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2666: A Novel Roberto Bolano
Publisher: Picador

Roberto Bolaño died shortly after presenting the first draft of 2666 to his publisher, Anagrama. This is as good a notion as any when thinking about Roberto Bolaño's monstrous novel 2666. Now, I like big books, but only big books that I like. Since Bolaño's mind tends to work most powerfully in self-contained bursts (anecdotes, images, monologues) rather than in narrative continuity, skipping around is far less of a ño-ño than it would be in a traditional novel. And this is probably why, out of all the 'books' in 2666, I liked Book II best. Santa Teresa, in the state of Sonora, on the Mexican-U.S. Over the past 2 months, I've been reading Roberto Bolaño's encyclopedic novel 2666 in the spare minutes before bed. I have very little patience for books I'm not enjoying and I have no reluctance to put a book down forever if I'm not getting "pleasure"* from it. It was reported that he was not completely finished writing or editing the novel at the time of his death. Several days ago, I came out with a rather clumsy post (mostly written during my lunch break) comparing "The Part About Archimboldi" to a novel by Jakov Lind called Landscape in Concrete. Now that I have that distance, no tangible perspective has come other than this: nothing else I've read since has been 2666. Perhaps the first online group read of the novel was the "National Reading '2666' Month", a month-long reading by The New Yorker (The Book Bench) in January 2009. No other book has done to me what 2666 did. Either there are going to be a lot more posts on this one, or hardly any.