2666 in The Roundtable

Nov 30, 2008 El rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: cuckoos, 21st-centurylit, big-effing-books

This is one of those books that surpasses anything positive or negative I might manage to say about it. This is one of those books that I can say with a fair amount of certainty actually consumed me. I thought about it constantly while I was reading it, and while enough time has not passed since I finished it this morning, I am fairly certain I will be thinking about it regularly for quite some time. I showed it to someone at work and said it would be the kind of book to cause my brain to explod This is one of those books that surpasses anything positive or negative I might manage to say about it. This is one of those books that I can say with a fair amount of certainty actually consumed me. I thought about it constantly while I was reading it, and while enough time has not passed since I finished it this morning, I am fairly certain I will be thinking about it regularly for quite some time. I showed it to someone at work and said it would be the kind of book to cause my brain to explode if it did not end the way I wanted/hoped/expected/anticipated/etc. My brain exploded. And it itches now, the inside of my head. A lot.

In a nutshell (since the story actually takes just shy a few pages of 900) the central character is reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi, but there are so many other characters that it is hard to focus on one character and say "this is the one". They all served a purpose, and ultimately all wind up in Santa Teresa (more recognizably Ciudad Juarez to the rest of us) where hundreds of girls and women are raped and murdered (based on the true story). The book is split into five parts, some of which read more easily than others (the section primarily about the murders I found tedious at best as even I, with my stomach mostly made of iron, had trouble stomaching such an attack of visual imagery, section after section repeating almost the exact same images). Each of the five parts are told from the perspective of different characters, but Archimboldi's writing plays a part in all as does Santa Teresa and the murders. There are motifs and symbols out the wazoo here, and I think even if I kept detailed notes throughout the reading I would have missed a few. On top of that I find out now that Roberto Bolano uses a lot of the same motifs in his previous books, which, ah hell, now means I need to read them all and probably be consumed by each and every one of them in turn.

More accessible than Proust and Pynchon put together, I was driven the entire time to finish the book to find out the meaning of the number on the cover. I also became obsessed with the cover (I normally try not to put much stock in the cover images unless it's Margaret Atwood since I know she chooses her own covers for specific reasons) - Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele (be still my heart)... and now I'm finding myself analyzing the hell out of that choice. Does it relate to the story? Is there a connection? Is it a random choice, outside of the one small Moreau reference in the book which probably went unnoticed by most people as just another artistic/literary reference? And now I also need to brush up on my Greek mythology to see what more I can gather about Jupiter and Semele's relationship, and try to trace a relationship to 2666...

One day if I have a brain aneurysm, the central reason will be this book.

Interestingly today when I returned the book to the library and picked up another book on-hold, the guy at the counter had a book off to the side of his keyboard. I saw that it was Nazi Literature in the Americas; when I looked closer I saw that it was written by Roberto Bolano. Random coincidence?

I want to talk about this book a lot, I want to discuss it with people. But I certainly can not do it the right amount of justice. And I am saddened that Bolano died before he was able to finish it, even if they do say he was near the end anyway. I still feel like there is more that should have been included, more characters I would have liked to have been fleshed out more, more avenues investigated. But I can't really complain, overall. Except maybe for this persistent itch in my head that just won't go away even after I finished reading it. ...more

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Feb 07, 2012 Christopher rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 500-pages-or-more, 21st-century, latin-american

UPDATE: Aside from the wonderful detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele featured on the paperback version of 2666, the best work of art to assist your reading would be the work above, the third panel of Heironymous Bosch's triptych Garden of Earthly Delights.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: Reading 2666 is like peering into a well.

In Part One: The Part About the Critics, you observe the well from a park bench. It's a little romantic; there are four critics, all obsessed with the same obscure German aut ...more

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Jul 04, 2010 Petra rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I'm not usually at a loss of how to review a book but this is one book that is very hard to review.
Excellently written. Full of prose and thought and clarity and confusion and details and details and details.
This is not a fast or "cozy" read. It's stories within stories within stories. It's murder and corruption and fear. It's ordinary people. It's appearances and disappearances. It's so many things that it's hard to describe.
One thing is clear. The Reader has to put things together for themse ...more

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Jan 09, 2020 Gerard rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20c-literature, behemoths

I finished the beast. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is one of those novels that you should feel proud of enduring as a reader if you complete it from cover to cover. That is not to say that Bolaño's grand masterwork is bad by any means. It is full of dense, philosophical meanderings that will seduce any adventurer who is searching for something to really ponder over. What makes this a grueling novel is Chapter 4: The Part About the Crimes. This section recounts the brutal murders of over 100 women in a ...more

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Jul 24, 2013 Elise rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: translated, fiction, read-in-2014, 2000s

Sometimes you sign on for a scholarly adventure in search of a recluse author and end up drowning in a sea of rape and war crimes.

