Scan barcode
auronj90's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘Every hundred feet the world changes.’
‘Only poetry isn’t shit,’ Roberto Bolaño writes in his mammoth fragmentary novel, 2666. The self-mythologizing author figured himself a poet first and foremost, claiming the impetus for his many novel’s prolifically written in the final decade of his life was to give people a reason to want to read his poetry (having money to take care of his children after his early death was, likely, another part), yet the scale and scope of this book is a sort of poetry all of its own. It is a big book that leaves a piece of itself within you once you’ve read it that fills the space where a piece of yourself seems to have been worthily sacrificed to be devoured by the novel. For that reason it is impossible to truly separate this novel from yourself when recalling it, as the reading process and your own life feels pertinent to your impressions on the novel. This was a book that made me consider what it would mean to be poetry, quite literally in the way [a:Henry David Thoreau|10264|Henry David Thoreau|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392432620p2/10264.jpg] meant when he wrote ‘my life has been the poem I would have writ,’ and experiencing this book was recognizing the poetry of life in action. This is a complex, multilayered novel that looks at violence and the perpetrators of it to better comprehend evil in a world that is still filled with beauty if we only dare to identify it amidst the darkness, and it is a novel that you will absorb into yourself in gratifying ways that make you feel a part of something meaningful.
‘Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.’
I read this novel in the autumn of 2015 during a time I spent more or less living on the road as a delivery driver around the midwest. Forgoing a cursory overview of my life at that time as a young, I’ll simply say a lot of aspects of my life were not going well and things weren’t great. It’s times like these I find a solace in literature and assuage my anxieties with artistic outpourings, and this is a period that would be misguided to romanticize yet was still an extravaganza of learning and living many avenues of art. Diving into creating and reading is the best way I've found to escape the gnashing teeth of your own suidcide ideation and so 2666 was a constant companion with me for a few months, much in the way Crime and Punishment was during a similar hard time years previous.
I read a 3 volume set, each with a unique cover and while each had the full 2666 written out on it, it was displayed in a way that the combined spines also read 2666. Insert awkward moment reading the book while waiting for my daughter to get out of dance lessons when all the mother’s around me were reading christian non-fiction and here I was with a book where the cover boldly just showed 666 over the painting Jupiter and Semele by French artist Gustave Moreau. I got a few looks, none of them positive.
‘Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.’
Something about reading most of this book in a parked delivery van in the decay and rains of autumn fits the tone of this book perfectly with its ever creeping dread and the lurking shadows that haunt characters like philosophy professor Óscar Amalfitano. Bad times all around as each section seems to be spiraling around a core of violence set in a Mexican border town that functions as a literary investigation into the mass femicides in Ciudad Juárez that claimed the lives of 370 women between 1993 and 2005. The violence is like a black hole of depravity slowly bending each strand of the novel into its gravity with the pull felt through abject existential despair to those unknowingly caught in it’s grip. Each of the sections of the novel stands strongly on their own, but the collage created by them amalgamates to something much more powerful than simply the sum of its parts.
The book begins with a dark comedy about literary critics as they hop along the globe caught up in academic feuds, love triangles and a search for the reclusive author who’s works brought them together: German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. From there it segues into the story of a professor and his daughter as he feels the growing dread of Mexico overcoming his mental health and safety, a fast paced story about an American reporter sent to cover a fight and gets plunged into the deadly machismo culture that demonstrates the mindsets that create violence against women, a long police-centered section on the actual murders, and finally into a story of a German man’s life from Berlin to war to his literary life. The final section is as close to a fable as Bolaño gets and doesn’t so much as blatantly tie the stories together but puts us at the precipice of understanding and terror, a signature style of his I’ve come to truly love. The centerpiece of the book, “The Part About the Crimes” is a difficult and disturbing section but also full of political intrigue, detective drama and action. Bolaño really leaned into this section due to his love of detective stories and noir but also it is said he knew his friend [a:Mario Santiago Papasquiaro|2883665|Mario Santiago Papasquiaro|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1293516227p2/2883665.jpg] (fan of [b:The Savage Detectives|63033|The Savage Detectives|Roberto Bolaño|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1342651149l/63033._SX50_.jpg|2503920] will know him as Ulises Lima) wouldn’t read the book without an action cop drama hidden inside.
