Another awesome review. I do these for Bill Marx’s World Books blog on the website for PRI’s The World (Public Radio International). As usual, excerpt below:

Roberto Bolaño’s Final Nightmare
January 11, 2009

The writer’s epic magnum opus so perfectly concentrates the spirit of his previous works that it practically renders them obsolete.

“2666″ by Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 898 pages, $29.95.

Review by Tommy Wallach

The crowning achievement of Bolaño's career

“All criticism is ultimately a nightmare,” writes Roberto Bolaño midway through his epic 898 page masterpiece, “2666.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but it doesn’t really matter. The sentence is less a rational statement than a Zen koan; it forces the reader to consider something nebulous and create their own meaning. Most of Bolaño’s best work functions this way, through language and stories that are neither Campbell-logical nor Marquez-magical, but suggestible, malleable.

“2666″ wasn’t quite finished when Bolaño died in 1999, but his heirs assure us in their postscript to the novel that it was close enough to merit publication. The claim seems legitimate. Everything we’ve come to expect from a Bolaño book is here. There’s the meandering pursuit of a literary figure, by way of “The Savage Detectives” (itself clocking in at 600 pages). There’s the encyclopedic treatment of a distasteful, morbid subject, lifted from his experimental novel “Nazi Literature in the Americas.” And through it all, there is the dissonant prose style of a revolutionary poet who turned to fiction begrudgingly, because he thought there was more money in it. “2666″ is vintage Bolaño: not distilled, exactly, but writ large.

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