2666: A Novel

2666: A Novel

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNERNew York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008 Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008 Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008 San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008 Seattle Times Best Books of 2008 New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008 Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bola? joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bola? has joined the immortals."Review?A masterpiece...the most electrifying literary event of the year.? ?Lev Grossman, Time?Indeed, Bola? produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, postnational world.? ?Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review?A work of devastating power and complexity, a final statement worthy of a master.? ?Adam Mansbach, The Boston Globe?Bola?'s most audacious performance . . . It is bold in a way that few works really are--it kicks away the divide between playfulness and seriousness.? ?Henry Hitchings, Financial Times (UK)?The opening of 2666 had me in its thrall from those first few pages . . . For all the precision and poetry of its language, for all the complexity of its structure, for all the range of styles and genres it acknowledges and encompasses, for all its wicked humor, its inventiveness, and sophistication, 2666 seems like the work of a literary genius.? ?Francine Prose, Harper's Magazine?Bola?'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) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Ju?ez, in the Sonora desert near the Texas border.? ?FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, The New York Review of Books?Not just the great Spanish-language novel of [this] decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature.? ?J. A. MASOLIVER R?ENAS, La Vanguardia?One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time . . . to see . . . a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his life's work but redefines it and raises it to new dizzying heights.? ?RODRIGO FRES?, El Pa??Bolano's savoir-faire is incredible ... The exploded narrative reveals a virtuosity that we rarely encounter, and one cannot help being bowled over by certain bravura passages--to single one out, the series of reports describing murdered young women, which is both magnificent and unbearable. We won't even mention the 'resolution' of this infernal 2666, a world of a novel in which the power of words triumphs over savagery.? ?Baptiste Liger, L'EXPRESS?Splendid . . . The jaw-dropping synthesis of a brief but incredibly fertile career.? ?Fabrice Gabriel, LES INROCKUPTIBLES?The event of the spring: with 2666 Roberto Bolano has given us his most dense, complex, and powerful novel, a meditation on literature and evil that begins with a sordid newspaper item in contemporary Mexico.? ?Morgan Boedec, CHRONIC ART?Including the imaginary and the mythic alongside the real in his historiography, without ever dabbling in the magical realism dear to many of his Latin-Americ