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Oct 08, 2012 Meghan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, own, historical-fiction, modern-classics, horror, german, crime, philosophy, mexican, south-american

I'm finished! Finally. After a couple major breaks, mostly because Part 4 is so difficult to get through and then in Part 5 I was completely uninterested in the Sammer story (although I found the end very interesting), I can say I finished this bohemoth. And weirdly, this is not the longest book I've read. But it is so complex and stuffed from cover to cover with every idea I think Bolano ever had about everything.

"By now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was I'm finished! Finally. After a couple major breaks, mostly because Part 4 is so difficult to get through and then in Part 5 I was completely uninterested in the Sammer story (although I found the end very interesting), I can say I finished this bohemoth. And weirdly, this is not the longest book I've read. But it is so complex and stuffed from cover to cover with every idea I think Bolano ever had about everything.

"By now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece." (p. 786)

And by all accounts, this is probably his masterpiece (I can't really say since this is the first and only Bolano I have read as to date). And the thing that made me most frustrated is that this was published posthumously and so no one can ask him what he meant by everything. There is so much I know I'm missing but just am too ignorant or unread to know. But the little that I could glean was that this book is phenomenal.

Some might argue that it is uneven. I would even say that it would be better to read it as 5 individual stories (more like a series since it is loosely related). But then in the last 150 pages of Part 5, Bolano wraps it all up and you see his vision and to quote Keanu Reeves, you can only way "whoa".

This book's main story (the Crimes) is based on true events. It is horrifying. It is shocking. It speaks loudly at not just Mexico's apathy, but the world's apathy, towards these victims. Their story is still unheard by most and their killers are still at large. But I feel that in this small way, Bolano has given them a voice and given them a name and we stand accused if we continue to ignore them. Maybe not specifically ignore the crimes of Ciudad Juarez (the real city in Mexico), but the deaths of those that live on the fringes of our own personal worlds. The shootings of the school children in Connecticut this past December shocked the world. People asked outraged and horrified "how could this happen?" And yet hundreds of children die every day, murdered in grosteque and horrifying ways, and we do nothing. In this light, Bolano has given me a lot to think about and question about how society functions and how I choose to live my life.

The rest of the book's themes are less horrifying and more in the magnificent side of life. His love for writing and writers and the written word oozes out of every sentence. This is a man who loves writing. And wants everyone to only write great works so that everyone can read only great works. And if you love literature, you have to love this man's enthusiasm.

My favorite part was Part 3. To me, this was the most "complete" story. You could argue Part 5 was a complete story, but it really was more a summary conclusion to the other 4 parts. Part 3, for me, showed his strength as a writer and beauty as a poet. I loved Part 1 and the writers. They were crazy and obsessed in that fanatical way that true believers can get. Part 2 exposed my limited knowledge of philosophy and classics and German literature.

I'm too distracted right now to really write coherently but while this was an incredibly difficult read and not always a typical novel, this book affected me profoundly and I am so glad I had the opportunity to read it. I am especially happy that I read it with a group of really intelligent people who helped me understand this on an even higher level. I cannot imagine trying to read this on my own.

This book is not for everyone. But I still wish everyone would read it.

I am definitely reading more Bolano and from what I've learned, Borges too since Bolano was greatly influenced by him. ...more

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Jan 21, 2025 Zadignose marked it as not-now

At first it seemed potentially interesting for being different, and I went along with it for a while to see where it would go. Then, as with The Savage Detectives, I found the style clunky and my interest started rapidly fading. I lost faith that the book would be taking me anywhere interesting anytime soon, and then it occurred to me to consider: there must be something else I could be reading instead.

In a way, it's kind of easy reading. But... do I want to? Well, I may come back and read a few ...more

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Apr 04, 2018 Nadine in California added it

I'm throwing in the towel after reading the first two sections, which is up to page 228. I liked the first section but the second dragged, so the thought of 700 more pages of this writing style is more than I can handle. The author's voice is extremely dry and his pacing is slow - this works for me for a short durations but not for the long haul. ...more

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May 10, 2012 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: around-the-world, own, 1001-books, world-lit-na-mexico, found-in-translation, bookish-floor-joists

4.5

First, I do not believe that it was finished as a novel in five parts but it would not have had the same impact if published as five separate works. My plan is to read his other published works and then read 2666 again.

The fourth part is a struggle. The ending left me up in the air.

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