Roberto Bolaño

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008 Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008 Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008 San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008 Seattle Times Best Books of 2008 New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008 Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared. In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, 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, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals."

A Novel

2666

With an introduction by Ben Lerner The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl, a vortex for lost souls. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town: girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate and it is fast becoming the scene of a series of horrifying crimes. As 2666 progresses, the sense of conspiracy grows, and the shadow of the apocalypse is drawing closer. Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 became a sensation on publication and has been hailed across the world as Bolaño's masterpiece. Terrifying, awe-inspiring and beautiful, it is the classic novel that has come to define one of Latin America's greatest writers.

Picador Classic

This book is so very homophobic and so very homosexual.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.

Edward Steel

Jordan Card

a ridiculously ambitious book experienced through vignettes that surround the protagonists —  the town of santa clara, mexico and benno von archimboldi, an elusive novelist. 

the five parts, read independently, can stand by themselves, but altogether, the picture it paints is that of the nature of desire, duty, the all-consuming nihilism that knowledge bestows on its seeker, the structural roots and banal mood of femicide, the perils of mythologising Man, culture’s persistence, and above all, the pervasiveness of lost souls and their accompanying tragedy of destiny and chance.

trigger warning: in the fourth part there are 2-300 pages bluntly detailing rape and murder. also trigger warning: the fifth part has 100-150 pages straight of the correspondences of war that i had to absolutely trudge through.

the closest a book has ever been conscious that it was written by a writer — it insists upon itself but considering its depth, breadth, ambition, style, and execution, id say that it is completely justified in doing so. wouldnt say it is a Must Read but i am better off doing so

edit: how do u even write a book like this without the internet. picture american psycho diatribes about pop culture except it happens every 10 pages and they are about dull things like specific roads, the diary of a passing character, recipes and more

Ghee

a ridiculously ambitious book experienced through vignettes that surround the protagonists —  the town of santa clara, mexico and benno von archimboldi, an elusive novelist. 

the five parts, read independently, can stand by themselves, but altogether, the picture it paints is that of the nature of desire, duty, the all-consuming nihilism that knowledge bestows on its seeker, the structural roots and banal mood of femicide, the perils of mythologising Man, culture’s persistence, and above all, the pervasiveness of lost souls and their accompanying tragedy of destiny and chance.

trigger warning: in the fourth part there are 2-300 pages bluntly detailing rape and murder. also trigger warning: the fifth part has 100-150 pages straight of the correspondences of war that i had to absolutely trudge through.

the closest a book has ever been conscious that it was written by a writer — it insists upon itself but considering its depth, breadth, ambition, style, and execution, id say that it is completely justified in doing so. wouldnt say it is a Must Read but i am better off doing so

edit: how do u even write a book like this without the internet. picture american psycho diatribes about pop culture except it happens every 10 pages and they are about dull things like specific roads, the diary of a passing character, recipes and more

So much to eat and digest and barf up. Book One was great, love some lit porn, the introduction to the ‘madhouse idea’ was neat, I love how little Bolaño gives us of Archimboldi. Book Two seemed like the most useless addition, Book Three following closely behind. They were both fun little romps around these characters’ minds and fleshed the world out but it really seemed like a way to tell the pharmacist story and then again to build upon the madhouse. Lotta words for maybe a page or two of striking writing. Book Four was gruesome, over a hundred pages of gore and gross shit. Most palpable gross shit I’ve read, which was fun but such a bummer to get through! Cool character moments, I bet Bolaño had fun building the detectives’ lives behind the scenes. Book Five was excellent, the moment everyone was waiting for, and it was a blast to put the story together parallel to the Book. If you have a bunch of time on your hands and enjoy nonsense paragraphs and also beautiful language that goes absolutely nowhere this is the novel(s) for you! 

