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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2009
"Starred Review. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one." - Publishers Weekly.
"The book is rightly praised as Bolaño's masterpiece, but owing to its unorthodox length it will likely find greater favor among critics than among general readers." - Library Journal.
"[A] consummate display of literary virtuosity powered by an emotional thrust that can rip your heart out ... Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century—and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Bolaño’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)." - The New York Review of Books.
This information about 2666 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Roberto Bolaño was born in Chile on April 28, 1953. For much of his
life he lived a nomadic existence, living in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France
and Spain. During the 1970s, he formed an avant-garde group called infrarealism
with other writers and poets in Mexico where he lived after leaving Chile when
it fell under military dictatorship. He returned to Chile in 1972 but left again
the next year when General Augusto Pinochet came to power.
In the early eighties, he finally settled in the small town of Blanes, near Gerona in Northern Spain, where he died on July 15, 2003 of liver
disease while awaiting a transplant. He is survived by his Spanish wife
and his son and daughter.
Bolaño received some of the Hispanic world's highest literary ...
Name Pronunciation
Roberto Bolano: roh-bAIR-toh bo-LAR-neo
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim
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