2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Buy the boxed set!
Summary: 5 Stars
By all means read this fascinating masterpiece in whatever edition you can. It is a labyrinth of wonders in which you may willingly lose your bearings, knowing that you will emerge transformed. But if at all possible, buy the boxed set. The three separate volumes fit much more easily into the hand, and the gorgeous covers are a meaningful commentary on the diverse qualities of each of the major sections. See my more detailed review in this context.Book Review: Buyer Beware
Summary: 1 Stars
This is not an enjoyable/pleasurable book to read. Do not be misled by the 1st 100 pages or the other reviewers who would lead you to think it's a beautiful masterpiece. I am hard pressed to believe that the other reviewers even read this book. They gush on an on about how great it is, but every one of them fails to mention the overriding fact that this book is a GRUESOME and HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT book. The largest section of the book is basically 300+ pages of autopsy reports. You will read the words "vaginally and anally raped" over and over and over, until it runs through your mind day and night. I don't know what's more disturbing, the book itself or all the people who claim to love this book but somehow overlook or just never mention the brutal and gruesome violence which is the core of the entire work. If a masterpiece is a book to be reread again and again, then this book fails to be so. I could NEVER stomach this book for even one more read.Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
Very disappointing...this book does not live up to its hyped-up reviews. The book reads like a very rough draft for a novel, in that the text is disjointed, the rhythm of the story is disorganized, and the core story is inflated from the 300 pages it deserves to about 870 pages, due primarily to the inclusion of hundreds of pages of random, pointless details with little bearing on the story. A couple of critics have called the book "Borgesian," but I find it hard to imagine how a novel could possibly be LESS Borgesian than this one.Book Review: Embracing Literature, Details of Contemporary Life, Universality
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolano's last novel, 2666, evokes so much of life even as it seems to violate form and content prescriptions for writing fiction. It is also a page turner despite its length and the often violent nature of one subtext related to the ongoing unsolved murders of so many young Mexican women, many of whom are poor factory workers. The novel simultaneously embraces literature, encompasses details of contemporary life, and evokes universality.
Professor Mitchell's summary review offers a larger outline of sorts of the books five parts, but I would like to offer a few sections that show readers details behind the more abstract words of praise.
The first part about critics lays bare many problems with current academic literary criticism - its isolated and isolating search for an obscure author who ostensibly "reveals" life, who might become the Nobel recipient, but who is elusive and thus prized or at least greatly discussed in academic circles. The supposed little known German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, becomes the singular life focus of certain critics (from France, Spain, and England as well as Italy) about whom they publish and give talks at conferences. Their personal lives become intensely intertwined as they write about and then search for Archimboldi which becomes, in effect, a search for meaning in their own lives. Near the end of this first section, three of the critics arrive in back-water northern Mexico (University of Santa Teresa), meet a professor there, Amalfitano, supposedly another Archimboldi expert. They initially judge him with the following long sentence in typical Bolano style where he breaks most grammar rules yet yields something more:
"The first impression the critics had was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the awful terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border." (pg. 114)
Bolano ends the paragraph by describing the critics' perceptions: two saw him as failed because though he [Chilean-born, they discovered later] had lived and taught in Europe but had not developed have the necessary tough veneer and "his innate gentleness gave him away in the act." One thought him a sad person whose life was slipping away quickly.
Shortly thereafter in the same first section follows another Bolano extended passage (pgs 120-23), this time as Amalfitano responds to the critics' discussion about Latin American intellectuals. He says that many Mexican (and Latin American) intellectuals just wanted to get by whereas some were more interested in writing. As the critics ask what he means, Amalfitano launches into a three-page discourse on intellectuals there and in Europe, their means of support, particularly state support and university jobs in which they lose their way (what he calls their shadow) and often abuse alcohol to forget their lost shadow. And then Amalfitano then begins a long passage that echoes not only Shakespeare and Plato but also life itself:
"And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The state is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoetic noise, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads they can't see anything. The only sounds they hear come from deep in the mine. And they translate and reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they hear a hurricane, they try to be eloquent when they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence..." (121-122) Amalifanto's monologue continues about life and art and their intersection for another page or so, to which one critic then merely replies that she doesn't understand a word he's said.
These are only two examples of how Bolano's novel embraces and conveys life in all its complexity. This does not seem like fiction: it mixes art, life, and universal truths. It is worth not only a first read but many more.
2666: A Novel
Book Review: Emperor's New Clothes
Summary: 1 Stars
Extremely disappointing. Notwithstanding all of the literary praise and hype, this novel (if it can be called that) simply does not deliver on a storytelling or intellectual level. It is a pointless study of odd obsessions and the meaningless of life. The principal characters have few if any redeeming qualities. Even worse, the text delivers little if any enjoyment to the reader. The story is incoherent and rambling with little or no substance in terms of an overall message or theme.
Despite critical acclaim from the New York Times and other critics, there is no subtle meassage that is worthy of discussion or thought. This is an obtuse novel with no real point. Rather than concede the obvious, the critics have touted this novel as "subtle". However, such an assertion is pure drivel. There is no substance here that need to be teased out of the story. It is an obtuse (and long winded) tale that has little of note to say about the meaning of life or the human condition. Just because a novel is not easily accessible does not mean that it has something important to say or that it is worth reading.
Do not waste your time or money on this failure of a book.