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) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, 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 RÓDENAS,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 FRESáN,El País, "Not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature. [Bolano] has revived an idea that the postmoderns seemed to have abandoned: the totalizing novel, one that aspires to create a complete narrative universe. This idea goes back to the dawn of the modernists, to REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST and ULYSSES, and in Latin American literature finds its crucial expression in the Boom ... 2666 is a magisterial and inimitable novel, in which reality takes on a strange air of unreality thanks to situational oddities and absurdities, hairpin turns of language, dreams, sustained questioning, vague associations, changing landscapes. A novel rising like a delirious mirage in the void." --J.A. Masoliver Rodenas, LA VANGUARDIA "A work of genius: a work of immense lucidity and narrative cunning, written with a unique mixture of creative power and intimate existential desperation, the work of a master whose voice has all the authority and seeming effortlessness that we associate with the great classics of the ages ... It is impossible to read this book without feeling the earth shift beneath one's feet. It is impossible to venture deep into writing so unforgiving without feeling inwardly moved--by a shudder of fear, maybe even horror, but also by its need to pay attention, by its desire for clarity, by its hunger for the real." --Andres Ibanaz, BLANCO Y NEGRO "Without a doubt the greatest of Bolano's productions ... The five parts of this masterwork can be read separately, as five isolated novels; none loses any of its brilliance, but what's lost is the grandeur that they achieve in combination, the grandeur of a project truly rare in fiction nowadays, one that can be enjoyed only in its totality." --Ana Maria Moix, EL PAIS "Make no mistake, 2666 is a work of huge importance ... a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out. Bolano inspires passion, even when his material, his era, and his volume seem overwhelming. This could only be published in a single volume, and it can only be read as one." --EL MUNDO "One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time. What 2666 promises and achieves ... is the sight, equally wonderful and upsetting, of a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his life's work but, at the same time, redefines it and raises it to new vertiginous heights ... 2666 could be described as a "cosmic novel" because--as with the universe--the crucial and amazing thing is not that it's unfinished, but that it has no end." --Rodrigo Fresan, EL PAIS "An absolute masterpiece ... Bolano writes almost without adjectives, but in his prose this leads to double meanings. The narration is pure metonymy: it omits feelings in favor of facts. A phone call or a sex act can express real tragedy, the sweep of the vast human condition." --Andres Lomena, LA OPINION DE MALAGA
