2666

Critics Review

• “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

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

  Time

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

  O, The Oprah Magazine

• “[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.”

  AudioFile

• “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

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

  Amazon.com

• “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.”

  The Millions

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

  New York Review of Books

• “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.”

  El País

• “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.”

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