This layered and fragmentary novel is absolutely incredible as it explores so many different themes and ideas that all seem to work well in an orbit around the central themes of violence--particularly misogynist and racial violence. Understandably, the book may seem a bit clunky with so much going on, yet that might be part of what makes it so endearingly brilliant. At one point a character observes a clerk always reading great authors, but never their bigger books:
This seems an apt assessment of 2666, Bolaño sparing with dense ideas and delivering us a novel scarred from the battle of creating literature. Bolaño has a gift to be simultaneously pretentious and unserious, often making literature seem like the most important notion in the world while also lampooning it. This is perfectly embodied in “The Part About the Critics” with comical caricatures of academia such as debates at literary conferences written as if it were a battle between the Gods and Titans. There is also a segment on a famed artist who admits everything was simply for money, a dagger in the heart of one critic who wants to believe art is sacrosanct . This whole section is brimming with situational comedy (a famed publisher has the last name Bubis [yep, pronounced ‘Boobies’] and one joke has two of the critics thrilled to see photos of him with famous authors shouting ‘It’s Heinrich Boll with Bubis”. Its juvenile humor that somehow works to offset the darkness of the book) that quickly drops into a dark and desperate depression when the group heads to Mexico in search of their prized author. This was so comforting to read in a time when life seemed uncertain and a reminder to look for beauty but not take anything too seriously. It is freeing in a way, to fully embrace your dreams and quests yet not demand impossible meaning from them.
‘History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.’
At the heart of this book, however, is the violence, and ‘violence piled upon violence.’ As in most Bolaño, abstract evil is lurking and violence is often compared to sexual desires. Here we see that patriarchal norms and objectification and oppression of women open the floodgates of horror. Lusts override humanity and sex workers are killed for pleasure and discarded, small disputes lead to men shooting their girlfriends, and even children are not safe. While not every one of the multitude of deaths that are covered in the book are directly linked to what might be a chain of murders, they are all part of a larger systemic issue Bolaño attempts to place his finger upon. The deaths pile up in this section of police report after police report in order to overwhelm the reader with the tragedy, and the effect is very well accomplished.
The final section of the book is simply majestic. It reveals mysteries and misconceptions that have occurred throughout the novel without directly pointing them out in a way that captures his idea that ‘People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.’ We learn the truth behind the reclusive author--his purpose for remaining in hiding is one of the strongest sections of the book--and see another side of characters almost forgotten from the beginning of the book. Ultimately, Bolaño shows how multifaceted the world and people are, and even in darkness there is beauty. Particularly in storytelling, as this section includes many stories folded into the larger story. It’s completely astonishing.
I can’t think of this book without thinking of my good friend, Mike Puma, a former Goodreads reviewer who passed away this year. After years of him telling me I needed to read this book, he finally convinced me when we learned there was to be a 6 hour stage production of it in Chicago. The play was funded by a monk who won the lottery and wanted to give it all to theater and have his favorite book produced, a detail that feels directly out of a Bolaño novel that I’m sure would have pleased the author. I spent that autumn enraptured with this book, discussing it with my good friend and later having a grand weekend seeing the play. It's been awhile since I read this but it's been nice to check in on my past self and send a message back through time that things will be better. Also a good reminder that at least once a year read its good to read a book that will become a part of you and devours a part of you to make room in you for itself. Books like this are the reason why literature will always hold a special place in my heart.
5/5
‘Only poetry isn’t shit,’ Roberto Bolaño writes in his mammoth fragmentary novel, 2666. The self-mythologizing author figured himself a poet first and foremost, claiming the impetus for his many novel’s prolifically written in the final decade of his life was to give people a reason to want to read his poetry (having money to take care of his children after his early death was, likely, another part), yet the scale and scope of this book is a sort of poetry all of its own. It is a big book that leaves a piece of itself within you once you’ve read it that fills the space where a piece of yourself seems to have been worthily sacrificed to be devoured by the novel. For that reason it is impossible to truly separate this novel from yourself when recalling it, as the reading process and your own life feels pertinent to your impressions on the novel. This was a book that made me consider what it would mean to be poetry, quite literally in the way [a:Henry David Thoreau|10264|Henry David Thoreau|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392432620p2/10264.jpg] meant when he wrote ‘my life has been the poem I would have writ,’ and experiencing this book was recognizing the poetry of life in action. This is a complex, multilayered novel that looks at violence and the perpetrators of it to better comprehend evil in a world that is still filled with beauty if we only dare to identify it amidst the darkness, and it is a novel that you will absorb into yourself in gratifying ways that make you feel a part of something meaningful.
‘Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.’
