2666 Lib/E
Description
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book's subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death as it explores how humans make sense of senseless events. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, writers and cops, pursuing their own separate yet interrelated quests for meaning: an enigmatic Prussian novelist who disappears from the public eye after the death of his lover; a group of literary critics who bond through their shared love of the novelist's works; an African American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat in the wake of his mother's death; and a Spanish professor and widowed father whose mind is beginning to lose its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juárez on the US-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved.
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About the Author
Roberto Bolano (1953-2003), born in Santiago, Chile, grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over eight hundred titles to his credit. Named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
Armando Duran has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
G. Valmont Thomas, a longtime member of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has also been a faculty member at the Johnny Carson School of Film and Television at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His voice may also be heard in a number of video games and in advertisements for radio and television.
Reviews
This surreal novel can't be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory.
-- "Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author"Every scene is powerful and realistic; yet the overall effect is hallucinatory and dreamlike.
-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"The year's most exciting novel...A masterpiece, and its publication in English translation...is the most electrifying literary event of the year...A display of novelistic mastery, and as devastating a reading experience as you are likely ever to encounter.
-- "Time"Think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp, and the Bob Dylan of 'Highway 61 Revisited, ' all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers.
-- "New York Times""Should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist...Bolaño has joined the immortals."
-- "Washington Post"Bolano's true masterpiece...He writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane.
-- "Amazon.com"Bolano's masterwork...An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel's narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery).
-- "New York Review of Books"[2666] is divided into five books, each read here by a different narrator, each in his way extraordinary. John Lee is especially subtle with accents, Armando Duran brings his mostly Spanish-flavored section to vivid life, G. Valmont Thomas lends 'The Part about Fate' a deadpan humor, and Grover Gardner gives the saga of the writer Benno von Archimboldi a compelling pace. Scott Brick['s] characters' voices are outstanding.
-- "AudioFile"This brilliant behemoth is grander [than The Savage Detectives] in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job...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)""One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time...a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his life's work but redefines it and raises it to new dizzying heights."
-- " El Pais""The book explores evil with irony, without any theory or resolution, relying on storytelling alone as its saving grace...Each story is an adventure: a fresco at once horrifying, delicate, grotesque, redundant, and absurd, revealed by the flashlight of a child who stands at the threshold of a cave he will never leave."
-- "Liveration""On every page the reader marvels, hypnotized, at the capacity of this baroque writer to encompass all literary genres in a single fascinating, enigmatic story...It is a fully realized work by a pure genius at the height of his powers."
-- "Lire""[A] work of huge importance...a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out."
-- "El Mundo""To say that 2666 is a novel is like calling a Beethoven symphony a collection of songs. If we must, though, this novel in five parts is without doubt Roberto Bolaño's masterwork, epic in scope, labyrinthine, frustrating, disjointed, maybe a bit pretentious, always somewhat aloof--and brilliant...Reading 2666 is a daunting task, though once accepted, the result might be something akin to what readers felt in 1922 when, faced for the first time with the disquieting modern vision of James Joyce, they picked up Ulysses and were changed by the experience."
-- "Bookmarks"