Patrick Book

This book is simply awful. It's also audacious, staggering in scope, impossibly detailed, and astoundingly bold. But to me it is a goddamn nightmare. It took me two and a half years of on-and-off reading to actually finish it, partly because so much of it is just interminable; passages go on unbroken by even a period for upwards of two and a half pages, epically-extended run-on sentences that will seem to each reader to be either Bolano's style of prose taken to its furthest possible conclusion or a disjointed, free-associated mess. Similarly, he is as easily distracted as a toddler who just learned to walk, flitting off on tangents within tangents; this book could be reduced by half if he eliminated all the tertiary characters whose lives he follows for a dozen pages at a time even though they don't seem to have any real import to the central story, if there even is one. Moreover, the dead-eyed recounting of the rape and murder of some 200 woman in cold, clinical, detached detail could be lost almost entirely, which would essentially reduce the book by a full section amounting to more than 200 pages. It's frankly sort of grotesque, especially since those murders are little more than window dressing. The level of detail is completely unnecessary. 

Fundamentally, however, making such changes would inherently change the very nature of "2666." It's ambling, constantly-shifting storytelling and obsessive details and elongated prose are Bolano's essence; they're what makes "2666" an impressive and unique work. Which I did not enjoy at all.

Miles Silverstein

An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.

Rohan Uddin

Where to begin with this sprawling, exhaustive, meditative work of such ambition? The interconnected parts of 2666 tell the story of humanity, its contagious madness, its beauty, its art, and its gruesome and brutal savagery. Populated with a vast array of characters from every facet of life, reading this near-masterpiece gives one the same feeling of glimpsing into the history of the human world, and witnessing its happiness and woes. Truly epic.

ROBERTO BOLANO

Nelson Zagalo

No final das 1000 páginas podemos fechar o livro e decidir ficar com as impressões criadas ao longo das semanas de leitura, sem realizar qualquer esforço de as organizar, de lhes dar um sentido. Essa vontade pode ser maior quando de frente a livros que são escritos com a intenção de se furtar a essas tentativas de catalogação ou organização de significados, como é o caso de “2666”. Ainda assim, enquanto leitores dotados de competências, por vezes obsessivas, na identificação de padrões e atribuição de significados, torna-se difícil não encetar esse esforço. As linhas que se seguem são assim o resultado da minha experiência de leitura, condensada e verbalizada num conjunto de ideias e parágrafos.

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“2666” é destacado no panorama literário por duas razões contextuais — o seu tamanho, que tem motivado uma discussão, irrelevante, sobre se deveriam ser 5 livros autónomos, ou apenas 1; e a morte prematura do autor, tendo o livro sido publicado de forma póstuma, um ano após a sua morte — e ainda uma razão narrativa — a descrição de violência, apresentando assassinatos de dezenas e dezenas de mulheres. Mas, na verdade, estas razões são adereços, contribuindo pouco para a compreensão do que está contido nesta obra, do que nos impacta e produz uma experiência singular.

Descartando desde já as razões contextuais que me parecem por demais óbvias na sua irrelevância, preciso de dar conta da questão da violência, que não sendo de somenos, acaba sendo-o pelo tratamento escolhido pelo autor para a representação da mesma. Passo a explicar. A violência apresentada numa cidade fictícia, na fronteira do México com os EUA, é facilmente conectada com a violência ocorrida na cidade de Juárez entre os anos 1993 e 2010. Ou seja, aquilo que Bolaño nos apresenta não é pura ficção, é baseado em múltiplos relatos que leu sobre o que se passava em Juárez. 

Assim, no início dos anos 2000 começaram a surgir, nos media internacionais, histórias e apelos à comunidade internacional para o alegado fenómeno de femícidio, sem precedentes em todo o planeta. Nuns meios falava-se em 100 mulheres, noutros em mais de 300, e noutros chegava-se a 500 mulheres assassinadas. Eram números nunca ouvidos, em parte alguma, tendo gerado forte comoção na sociedade internacional, e consequentemente respostas da literatura como “2666”, mas também “If I Die in Juárez” por Stella Pope Duarte, entre outras. No cinema, o realizador de “Bordertown” (2007) — com Martin Sheen e Jennifer Lopez — falava, em entrevista, que existiam mais 5 mil mulheres desaparecidas, só na cidade de Juárez. Nas revistas, escreviam-se títulos como "Juárez, a Cidade que Odeia as Mulheres".

