2666

By: Roberto Bolaño

Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick, Grover Gardner

Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, 2009

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.

©2004 the heirs of Roberto Bolaño (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

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" (New York Times Book Review)

"...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." (New York Times)

"It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Irritating

1st book in 12 months I just could not finish. Finally gave up and quit listening after about 8 hours of pure agony.

BORING, BORING, BORING

This book is not for the masses! It is boring, unless of course you like books about obscure academics involved in obscure academic research (German Literature) and their coffee house conversations with like minded characters. Throw in a plethora of untranslated romance language phrases and you have something fit only for academic snobs. I could only stand about 4-5 hours of this. My worst selection ever.

Don't bother.

Tedious.

Just plain disappointing.

I could probably listen to John Lee read a menu. I read the reviews, it seems, it is either love it or hate it book and I love long books. I read or listen to almost anything, so I took a chance. Wish I hadn't wasted a credit.

THE NAME IS MISLEADING

Did I get the same book as everyone else? This book is not a good audio book. Scott Brick cant make this fun. If you want to feel smart because you read an acclaimed master piece with no entertainment value then this is the book for you. This book is just to dry to be endured.
In print it may be fantastic but as audio it is a very wretched thing.

Rambling humourous

what a rambling of strung togethar sentances. Sort of funny but not my cup of tea. Its nonsensicle.

Don't understand the hype

Any additional comments?

I'm 26 hours into this bugger and I just cannot fathom the good reviews and awards. For the last 12 hours or so, it's just been a litany of anonymous murdered women, one after the next. Then there was the several minute long interlude of violent misogynistic jokes. The further in I get the more it feels like masturbatory fantasy material for psychopaths. The characters are dull and many are indistinguishable from each other. If the author ever heard the old saw "show, don't tell," he sure didn't take it to heart. So far, there is no plot. Overall, just unbelievably tedious. I am returning it.

39 hours of my life lost

What disappointed you about 2666?

2666 is a work (or several works) which never actually does more than touch on several interesting subjects. One work touches on the supernatural and then we abandon that story. Another spends hours and hours merely listing deaths both relevant and irrelevant to the work. Many interesting characters are met along the journeys but as soon as something catches your attention which may lead to a storyline all of its own the author abandons it (snuff films, otherworldly voices, the mexican underground, corporate coverups, corrupted government/police officials). The book is well written, but well written and intelligent do not, in this case lead to entertainment value in the least. I'm growing very tired of authors seemingly writing books to display the fact that they are knowledgeable in many different subjects and ridiculously over-educated in the works of many other authors. Sorry about my review as I've finally finished the book, it's late, and I'm upset that I kept telling myself to stick with it because something has to be revealed about one of the storylines.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

I enjoyed most of the 5 narrators's performances. None were truly horrible, or hindered the content of the book.

What character would you cut from 2666?

Half to three quarters of the characters should have been cut to actually focus on a story. Not a single one of the 5 works had any completion to them, as if the author had grown bored with the lives of the characters he'd started writing about only to continuously do the same with each new character he introduced. I understand the author died before truly completing this but one could assume that a few of the 5 arching storylines would be completed.

Terrible and utterly strange

One of the worst books I ever read. Looks like the author had one goal - to write as many pages as possible. He ended up with a jumble of unrelated stories, loose ends leading to nowhere. Terrible, terrible. At the same time, it is obvious that the author is a professional and skillful writer in terms of the literary technique . It turned out that he wrote a lot but after this book I would not take a risk to start any of his other books.

Irritating if you speak even a bit of Spanish

As a native Spanish speaker, it was hard to play this for too long. As a fluent English speaker I am used to the bad pronunciations of Spanish words by non-Spanish speakers, but to hear all the names and so many butchered pronunciations, just gets too frustrating. Some are worst than others but they needed the right bilingual narrators (These are good narrators, but not for this!).
Do yourself a favor and look for a Spanish version if you speak the language, and if you don't, I would definitely recommend reading it yourself. This is no short audiobook and I'm bailing halfway through it after trying very hard to overlook the narration.
Some people mention that this may have been rushed, but that's no excuse. It's almost worse than watching a TV show or movie with actors who can't deliver the language they are supposed to be fluent in because nobody cared to hire a consultant. I expect more from audiobooks that rely fully on audio.