2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Honor to whom honor is due
Summary: 5 Stars
One would generally not consider a long novel to be a concise novel, but there appears to be a very economical use of words in this 898 page masterpiece. No deadwood here I am happy to report. Five stories in one like an opened hand with four fingers and the story of the killings of young women in Santa Teresea being the opposable thumb that holds it all together.
Bolano has erected a lasting monument to the memory of all those who have faced untimely death and those who have lost loved ones to untimely death. In his description of Archimboldi the writer and the critics and followers of Archimboldi, Bolano honors those who write and those who read great literature: "what a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read." (Hardcover Edition, page 788)
Perhaps hanging an unfamiliar geometry book on an outdoor clothesline is a good way to exorcise the world of demons, monsters, and evil men and institutions. Perhaps it just convinces your daughter that you have a loose screw in your head while you worry that she might become a victim of homicide in a dangerous city in Mexico.
You will probably want to share this book with friends and family or even buy more than one copy. It will become a classic.
Book Review: I Gave Up!
Summary: 1 Stars
Page after page after page of similar descriptions of murdered women. The joke is on me, I guess. The first two sections barely held my interest as it is. Edited by half this might have held together, as there are glimmers of fine writing here and there.Book Review: I found this long-winded, unfocused and pretentious
Summary: 2 Stars
I was really looking forward to reading "2666." Not only did this book make the 2008 top-10 list of just about every fiction critic in the country, but the book's ostensible subject matter, the unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican state of Sonora, certainly deserves serious literary attention. It took me two months to read, however, and while parts of it were interesting, even compelling, most of it was a slog, and there never comes a point at which it all came together in any way at all for me, let alone one that cried "genius."
I fully admit that Bolano is smarter and better-read than I am. So is Umberto Eco. But when Eco starts rattling off the names of other literary works, as he does with some frequency in, say, "Foucault's Pendulum," it always feels like it's relevant to the plot. In "2666," it feels like Bolano is just throwing out laundry lists of literature, philosophy, art, history, and even biology and math, solely to impress you with the depth and breadth of his knowledge. It may or may not relate to the plot, which isn't surprising, since there really isn't much of a plot. The five books that make up this volume are only loosely related, and even within the different books, there is not always much cohesion. Bolano will start out talking about one or more characters, but the minute he sees the literary equivalent of a shiny object, he runs off after it. While chasing said shiny object, he may see another shiny object and abandon the chase for the first one. At some point, he might remember what he was doing before he wandered off-course, but not always. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness with lots of accounts of people's dreams. If you don't mind rambling thoughts and "deep" philosophy that goes on for so long that when he does occasionally return to an early character you find yourself wondering who he's talking about, you might be enchanted. But if you need to have characters that you love or like, or even ones you hate, you're out of luck here.
As an example of the character problem, let's take Book 1, which focuses on four scholars who are obsessed with the works of an obscure German writer named Archimboldi. Three of the scholars are male, and all are in love with the one female scholar, although I was never sure why, since Bolano doesn't give her any traits that would seem to inspire that level of devotion. Two of the three men are completely interchangable -- other than the fact that one is Spanish and one is French, they might be the same person. Maybe that was the point, but if so, I missed it. The third one is Italian and in a wheelchair. Otherwise, he is just as sketchily drawn. I didn't like them, I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them and when their story suddenly ended, along with Book 1, never to be taken up again, I wondered why Bolano had wasted so much time with them.
Books 2 & 3 fare somewhat better, but Bolano can't stick with the interesting characters. I loved Book 3 when it dealt with Oscar Fate, a writer who gets roped into covering a boxing match in Sonora for his magazine when the sports writer dies, but first Oscar has to spend 75 pages or so with a formerly jailed black radical for no apparent reason. Then it's on to Mexico, where the raped/murdered women still rate barely a sentence background mention. We finally get to those women in Book 4. Boy do we get to them.
Book 4 is l...o...n...g and, as others have noted, filled with lots of gruesome and sad details about the girls & women who've been raped and murdered. At first I thought, "yes -- someone is giving these women an identity and a voice," but after awhile there are so many of them, and so little story to them, that you stop caring. Again, this could be the point. There are some interesting characters in this section, but there are so many people, it's hard to know who or what is important. Maybe none of it is. And when Bolano talks about how the American police profiler was always referred to at home in the U.S. by his young lawyer and doctor neighbors as Mr. ______, you doubt he even knows what he's talking about. Is anyone in your neighborhood under retirement age referred to by everyone else as Mr.? Bolano has clearly read a lot, but it feels like most of what he's writing about he learned in books, rather than by experience, and it creates a sense of distance that doesn't seem intentional but is off-putting nevertheless.
The final book is about Archimboldi's days as a strange, young German named Hans Reiter, but the story wanders all over Romania and Russia with a lot of divergences, most of them unconvincing. I kept waiting for Bolano to tie it all together, but he never did. Ultimately, the book seemed to be a portrait of despair and indifference, which was represented at its most perfect by Sonora.
As a final warning to potential readers, the middle three books are written without paragraphs, and sections often go on for pages. There is even a sentence at one point that is about 5 pages long. 900 pages is not actually that long a book, but those pages are extremely dense and the translation is grammatically awkward in places, making it slower-going still.
If you like rambling, philosophical musings, and don't mind characters, stories and events that just end whenever the writer gets tired of exploring them, you're not in a hurry when you read, and you don't mind reading being hard work, you might like this book. Certainly a lot of people did. I just wasn't one of them.
Book Review: I wish that some good writer would now finish the book.
Summary: 2 Stars
It's my true belief that the author died before finishing or editing
this potentially great book. What else is to be said? The book, even
though very trying at times in its unedited state, was becoming
fascinating when both it and the author passed away.
Book Review: I'm baffled by the hype.
Summary: 2 Stars
Maybe I just don't get this book. Like many, I bought this on the strength of the reviews, and it's the positive reviews that forced me to plow through this relatively incoherent mess.
It seems that most reviewers readily acknowledge that the book doesn't have much by way of plot. Fine, I'm a pretty highbrow sort of person. I watch PBS. I do the Sunday crossword. I'm willing to accept the premise that a great work of literature doesn't necessarily need a plot. I'm a fan of Beckett, for instance. I'm a grown-up, more or less. I don't have to get a rip-roaring tale from everything I read.
The great disappointment isn't just the plotlessness, it's that this book provided nothing much of anything else, either. There is not a single character to care about here. Not the critics, not Archimboldi, not the dead Mexicans, nobody. The prose, while definitely competent, is nowhere near as engaging as the author clearly thought it was. There are no grand ideas introduced. There is no new light shed on the human condition.
Maybe I'm supposed to delight in the wicked send-up of literary academia. Maybe the ossified ineptitude of the Mexican bureaucracy is supposed to raise my dander. Maybe the dispassionately related saga of Reiter cum Archiboldi is supposed to fill me with awe. Maybe it's something else that makes this the greatest book written since the dawn of time.
Whatever it is, I just don't get it. I did not enjoy this book. I did not grow as a result of reading it, except in the sense that whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Let the academics and posers wax lyrical over the merits of this book, such as they are. But if you're just, say, a typical college-educated person who loves books, move on. There's nothing to see here.