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Cruzes rosa em Juárez marcando o assassinato de várias mulheres

Ou seja, Juárez, a ser uma cidade onde as mulheres, e apenas estas, morriam às mãos de homens, vítimas de violação violentas, de profanação, estaríamos a falar de uma maldade “encarnada”, racionalizada, capaz de olhar para a mulher como ser inferior, que serve apenas os propósitos do macho para depois ser descarta numa qualquer lixeira a céu aberto, tratada como nenhum animal. O problema de todo este enredo, que cria a representação de um Inferno à superfície da Terra, é que está longe da realidade. Se Bolaño fala e descreve dezenas e dezenas de assassinatos violentíssimos todos, sem exceção, cometidos sobre mulheres, quando olhamos para os dados efetivos da cidade de Juárez nos anos reportados por Bolaño, verificamos algo muito contrastante (ver tabela):

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Número de assassinatos, triagem por género e percentagem, entre 1988 e 2012, da cidade de Juárez, México [1]

1993 foi ano em que mais mulheres face aos homens morreram, ainda assim por cada 2 mulheres mortas, apareciam 8 homens mortos. Se os dados, na altura examinada por Bolaño, impressionam, após a sua morte, em 2003, os números de assassínios na cidade Juárez viriam a explodir, atingindo valores absolutamente inauditos em 2010, com mais de 3600 pessoas assassinadas, mas mesmo aí, apenas 10% eram mulheres, uma percentagem baixa quando comparada com os 25% nos EUA [1]. Face à média de assassínios no México, que é já bastante alta na relação internacional, cerca de 30 por 100 mil, Juárez apresentou nesse ano uma média 10 vezes acima [2]. Para se poder ter uma noção do que são 3600 assassinatos, numa cidade de 1,3 milhões de habitantes, podemos dizer que Portugal, um país de 10 milhões de habitantes, apresenta menos de 100 assassinatos por ano. 

Ou seja, existia um problema grave naquela cidade, mas esse problema nunca foi exclusivo das mulheres, como dão conta as quase todas 300 páginas do capítulo 4 de “2666”. Podemos dizer que problema era muito menos racional, dirigido, refletido, e muito mais fruto dos ambientes de violência proporcionados pelas variáveis da droga, mas também de cidade fronteiriça que atraía milhares de pessoas de toda a américa latina, em busca do salto para os EUA. Muitas destas pessoas não possuiam papéis, não eram suportados por laços familiares nem de proximidade, acabando em malhas complexas e muito tóxicas, para as quais a vida humana nada vale, é totalmente descartável seja homem, mulher ou criança.

Entrando agora na obra, nas suas qualidades estéticas e na experiência produzida. Tenho de dizer que Bolaño foi um virtuoso literário, tanto no modo como escrevia, como no modo como entrelaçava enredos, apresentando uma capacidade para contar histórias como se não passasse de um simples respirar. Para esse efeito a sua escrita, aparentemente acessível, dá cor e tom ao historiar, permitindo que o leitor entre nos universos ficcionais criados, e se deixe ficar por ali, simplesmente pela experiência da leitura, mesmo sabendo que não existirão grandes respostas à espera no final. Bolaño transporta o leitor para o seu mundo, enreda-o, envolve-o, alimenta-o, e faz como que se sinta ali bem recebido, mesmo quando de relatar o horror se trata. Para isso, Bolaño convoca espaços espalhados pelo globo — Alemanha, França, Inglaterra, Itália, México, Chile, EUA, etc. — que vão servindo na ampliação do cenário da viagem, enredando-nos, como se fosse abrindo sempre novas avenidas para dar a ver e sentir, mas que alimenta de histórias, múltiplas, umas dentro da outras, labirínticas no espaço e no tempo. 

