Review of 2666: A Novel 2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño

2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am relieved to be finished with this book and with Roberto Bolaño, not because I didn't enjoy it, in fact, I think this is the longest novel that I have ever finished, but I'm ready to leave the cloud in which his extended prose places me. Like The Savage Detectives, which I think is a better book though 2666 is better written (or is easier to read, and I am willing to chalk that discrepancy up to different translators), the stories that unfold here are lived in rather told. By the onset of part 5, I had a sinking fear that none of this was going to tie up, and I'm not sure if it all did. I think the experience was like living in a town so long that you no longer seek to connect the threads, you become a thread in it.

I think Bolaño's novels are totally deserving of the hype they have received and find sweetness in the fact that the late writer himself is wandering the ether of lost enigmatic writers which embodies much of his work, chuckling as a bunch of peckerwoods like myself chase his ghost.


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