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2666: A Novel Roberto Bolano
Publisher: Picador

Nowhere else is his writing more decadently sampled than with his major novels–”The Savage Detectives” and his magnum opus, “2666,” both translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 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. While I certainly don't take everything he says or writes as gospel, his distaste of Bolaño sours my enjoyment of the novel. No other book has done to me what 2666 did. 2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. 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. In the New York Times, Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the distinctions between the genre of the short story and the novel. That is the basis for their connection. In the first section of Bolano's 2666, the academics have Archembolo's books in common. Over the past 2 months, I've been reading Roberto Bolaño's encyclopedic novel 2666 in the spare minutes before bed. Now that I have that distance, no tangible perspective has come other than this: nothing else I've read since has been 2666. As I was reading the passage in Bolaño's novel 2666 on page 40 through 41 I was reminded of the article from the New York Times we read last week entitled, “Analyzing Literature and Words by Numbers”. But I know exactly when I read the first page of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The bookmark that I use in my copy of 2666 is the Christmas card that my brother wrote to me when he gave me the book.