Contudo, nem sempre acompanhei o autor. Existem múltiplas secções, e em 1000 páginas não é difícil, em que sentimos Bolaño a dar pura rédea solta a criatividade, deixando a imaginação divagar sobre um qualquer caminho narrativo, totalmente irrelevante, alimentando-o de descrição, apenas porque sim, ou apenas para poder preencher mais algumas páginas do seu enorme tomo. Para atenuar estes momentos, menos engajantes, Bolaño usa a sátira, um elemento particular deste tipo de pós-modernismo, a fazer lembrar David Foster Wallace, ainda que bastante mais acessível, desde logo porque muito menos fragmentário. E ainda, na senda de DFW, usa a meta-narração, com o narrador a intrometer-se, sub-repticiamente, aqui e ali, para nos dar conta do que estamos a ler, porque estamos a ler, com comentários sobre a diferença entre o que estamos a ler e poderíamos ler noutro qualquer lugar, aprofundando assim o tom satírico pela autocrítica.

Finalmente, sobre o que diz, ou teria para dizer, com uma obra tão grande e dotada de momentos tão intensos. Confesso sentir algum vazio. A obra preencheu-me totalmente no processo de leitura, questionou-me e confrontei-a, mas terminada, fechou-se. Nem as pontas abertas me deixaram com vontade de procurar compreender porquê assim e não de outra forma. Existem múltiplas ideias, mensagens e conceitos espalhados pelas páginas, mas formam mais um conjunto de idiossincrasias do autor, da sua forma de estar no mundo, como olhava para a realidade, considerava o outro, a arte e a vida do que propriamente uma ideia ou visão que nos quisesse passar com esta obra em particular. Posso dizer que sempre tive a inclinação para ver no 2666, o ano do diabo, e que para esse convergiria todo o mal à face do planeta, podendo Juárez servir de epicentro. Mas tudo isso cai um pouco por Terra com o tratamento dado aos dados do que realmente aconteceu naquela cidade.

[1] Molly Molloy. (2014). “The femicide fallacy: tyranny of the ten percent”
[2] Steven S. Volk. (2015). The Historiography of Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez: Critical and Revisionist Approaches

Publicado no blog VI - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

This book is long as hell and vastly incomprehensible and I'm far too stupid to know what I'm missing from this. 

The first book was the best book. The second and third were ok. The fourth and fifth devolved quickly. The fourth is by far the worst part, a veritable catalogue of the raping and killing of hundreds of women.

Besides that, his writing is great.

Donald

I am a lunatic, so I am rereading 2666 at least once before seeing it on the stage in February: https://www.goodmantheatre.org/2666

My first instinct upon finishing this for the second time was to turn back to the first page and begin again, which I did (only the first three pages). My second instinct was to go to the kitchen and hug my wife, which I did. My third instinct was to check on a friend who is in the hospital because I was sure that she had died. (She had not.)

If you are attending the play, please let me know.

This is my third time reading 2666. I started it before I went to see the theater adaptation in Chicago in March, and I just finished now.

A few thoughts:

1) I am sure that this is the great novel of our young century, but I still do not understand it, whatever it means to understand a novel. There is something going on with water that helps tie it all together. Maybe the water stuff will make more sense to me when I read it a fourth time.

2) Santa Theresa is not Ciudad Juarez.

3) 2666 is the fullest expression of Bolaño's devotion to Borges. 2666 is about fiction! Just like The Savage Detectives is about poetry!

4) I could start reading it again tonight.

THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

2666 - 3-Volume Boxed Set

Finished Vol. 1 on 11/25/09

The first volume of this epic novel is very good As a hopeless bibliophile, I am drawn to fiction that is literary in both subject and style. I love novels that talk about and obsess over books. Like the rest of Bolaño's work, there is a lot of that here, and it is wonderful. I hope I am not the only person who dreams of von Archiboldi being real.

But books and literature are not the focus of this novel. Violence is the focus of this novel. The center of gravity is Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez), and the center of gravity in Santa Teresa is a pattern of torture, abduction, and murder of hundreds of women. The city name is changed, but the murders are very real and still happening. Bolaño paints them in a terrifying light, though they remain just out of focus. In the subsequent volumes of the novel, they will be thrust forward, forcing us to stare into the inhuman, if only on the safety of the page.

(Some complain that this novel is fragmented and sloppy, but I disagree, so far.)

