This winner of the 2008 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Fiction is the master work from "one of the greatest and most influential modern writers" (James Wood, 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 Santa Teresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Roberto Bola–o's surrealist magnum opus, set in Europe and South America, is divided into five books, each read here by a different narrator, each in his way extraordinary. John Lee is especially subtle with accents, Armando Duran brings his mostly Spanish-flavored section to vivid life, G. Valmont Thomas lends The Part About Fate a deadpan humor, and Grover Gardner gives the saga of the writer Benno von Archimboldi a compelling pace. Scott Brick takes a risk that might have worked but doesn't: presumably to convey the mythic and irrational nature of his part, about horrifying serial rape-murders in Mexico, he tries a singsong narration as if he were reciting an epic poem. A smart idea, but tiresome to listen to. His characters' voices are outstanding, though. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
Janet Maslin, New York Times...
"…think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp (both explicitly invoked here) and the Bob Dylan of 'Highway 61 Revisited,' all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers."
About the Author
ROBERTO BOLAÑO (1953-2003), born in Santiago, Chile, grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998.
