Mon premier blog

2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano

2666: A Novel Roberto Bolano ebook
Format: epub
Page: 912
ISBN: 0312429215, 9780312429218
Publisher: Picador

Chilean author Roberto Bolano posthumously won the National Book Critics Circle award Thursday night for the English translation of his 912-page novel 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. While I certainly don't take everything he says or writes as gospel, his distaste of Bolaño sours my enjoyment of the novel. Reading "2666", "it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Roberto Bolaño's genius from his excess. If the streets of Santa Teresa and the style of 2666 are anarchic and the epigraph refers to our corrosive modernity and its abuses of freedom and desires, then we can anticipate an even more sprawling post-modern novel. Obviously there's a part of me that applauds the willingness of all three critics, at a time when 2666 was the Hot Hot Book in the US, to swim against the current. A few weeks ago I said that I was considering doing the group read of Robert Bolano's novel 2666. Not every writer would write a novel in the form of a completely invented encyclopaedia of imaginary writers and call the result Nazi Literature in the Americas. He completed its first draft shortly before his death in 2004. 2666 is one of those novels which push the limits of the novel past its conventional size and scope, and its 893 pages of text definitely is one literary mammoth. Bolaño's final novel, 2666, represents a sort of apotheosis of that dread. That's not something very many people are willing to do. 2666, a novel by Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano, was published posthumously in 2004. It wasn't as if I had been dying to read it.