Mon premier blog

2666: A Novel Roberto Bolano
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. In the New York Times, Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the distinctions between the genre of the short story and the novel. He worked on his novel 2666 until his last days, which was finally published in 2004 after his death. There is something about it in this novel that made it feel at times more real than real and more true than life itself. Certainly, it bears many attributes of a work of long fiction – memorable characters, richly evoked locations, abundant action, recurrent themes. Facetious, I know, but hey, I got through the book. I can imagine that as a book 2666 would present a huge challenge to me, because it's very testing in places. He completed its first draft shortly before his death in 2004. The reason I bought 2666 wasn't because I knew I was getting stomach flu, but because of my occasional worry that I'm too old to experience a new novel as a masterpiece. 2666 is a detective novel featuring a character from Savage Detectives as the narrator. 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. Calling Roberto Bolano's 2666 a novel is somewhat misleading. And the experience was generally positive.