I read this novel in the autumn of 2015 during a time I spent more or less living on the road as a delivery driver around the midwest. Forgoing a cursory overview of my life at that time as a young, I’ll simply say a lot of aspects of my life were not going well and things weren’t great. It’s times like these I find a solace in literature and assuage my anxieties with artistic outpourings, and this is a period that would be misguided to romanticize yet was still an extravaganza of learning and living many avenues of art. Diving into creating and reading is the best way I've found to escape the gnashing teeth of your own suidcide ideation and so 2666 was a constant companion with me for a few months, much in the way Crime and Punishment was during a similar hard time years previous.
I read a 3 volume set, each with a unique cover and while each had the full 2666 written out on it, it was displayed in a way that the combined spines also read 2666. Insert awkward moment reading the book while waiting for my daughter to get out of dance lessons when all the mother’s around me were reading christian non-fiction and here I was with a book where the cover boldly just showed 666 over the painting Jupiter and Semele by French artist Gustave Moreau. I got a few looks, none of them positive.
‘Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.’
Something about reading most of this book in a parked delivery van in the decay and rains of autumn fits the tone of this book perfectly with its ever creeping dread and the lurking shadows that haunt characters like philosophy professor Óscar Amalfitano. Bad times all around as each section seems to be spiraling around a core of violence set in a Mexican border town that functions as a literary investigation into the mass femicides in Ciudad Juárez that claimed the lives of 370 women between 1993 and 2005. The violence is like a black hole of depravity slowly bending each strand of the novel into its gravity with the pull felt through abject existential despair to those unknowingly caught in it’s grip. Each of the sections of the novel stands strongly on their own, but the collage created by them amalgamates to something much more powerful than simply the sum of its parts.
The book begins with a dark comedy about literary critics as they hop along the globe caught up in academic feuds, love triangles and a search for the reclusive author who’s works brought them together: German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. From there it segues into the story of a professor and his daughter as he feels the growing dread of Mexico overcoming his mental health and safety, a fast paced story about an American reporter sent to cover a fight and gets plunged into the deadly machismo culture that demonstrates the mindsets that create violence against women, a long police-centered section on the actual murders, and finally into a story of a German man’s life from Berlin to war to his literary life. The final section is as close to a fable as Bolaño gets and doesn’t so much as blatantly tie the stories together but puts us at the precipice of understanding and terror, a signature style of his I’ve come to truly love. The centerpiece of the book, “The Part About the Crimes” is a difficult and disturbing section but also full of political intrigue, detective drama and action. Bolaño really leaned into this section due to his love of detective stories and noir but also it is said he knew his friend [a:Mario Santiago Papasquiaro|2883665|Mario Santiago Papasquiaro|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1293516227p2/2883665.jpg] (fan of [b:The Savage Detectives|63033|The Savage Detectives|Roberto Bolaño|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1342651149l/63033._SX50_.jpg|2503920] will know him as Ulises Lima) wouldn’t read the book without an action cop drama hidden inside.
This layered and fragmentary novel is absolutely incredible as it explores so many different themes and ideas that all seem to work well in an orbit around the central themes of violence--particularly misogynist and racial violence. Understandably, the book may seem a bit clunky with so much going on, yet that might be part of what makes it so endearingly brilliant. At one point a character observes a clerk always reading great authors, but never their bigger books:
’He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.’
This seems an apt assessment of 2666, Bolaño sparing with dense ideas and delivering us a novel scarred from the battle of creating literature. Bolaño has a gift to be simultaneously pretentious and unserious, often making literature seem like the most important notion in the world while also lampooning it. This is perfectly embodied in “The Part About the Critics” with comical caricatures of academia such as debates at literary conferences written as if it were a battle between the Gods and Titans. There is also a segment on a famed artist who admits everything was simply for money, a dagger in the heart of one critic who wants to believe art is sacrosanct . This whole section is brimming with situational comedy (a famed publisher has the last name Bubis [yep, pronounced ‘Boobies’] and one joke has two of the critics thrilled to see photos of him with famous authors shouting ‘It’s Heinrich Boll with Bubis”. Its juvenile humor that somehow works to offset the darkness of the book) that quickly drops into a dark and desperate depression when the group heads to Mexico in search of their prized author. This was so comforting to read in a time when life seemed uncertain and a reminder to look for beauty but not take anything too seriously. It is freeing in a way, to fully embrace your dreams and quests yet not demand impossible meaning from them.
‘History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.’
