About this title: With "2666," Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel . . . who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand . . . summation of their culture.--"The Washington Post."
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Description: FINE. Superb, crisp, clean, unread hardcover with some light shelfwear to the dust jacket and a remainder mark to one edge-VERY NICE! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780312429218ISBN:0312429215
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780307475954ISBN:0307475956
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780374100148ISBN:0374100144
Description: New in new dust jacket. Glued binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 898 p. Audience: General/trade. Please Note: SHELF WEAR AND MINOR RIP TO THE COVER JACKET ONLY. Inside 100% New! No Marks! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780330509602ISBN:0330509608
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780330447423ISBN:0330447424
Description: BRAND NEW HARDBACK. 912 pages. Santa teresa, on the mexico-us border, is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls. among them are three academics on the trail of a reclusive german author; a new york reporter on his first mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; and a police detective in love with an elusive older woman. but there is darker side still to the town. (Hardback) read more
Edition: Second edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780374100148ISBN:0374100144
Description: 898pp. Octavo [23.5 cm] Black boards with title stamped in red on backstrip. Fine/Fine. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Editorial Anagrama
Date Published: 2008-03-15
ISBN-13:9788433973184ISBN:8433973185
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9788433973184. read more
Binding: Audio CD
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781433279508ISBN:1433279509
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Edition: First Edition/First Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780374100148ISBN:0374100144
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. Nudging at spine ends that would seem almost inevitable with this massive book; else unread and crsip. read more
"This book is almost impossible for me to rate. There are parts of it that I hated more than life itself. There are parts of it that I loved more than Five Guys burgers and Chick-Fil-A milkshakes. At times it was so mind-numbingly boring that I almost started to read Mitch Albom books. At times it was so engrossing that it made me forget what time and even what day it was.
I loved and hated 2666 and I'm giving it four stars because I can't possibly give it a lower rating than its partner in crime, Death by Zamboni."
"A sublime, inscrutable, horrifying, riveting, magical, mystical, breathtaking maelstrom. I read his shorter novels and didn't much like them. My goodreads friend Jesse loved this book enough to induce me to give it a go. I'm indebted to Jesse. I'm not saying I understood all of this book. I'm not sure anyone will. But I could not put it down. It is the finest, most momentous work I have read since UNDERWORLD or BLOOD MERIDIAN, and this could well surpass those."
"Easily the best book I've read in 2008. Probably the best book I've read in several years. Bolaño is an incredible writer and as another critic put it, his writing at first seems ugly, but it's an ugliness that is enchanting and intoxicating; an ugliness that gradually reveals its unique beauty. An ugliness that is really a stunning new style wrought from the flat language of whodunnits, police reports, academic tomes, and from great writers like Iceberg Slim, Julio Cortazar, Hemingway, Borges and countless others.
The book itself spirals around the hellish Santa Maria, a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, a town caught in the midst of the forces of blind and vicious globalization and the avaricious brutality of the global drug market. Corruption, power, ideology and indifference let killers and killings of the dispossessed flourish, and the rest of the book flounders around this hellish void - the barely contained forces of evil that erupt throughout the book, and the indifferences that let it all happen."
"I accept that I'll probably get flamed for this, but enough is enough: this maddening, rapacious, and occasionally compelling book is making my life miserable. Will I finish it? Will it matter? Let me say for the record that I counted myself as a likely enthusiast -- I fit the profile -- but after a long, protracted battle, can't bring myself to sing along with the choir to which Bolano is preaching. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if we're so enslaved as readers to the cult of the author that we no longer require his masterpiece to deliver on its claim to greatness, as an integral work of art that transfigures and transcends its moment without depending on the ego of its author to contain it. This happened with Sebald, too: the writer's death, in consummating that ego, paradoxically secures the instant immortality of the work, and we promote him to canonical status before the work itself can pass the endurance test -- not necessarily of time, but of fiction as an invented life form that can survive not only in the fair weather of an assured friendly reception, but the inclemency of readers' genuine surprise. And their work makes itself available to this kind of literary leapfroggery because of its overtly moribund self-reference: there is no "2666" as a singular novel without the idea of "Bolano" as an already-consecrated literary martyr, just as there may be no individual "Vertigo," "Austerlitz," "The Emigrants," et al., as novels, without the classical fantasy of "Sebald," as an idol of immediate eternity, to connect them all.
For me, the most significant failing of "2666" is that it is not convincing *as* a novel, as a unified world inhabited by a variety of imaginary real people whose lives are in our hands. For all their hyper-personalizing detail, the "characters" of this book do not exist for readers as such, because they serve the book more than vice versa; they appear, get used, and -- not unlike the Santa Teresa victims -- are discarded; their bodies pile up along the unrelenting highway of a narrative profoundly driven, it appears, by a refusal to finish. (Not to be a dime-store psychiatrist, but this reminds me of an intensely voluble teacher I once had who said, "Nobody ever died talking.") When characters reappear, their remergence carries no real novelistic weight, because they never haunted the spaces from which they were absent; without the direct consciousness of the author, they have no being. (When he isn't thinking about them, neither is the book.) I don't refer to them by name for a reason: I don't need to. Rather than sincerely individuated figures, they seem more like components of a consuming, universal ego that substitutes humane curiosity for self-interest -- the literary narcissism of a book that absorbs itself. (By this criteria, I can think of lots of postmodern/post-postmodern novels with dead authors who are still breathing.) It might even be said that the organizing principle of this literally infinite book is the death of the author, and while that might sound coherent enough, even noble, I'm not sure that automatic posterity is the most honorable or compelling motive for a novel, which at its best, endeavors first and foremost to make something live, whether it literally exists or not, or ever did.
What I think *is* noble, though, is the ecstatic response to Bolano's work. Personally, I find the reviews -- encomia to "2666" as the apotheosis of Bolano's genius -- a hell of a lot more interesting than the book itself, and I think I know why that might be. The enthusiasm that readers have for this novel honors something tremendously important: a persisting faith in the transformative potential of the novel as a tradition. Readers who love this book believe in the novel and what it can and should do, and my question is simply whether this particular book really does it, or if we're so desirous for a novel that remakes the form -- a show of proof that literary fiction isn't a terminal enterprise, but eternally regenerative and revelatory -- that we're willing to invest our faith in something that aspires to that aim, but doesn't necessarily achieve it. Bolano clearly shared this desire, too, but to my mind failed his readers by enlisting their belief primarily in the confabulation of this wish-fulfillment -- this imaginary great new book -- rather than in the invented world inside it. Instead of champions of "2666" as an autonomous contribution to literature, or the creation of a strange new world, we've become servants to Bolano's own auto-mythology. And that might be noble, but it's also disappointing."
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