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)

Best audiobook experience so far

Would you consider the audio edition of 2666 to be better than the print version?

I haven't read the print version yet, but I think this novel was perfect for audio. Listening to an audiobook can sometimes feel excruciatingly slow. For this novel, however, the slow tempo was perfect for experiencing the book and its characters, stories and stories within stories.

What other book might you compare 2666 to and why?

I've never read a similar book. Perhaps I could compare it to Murakamis 'Kafka on the shore' because of it's mysterious/supernatural parts, but I found Murakami not to be to my taste, while 2666 was a wonderful experience to read.

Which character – as performed by the narrators – was your favorite?

There's no particular favorite, but at the end of each part I sort of missed the old characters.

A work of genius!

One of my absolute favorites...dark, but hilarious at times, poetic, cerebral. This is one of those books I'll always return to. Pure Bolano.

REREAD, REREAD, REPEAT

Well done writing! Long and a lot of things to understand, though. You can tell that there is a great deal hidden throughout the novel, which is making me unable to resist rereading/listening. Highly suggest reading along with a physical copy of the book.

The third reader is horrible

This is an amazing novel though. It is a long haul to read or to listen to but it is absolutely worth it.

Just incredible.

I will be thinking about this novel for a long time. Each part is distinctive in its own. All the parts work together in unexpected ways.

Favorite Audiobook of the Year

This is easily my favorite audiobook of the year. Bolano's haunting masterpiece is epic in scope and truly lends itself to audio due to its cinematic nature - a must-listen for any fans of literary fiction.

Great book, but reader number 3 . . .

This is a great book. Too bad so many reviewers decided what it was about after listening to less than 10% of it. My reservation (indeed dismay) is that I have to concur with Nancy that the reader of the "Part About Fate" (whom I believe is G. Valmont Thomas) is not very good. In fact, his performance is without question the worst I have ever encountered in any audio book. He performs characters inconsistently, gives ridiculous and incongruous accents to characters, sometimes eschews accents altogether, overacts scenes like a 3rd rate high school theatre arts teacher, etc. His performance suggests he only read his part of the book, and had no idea what the book as a whole was about. It becomes quite comical at times. Fortunately, it's the shortest section, and eventually one is relieved at the advent of his replacement. G. Valmont Thomas: now that's quite a name, but an easy one to remember and try to avoid.

Either really good or really bad

Honestly, I'm not really sure how to rate this book. The individual stories were good, I related to many characters, however some portions were incredibly graphic about the sexual act. The overall book: awful. I kept waiting for it to "come together" but it never did. If you want essentially 5 books for the price of one, try this book. If you want a cohesive story, stay away.

Immersive and questioning

There is a phenomenon going on in Juarez that is so enduring and so horrific that it just begs to be written about. But how can you write about something that is mysteriously ongoing and refuses to resolve itself? How can you not write about something so desperately in need of resolution? Bolano cannot give us closure on this but he can attempt to put into words how it feels to live in such a world. He does so in the broad leisurely way that it deserves. This is necessarily a painful book, but ultimately rewarding. How it is rewarding is difficult to put into words. Perhaps the book itself is the only way to verbalize that.

Speechless

I’m not sure anything in modern literature compares to this strange and colossal work which the editor, in his afterword, said is marked by intense risk and a “totalizing zeal.” What is there even to say? It might best be described as an occult history of the 20th century, one in which entire eras of literary and cultural life are massively recapitulated in every detail and then spun off in a series of spectacular digressions and nested narratives. The center of the book, “the part about the crimes,” pushes the reader to the brink, as it is literally hundreds of pages of bleak, clinical reportage on a femicidal conspiracy in Mexico, the darkest possible experiment in social satire, outside of its inevitable analogue, which follows it, the Nazi rampage across Europe. This is not a work for the faint of heart. To borrow a phrase from another context, if you *can* read anything else, do it. But if you are the type of reader who is driven to scale the peaks of literature, this is one you cannot skip, and you won’t regret the time or the effort. This is a work of true grandeur, that pushes the imagination about as far as anyone would ever want it to go.