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2666

by Roberto Bolaño · 914 pages · ~16.5 hrs

Fiction

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Roberto Bolano's final novel, published posthumously, consists of five seemingly separate sections that orbit the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juarez) during the 1990s, when hundreds of young women were being murdered. The first section follows four European literary critics obsessed with a reclusive German novelist; the second recounts that novelist's journey to Mexico; others follow a philosophy professor, a reporter, and finally the crimes themselves in harrowing detail. Bolano, a Chilean who spent his final years in Spain dying of liver disease, created an enormous structure that defies conventional novelistic form. The book runs to nearly 900 pages and was intended by its author to be published as five separate volumes, though it appeared after his death as a single work. The femicides at the novel's center are never solved or explained; they simply accumulate, each victim carefully named and described. Bolano resists the detective-story convention of revelation and closure, instead showing how violence persists in plain sight while literary critics discuss arcane matters. The novel is demanding but rewards readers with some of the most powerful prose in contemporary literature, a work that faces evil without flinching or offering false comfort.

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