It’s a verbal labyrinth; it’s a zoetrope of rape and murder and prison violence; it’s a deep sea fish that crawls, impossibly, through the Sonora desert; it’s a world in which the Virgin winks and the whores are cross-eyed.

2666 · Roberto Bolaño · 2004
Natasha Wimmer translation · Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 · 893 pages, hardcover

♠

There is no summary for this book. 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s final opus, published posthumously one year after his death in 2003. Its five parts are incongruous but have a tip-of-the-tongue commonality that sucks them toward one point: Santa Teresa, Sonora, Mexico. Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño’s literary executor, writes in an addendum to the FSG edition that the novel’s title references a passage from one of Bolaño’s previous novels, Amulet, which he had published five years before 2666:

Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or in 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

And 2666 really is a cemetery of sorts and one that inters all the creepiness of something crawling beneath the eyelid of its many corpses.

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