“This surreal novel can’t be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory.”

“A display of novelistic mastery and as devastating a reading experience as you are likely ever to encounter.”

“Every scene is powerful and realistic; yet the overall effect is hallucinatory and dreamlike.”

“[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 Durán 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.”

“Think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp, and the Bob Dylan of ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers.”

“Should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist…Bolaño has joined the immortals.”

“Bolaño’s true masterpiece…He writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane.”

“Bolaño grabs us by the scruff of the neck and pushes our heads into the abyss. For Bolaño, the year 2666 is the symbolic culmination of humanity’s neglect and violence, a state of being that has become our modus operandi…That, Bolaño suggests, is where it all starts: at the very spot where we stop paying attention and slip into deadened stasis.”

“Bolano’s masterwork…An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force.”

“It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.”

“One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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.”