2666

Critical reception of the novel has been positive. In Chile, it won the Altazor Award in 2005. The New York Times Book Review included it in the list of "10 Best Books of 2008"; Time named it Best Fiction Book of 2008; and the novel won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Wimmer's translation was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award. Critics have compared it to the work of W. G. Sebald. They praised the book's multiple story lines and scope.

The novel revolves around an elusive German author and the unsolved and ongoing murders of women in Santa Teresa, a violent city inspired by Ciudad Juárez and its epidemic of female homicides. In addition to Santa Teresa, settings and themes include the Eastern Front in World War II, the academic world, mental illness, journalism, and the breakdown of relationships and careers. 2666 explores 20th-century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories.

While Bolaño was writing 2666, he was already sick and on the waiting list for a liver transplant.[1][2] He had never visited Ciudad Juárez but received information and support from friends and colleagues such as the Mexican journalist Sergio González Rodríguez, author of the 2002 book of essays and journalistic chronicles Huesos en el desierto (Spanish: "Bones in the Desert"), concerning the place and its femicides.[3] He discussed the novel with his friend Jorge Herralde, director of Barcelona-based publisher Anagrama, but he never showed the actual manuscript to anyone until he died: the manuscript is a first copy.

Originally planning it as a single book, Bolaño then considered publishing 2666 as five volumes to provide more income for his children; however, the heirs decided otherwise and the book was published in one lengthy volume. Bolaño had been well aware of the book's unfinished status, and said a month before his death that over a thousand pages still had to be revised.[2]

The meaning of the title, 2666, is typically elusive; even Bolaño's friends did not know the reasons for it. Larry Rohter, writing for The New York Times, notes that Bolaño apparently ascribed an apocalyptic quality to the number.[4] Henry Hitchings noted that "the novel's cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes" and may be a reference to the biblical Exodus from Egypt, supposedly 2,666 years after God created the earth.[5] The number does not appear in the book, though it does in some of Bolaño's other books—in Amulet, a Mexico City road looks like "a cemetery in the year 2666",[5] and The Savage Detectives contains another, approximate reference: "And Cesárea said something about days to come... and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something".[6]

The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes". Within the novel, "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book's title, a date that is referred to in passing in Amulet as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."[7]

The novel's five parts are linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in the fictional border town of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juárez but located in Sonora rather than Chihuahua) though it is the fourth part which focuses specifically on the murders.

The critical reception has been almost unanimously positive. 2666 was considered the best novel of 2005 within the literary world of both Spain and Latin America. Before the English-language edition was published in 2008, 2666 was praised by Oprah Winfrey in her O, The Oprah Magazine after she was given a copy of the translation before it was officially published.[8] The book was listed in The New York Times Book Review "10 Best Books of 2008" by the paper's editors.[9] with Jonathan Lethem writing:

"2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it. (...) As in Arcimboldo's paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily catalogued, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. (...) "[10]

Amaia Gabantxo in the Times Literary Supplement wrote:

"(A)n exceptionally exciting literary labyrinth.... What strikes one first about it is the stylistic richness: rich, elegant yet slangy language that is immediately recognizable as Bolaño's own mixture of Chilean, Mexican and European Spanish. Then there is 2666's resistance to categorization. At times it is reminiscent of James Ellroy: gritty and scurrilous. At other moments it seems as though the Alexandria Quartet had been transposed to Mexico and populated by ragged versions of Durrell's characters. There's also a similarity with W. G. Sebald's work.... There are no defining moments in 2666. Mysteries are never resolved. Anecdotes are all there is. Freak or banal events happen simultaneously, inform each other and poignantly keep the wheel turning. There is no logical end to a Bolano book."[11]

Ben Ehrenreich in the Los Angeles Times:

"This is no ordinary whodunit, but it is a murder mystery. Santa Teresa is not just a hell. It's a mirror also—"the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant, useless metamorphosis."... He wrote 2666 in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void. So his reach extends beyond northern Mexico in the 1990s to Weimar Berlin and Stalin's Moscow, to Dracula's castle and the bottom of the sea."[12]

Adam Kirsch in Slate:

"2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve."[13]

Francisco Goldman in New York Review of Books:

"The multiple story lines of 2666 are borne along by narrators who seem also to represent various of its literary influences, from European avant-garde to critical theory to pulp fiction, and who converge on the [fictional] city of Santa Teresa as if propelled toward some final unifying epiphany. It seems appropriate that 2666's abrupt end leaves us just short of whatever that epiphany might have been.."[14]

Online book review site The Complete Review gave it an "A+", a rating reserved for a small handful of books, saying:

"Forty years after García Márquez shifted the foundations with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Bolaño has moved them again. 2666 is, simply put, epochal. No question, the first great book of the twenty-first century."[15]

Henry Hitchings in Financial Times:

"2666... is a summative work – a grand recapitulation of the author's main concerns and motifs. As before, Bolaño is preoccupied with parallel lives and secret histories. Largely written after 9/11, the novel manifests a new emphasis on the dangerousness of the modern world.... 2666 is an excruciatingly challenging novel, in which Bolaño redraws the boundaries of fiction. It is not unique in blurring the margins between realism and fantasy, between documentary and invention. But it is bold in a way that few works really are – it kicks away the divide between playfulness and seriousness. And it reminds us that literature at its best inhabits what Bolaño, with a customary wink at his own pomposity, called "the territory of risk" – it takes us to places we might not wish to go."[5]

Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly:

"This surreal novel can't be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory. Suffice it to say it concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juarez, Mexico. Given this as a backdrop, the late Bolaño paints a mural of a poverty-stricken society that appears to be eating itself alive. And who cares? Nobody, it seems."[16]

In 2018, Fiction Advocate published a book-length analysis of 2666 entitled An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom by author and critic Jonathan Russell Clark. An excerpt of the book was published in The Believer in March 2018.[17]

It won the Chilean Altazor Award in 2005. The 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction was posthumously awarded to Roberto Bolaño for 2666.[18] It was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. Time also awarded it the honour of Best Fiction Book of 2008.[18][19]

In 2007, the novel was adapted as a stage play by Spanish director Àlex Rigola, and it premiered in Bolaño's adopted hometown of Blanes. The play was the main attraction of Barcelona's Festival Grec that year.

In 2016, it was adapted into a five-hour stage play at Chicago's Goodman Theater.[20] The stage adaptation was praised for its ambition, but according to The New York Times, it fell "short as a work of dramatic art."[21]

In 2016, it was adapted into an 11-hour play by Julien Gosselin and his troupe "Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur". It was presented at the Festival d'Avignon and then in Paris at the Odéon theatre as part of Festival d'Automne.

• 2666, at complete review. Aggregates links to most of the professional reviews.
• Roberto Bolaño's "2666", by Francisco Goldman
• "Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño's 2666"
• "On Bolaño’s 2666" Archived 6 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine by Eric Fershtman, Construction Magazine (24 February 2012)
• "Por una ética del desorden en América Latina (2666)" in Revista Nómadas