Finished Vol. 2 on 1/11/2010

The second volume of 2666 might be the most intensely disturbing book ever penned. It chronicles the rape and murder of countless women in Santa Theresa (Ciudad Juárez), one after the other, in the dry, detached style of a newspaper article or police report. Each murder is investigated or not investigated by the police. Evidence is lost. Men are arrested, interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned. The murders continue.

Between these deaths we follow the lives of policeman, a Mexican politician who friend disappears, the first man charged and imprisoned for the murders, local reporters, and others. It becomes clear that the state and the narcos are responsible for the murders (or at least responsible for covering up whoever is responsible), but the violence against women is so generalized it is hard to pin down any single culprit.

This is the oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. Bolaño's prose is masterful, and the novel continues to hold together, despite its length and scope and brutality.


Finished vol. 3 on 1/17/2010

Holy shit. The final volume of this novel moves from amazing to astonishing. We return to von Archiboldi and follow him through WW2, Nazism, and post-war Germany. We go through the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist purges. And it all comes back to Mexico and the killings in Santa Theresa.

The scope of this novel is ridiculously large, but it never breaks apart or becomes incoherent. It bridges the 20th and 21st centuries. It marks out a radicalism devoid of hope or false solutions and sets the bar really fucking high for every other writer this century.

With only slight hesitation, I can say that this is the best work of fiction I have ever read.

With an introduction by Ben Lerner.The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl, a vortex for lost souls. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town: girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate and it is fast becoming the scene of a series of horrifying crimes. As 2666 progresses, the sense of conspiracy grows, and the shadow of the apocalypse is drawing closer.Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 became a sensation on publication and has been hailed across the world as Bolaño's masterpiece. Terrifying, awe-inspiring and beautiful, it is the classic novel that has come to define one of Latin America's greatest writers.

Landen Angeline

Maria José Sandoval

Cuatro críticos literarios están en búsqueda de las huellas de su escritor alemán favorito, y esto los lleva hasta Satan Teresa, en Sonora. Allí conocen a un profesor que se establece en esa ciudad con su hija, a la que también llegará un periodista estadounidense para hacer la crónica de un combate. 
En el corazón del relato, se narran los asesinatos de mujeres en Santa Teresa y las infructuosas investigaciones de la policía. 

La obra esta dividida en cinco partes: La parte de los críticos, la parte de Amalfitano, la parte de Fate, la parte de los crímenes y la parte de Archimboldi, todas individuales pero que de alguna manera coinciden entre sí. Todas estas partes rodean los crímenes de Santa Teresa, que se refieren a los reales de Ciudad Juarez. En todas las partes se notan los razgos de tristeza que van invadiendo con forme se avanza en la lectura, e incluso ciertos tonos de horror anticipando lo que viene en el centro de la novela.

Fernando Andrade

Imposible reseñar un libro incompleto, así que no lo haré. Sólo diré que valen la pena las horas y horas y horas de lectura, para poder llegar al capítulo de Archimboldi.

Melody Izard

Subtly connected with words and events and people this massive, poetic book hammers you with one vivid description after another of the brutal murders and sexual assaults of young girls until finally they become the mundane. It occurred to me as I became desensitized to the bodies and the descriptions of the vile acts committed and the brutal way the victims are left in trash heaps, on the side of the road or partially buried, how suffocating it must be for the detectives and investigators (at least the ones who seemed to care about solving the murders) who tried to claw their way through these cases and carcasses and find the killer or killers and stop the crimes. But of course it goes much, much deeper that the murders. These murders represent the stink in humanity. There is beauty too – but always the stink. This book is long and deep and I wish I had time to read it again.

Phil James

This is I'm sure a very literate and well written book but it just became too much hard work.
I can take the post-modernist view ( "Dorian" by Will Self ) of the world and don't wear rose-tinted glasses, (I loved "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy), but the endless list of rapes and murders was not my cup of meat.
If this will lead to the solving of some of these murders ( or the prevention of new ones) then it's worth anybody's distaste, but I don't think it will...review fades to ambiguity and obscurity...

2666 A Novel

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