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)

Better as separate books

What did you like best about 2666? What did you like least?

There are really 5 separate books. The relationships between each are tenuous at best. I found myself looking for the threads rather than enjoying the story.

Would not recommend

2666 (Unabridged)

I'm sorry, but I found this book very boring. I couldn't get through it even 25% of it before I gave up.

I would not recommend it.

Irritating

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

This Author Must Have a Lot of Friends

I made it through 2666 and it changed my life. After dragging my way through this pretentious, poorly written, poorly crafted and poorly conceived waste of pulp, I learned that a book either shows promise by the mid point or it does not. I learned that critics are easily fooled.

The life changer for me is the freedom to never again have to finish a lousy book because some critic thinks it good because it has to be good, right? I stick with books unless they are obvious pap. I'll invest the time and make the effort. This book is an absolute mess. I am forever free to walk away from a book that is an obvious dud which the critics fear---is it just me? This is 900 pages of crap. I'd better play it safe and talk about the "reach" or the "expanse" so no one really knows that I think it's worthless.

Look at the reviews. When the best a critic can do is recap the book (need those 1,000 words!) and then call it massive or expansive which just means long, skip it. I now understand a code that can steer me clear of future time wastes like 2666.

Save your time. If you want to read Latin literature, turn to Marquez.

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.

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.