2666 - Softcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330447432 ISBN 13: 9780330447430

Publisher: Picador, 2009

Synopsis

Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 has been hailed across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary.

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. 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. As in the real town of Juárez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate . . .

As 2666 progresses, as the sense of conspiracy grows, as the shadow of the apocalypse draws closer, Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century European history.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives last year and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolaño's true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: 2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolaño's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of The Savage Detectives is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, 2666, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there--he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders--but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane. --Tom Nissley

About the Author

ROBERTO BOLAÑO was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He 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. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. NATASHA WIMMER 's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330447432
• ISBN 13: 9780330447430
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 912