| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780374100148 | | Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux | | Publish Date: 11/11/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 207886626 | | Item#: | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 67998 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.25H x 6.25L x 1.75T | | Pages: 912 |
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| | | 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 Bolano''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 Juarez--on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Annotation:
Four years after his death from liver failure, Roberto Bolano burst into the English-speaking literary world with the 2007 translation of his sprawling tour de force, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. In 2008 came the translation of his posthumously published epic, 2666, which he wrote feverishly up until his death, and which exceeds even THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in the ambition, scope, and complexity of its narrative structure. Made of up five interlocking novellas, 2666's plot swirls around a mysterious German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, and his connection to a series of gruesome murders in an impoverished Mexican town. As poets and critics collide with boxers and Black Panthers in the desolation of the Sonora Desert, Bolano shows his rare ability to blend the literary puzzle-boxes of Borges--Bolano's literary hero--with gritty and quixotic adventure and crime stories. 2666 takes the kaleidoscopic insanity of contemporary literature and culture, and applies it to the globalized world--the result is a 21st-century masterpiece in the tradition of Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE or David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. The New York Times Book Review selected 2666 as one of its 10 Best Books of 2008, Publishers Weekly named it a Best Book of 2008, and it won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction.
| Praise| "Bolaño's urgency infuses literature with life's whole freight: the ache of a writing-workshop aspirant may embody sexual longing, or dreams of political freedom from oppression, even the utopian fantasy of the eradication of violence, while a master-novelist's doubts in his works' chances in the game of posterity can stand for all human remorse at the burdens of personal life, or at knowledge of the burdens of history." - Jonathan Lethem 11/12/2008 "[Bolano's] ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void....Nothing is ever finished, nothing answered, nothing solved. Bolaño is too smart, or too sad, to attempt to piece it all together." - Ben Ehrenreich 11/09/2008 "[2666] is...a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year....There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolaño than Bolaño himself, which is a shame because he's dead." - Lev Grossman 11/10/2008 "Bolaño's final novel, 2666, published roughly a year after his death in 2003 and just now released in English, is the prime example - maddening, inconclusive and very, very long; hideous in parts and beautiful in others; exerting a terrible power over the reader long after it's done." - Alexander Cuadros 11/14/2008 "Knowing that his liver ailment would probably kill him, Bolaño pulled out all the stops for his last novel and threw out the rulebook for conventional fiction. A catch-all for many of his concerns, 2666 is at heart a fascinating meditation on violence and literature..." - Steven Moore 11/23/2008 "[2666] is a sprawling triumph, technically brilliant on the level of the individual sentence, eerie and emotionally honest in a way that belies Bolano's reputation for modernist trickery." - Jonathan Beckman 03/01/2009 |
| Author Bio| Roberto Bolano | | Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean poet and novelist, spent most of his life in exile from his native country. He grew up in Mexico with his parents, returned to Chile in 1972 to support President Allende, was jailed briefly after the rise of General Pinochet, fled back to Mexico and eventually settled in Spain. Despite these political influences, Bolaño rejected overtly political literature, writing sprawling, anarchistic, and satirical works that often dealt with wandering poets and the fecundity of Latin American life. He died in 2003 from longstanding liver problems. The following years saw a profusion of English translations of his work, including his masterpiece, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. |
| Awards |
National Book Critics Circle Award (2008) |  | won, Fiction | | |
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