work alone prove Bolaño to be worthy of all the praise and accolades, most which have unfortunately come posthumously. This work is even more masterful than 'The Savage Detectives', which is a powerful novel in its own right.

This book will be remembered as one of the great works of the 21st century and indeed as one of the great literary achievements of all time. Bolaño breaks all the rules here - long sentences, long paragraphs, lots of meandering side stories - but he keeps it all together. It works. It works magically. ( )

Embarrassed in light of the many expansive and positive reviews here, I cannot continue reading this book. I am constantly bored with the third-person narrative describing the most common everyday events of the characters in detail and describing interesting events in sparse, six word sentences. I struggled to continue reading from about page 40 to the end of the first book. Each character that had at first been interesting became tiresome. The absurd aspect of the writing where the characters act out extraordinarily under ordinary situations is only cute the first few times. I truly have nothing good to say about "The Part About the Critics" and I find it most displeasing to hear other reviewers favorably compare Bolaño to Proust and Nabokov. ( )

If ever there were a book that cried out for some vintage Foucaultian deconstruction, it's 2666 "by" Roberto Bolano. I hang the quote marks on the word because what appears to have happened is that Bolano wrote five related novels, with the intention of publishing them all separately. His heirs, however, convinced themselves that Bolano would have changed his mind and eventually published 2666 in its present iteration.

Well, maybe.

If not, however, then what we have here is a case in which someone other than Bolano actually "wrote" the book by integrating the five distinct novels into one volume in a specific order. Because certainly the order in which the individual chapters are read affects the meaning created by the reader. This is an especially significant consideration with 2666, because, as the "Note to the First Edition" indicates, Bolano intended the overall project to be "open," in the sense that the separate chapters/novels were not meant to be read in any specific order.

That being said, the end product, regardless of who "wrote" it, 2666 more than lived up to my expectations. The five separate chapters start with "The Part about the Critics." Here, on the surface, we follow four Europeans literary critics whose specialty is the (fictional) Prussian author Benno von Archimboldi. During the time during which the story is set, no one has seen Archimboldi for a number of years, and he's considered a mysterious recluse. The critics end up on sort of a mission to find him, following rumors and sighting to the (fictional) city of St. Therese, Mexico.

St. Therese is in Sonora, near Hermosillo, where an unbelievable, yet nonfictional, wave of violence has seen hundreds of women and girls tortured and murdered in recent years.

The next chapter, "The Part about Amalfitano" looks at the life of a Mexican philosophy professor/Archimoldi reader who lives in St. Therese and whom the European critics meet when they come to Mexico. Amalfitano lives alone with his daughter, Rosa, and is understandably concerned for her well-being considering the crimes against women taking place there.

In the chapter called "The Part about Fate," Rosa ends up having a relationship with Quincy Williams, a U.S. journalist for a black newspaper in New York. (Quincy is called "Oscar Fate" for some reason by everyone at work.) Quincy travels to St. Therese to cover a boxing match and ends up learning about the murders while there.

"The Part about the Crimes" is by far the longest and most affecting section of the book. It chronicles a number of the murders, as well as the Mexican law enforcement community's inability to stop them. It's a grim yet vivid story that is all the more horrible for being true, despite the fact that the characters in the book are fictional constructs.

As is, of course, the character of Archimboldi, who gets his due in the aptly titled "The Part about Archimboldi." This chapter follows the young Hans Reiter as he goes from poor Prussian child to German soldier on the Eastern Front to something like literary stardom—in the book, he's being mentioned as a contender for the Nobel prize.

And it's this chapter that, for me, is the key to the book, because Archimboldi is the pen name—the identity really—taken on by Reiter when he begins working on his first novel. As a soldier, Reiter had come upon the notebook of someone on the run from the Nazis who had written about how much he enjoyed an Italian painter named Arcimboldi (1527-1593)—best known for his portraits in which the subjects are made up of painted collages of vegetables, fruits, etc.

It's this notebook, through a story of double identities and mass murder, that awakens Archimboldi to the depressing state of the human condition, in which mass murder after mass murder is visited upon one group or another in an unstoppable cycle of casual brutality, ranging from Nazi Germany to the war against women in Sonora, Mexico.

Suddenly, looking back over the book it becomes obvious that that all the characters lead a kind of double life, typified by the already-stated examples of Hans Reiter/Benno Archimboldi and Quincy Williams/Oscar Fate. And in the same way that the characters represent a kind of internal doubling, so, too, does the violence in Mexico act as a semblance of the violence in Germany.

It's a powerful statement from a powerful writer whom I will definitely be reading again. ( )

Though it pains me to make such a careless comparison, there is something Proustian about Roberto Bolano's 2666. Simple objects, like the work of an author or a wheelchair or a highway in the desert, come bundled with mammoth-sized add-ons of meaning. But as much as it is Proustian in its often contemplative and musing style, it is even more akin Voltaire's notable story of epic sojourns, Candide. The reader again and again finds herself continents away from where she was just moments before both in terms of setting and implications... and both her and Bolano's characters might have wished to stayed put. What starts as a tale of four carefree scholars of German literature--all at the top of their game and wildly intimate both with their subject, the reclusive author Brenno von Archimboldi, and with each other-- descends into a darkening discourse on fate (and the fate of narrative) and ends with a stomach wrenching story of rape and murder in the deserts of northern Mexico. Bolano's prose twist and turns the mind and soul, wringing out all the energy and blood. I often found myself gasping for air at the close of a section, but wildly eager for more. Bolano's narrative, the dark poetry of his prose, stirs strange desires in his readers. There are too many stories contained in this 898 page work to summarize the plot. But if a summary is necessary, let me sum it up in this way: don't go into the woods at night. ( )

es un libro imperfecto, but that is the point. si entiendo correctamente el libro trata de ser abierto, organico. el mayor merito del libro es la vitalidad, la capacidad de generar tramas y mas tramas. la ambicion y el aliento narrativo son impresionantes. al mismo tiempo eso quiere decir que es un libro desigual. tiene secciones completas que son aburridisimas.

en un momento la trama como que se desintegra. en vez de una o varias historias lo que hay son un monton de historias, o mas bien viñetas. no parecen digresiones. parecen ser el centro o la falta de centro. eso me esta super interesante. no estoy seguro de lo que quiere decir, de todo lo que implica. . la palabra que me viene a la mente es superficie. de repente las viñetas son la superificie. luego por supuesto esta la idea de arcimboldi. la integracion y desintegracion.

me sospecho que esa vision de la literatura como una secrecion, como acto visionario tiene parentezco con los surrealistas. curiosamente tambien -en personalidad no en contenido- me parece que tiene parentezco con jack kerouac. viajando no para llegar a ningun lado. ese espiritu romantico, esas ganas de apertura y vitalidad.

he oido la novela descrita como alucinatoria y eso me gusta. creo que en otro lado la describen como mistica y hermetica. la palabra que me viene a la mente es visionaria. de repente me recuerda los dibujos de woffli. lo abrupto de los cambios de perspectiva. tambien me recuerdan algunos poemas de rumi y el otro poeta -no me acuerdo el nombre- arabe. el morbo es a veces adolecente. a veces es bien tremendista. gotica. no siempre funciona. a veces siente como trucos baratos. otras palabras que quiero usar: apocaliptico, amorfo, fascismo, art brut. ( )