At the heart of this book, however, is the violence, and ‘violence piled upon violence.’ As in most Bolaño, abstract evil is lurking and violence is often compared to sexual desires. Here we see that patriarchal norms and objectification and oppression of women open the floodgates of horror. Lusts override humanity and sex workers are killed for pleasure and discarded, small disputes lead to men shooting their girlfriends, and even children are not safe. While not every one of the multitude of deaths that are covered in the book are directly linked to what might be a chain of murders, they are all part of a larger systemic issue Bolaño attempts to place his finger upon. The deaths pile up in this section of police report after police report in order to overwhelm the reader with the tragedy, and the effect is very well accomplished.
The final section of the book is simply majestic. It reveals mysteries and misconceptions that have occurred throughout the novel without directly pointing them out in a way that captures his idea that ‘People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.’ We learn the truth behind the reclusive author--his purpose for remaining in hiding is one of the strongest sections of the book--and see another side of characters almost forgotten from the beginning of the book. Ultimately, Bolaño shows how multifaceted the world and people are, and even in darkness there is beauty. Particularly in storytelling, as this section includes many stories folded into the larger story. It’s completely astonishing.
I can’t think of this book without thinking of my good friend, Mike Puma, a former Goodreads reviewer who passed away this year. After years of him telling me I needed to read this book, he finally convinced me when we learned there was to be a 6 hour stage production of it in Chicago. The play was funded by a monk who won the lottery and wanted to give it all to theater and have his favorite book produced, a detail that feels directly out of a Bolaño novel that I’m sure would have pleased the author. I spent that autumn enraptured with this book, discussing it with my good friend and later having a grand weekend seeing the play. It's been awhile since I read this but it's been nice to check in on my past self and send a message back through time that things will be better. Also a good reminder that at least once a year read its good to read a book that will become a part of you and devours a part of you to make room in you for itself. Books like this are the reason why literature will always hold a special place in my heart.
5/5
graviereads's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
ilman002's review against another edition
4.0
I can't even find the right words to begin reviewing this beast, this oeuvre. Several protagonists, alternating settings - my thoughts are all over the place. 2666 is dark, puzzling and strange but I'm very glad I finished it. It's not an easy ride, but it's a ride worth taking. There are five books/stories in 2666 and they're vaguely connected. For you, the journey begins with literary critics on the search for the mysterious literary master Archimboldi. Suddenly, you're in the city of Santa Teresa, Mexico. A place where unemployment is not a problem and young girls and women are being brutally raped and murdered almost every week. This is what you're in for. And it goes on.
In the end,
2666 is a kind of book you don't forget; it becomes a part of you forever.
In the end,
2666 is a kind of book you don't forget; it becomes a part of you forever.
maguireriley's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
3.0
A somewhat interesting and often deeply unpleasant marathon of a book. Between starting and finishing 2666 I started and finished three other books, but I kept coming back to this one in between. I don’t know if some of it went over my head or if I just don’t have the stomach for the fourth section, but I don’t think I’d recommend it. I’m not mad at myself for refusing to DNF, but I’m also not gonna act like I understand why people love this one so much. (NYT says 6th best book of the 21st century???) At least now I can say I’ve read it.
jadom's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
redolentsap's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
Wow
lalawoman416's review against another edition
3.0
Because it's 900+ pages, by a Chilean author, about femicide in Mexico, it's been deemed amazing. It's not. It's overly long, overly rambling, overly pretentious. It feels like it's trying to be a David Lynch film but wildly failing.
It's split into five books. We don't even get to Mexico until the end of Book 1. Until then, you're forced to endure the minutiae of four intellectuals pontificating about their sex lives. Skip it. The second book isn't any better. Another professor, another book full of hodge podge. The third book was amazing. Felt much more like Fear and Loathing. Loved Oscar and Rosa. The fourth book felt like a non-stop reading of the list of the dead intermixed with some romance. This is the only time the femicides are directly described. The final book tried to tie everything together and failed. Read books 3 & 4. Skip the rest.
It's split into five books. We don't even get to Mexico until the end of Book 1. Until then, you're forced to endure the minutiae of four intellectuals pontificating about their sex lives. Skip it. The second book isn't any better. Another professor, another book full of hodge podge. The third book was amazing. Felt much more like Fear and Loathing. Loved Oscar and Rosa. The fourth book felt like a non-stop reading of the list of the dead intermixed with some romance. This is the only time the femicides are directly described. The final book tried to tie everything together and failed. Read books 3 & 4. Skip the rest.