Roberto Bolano. 2666.(Book review)

Roberto Bolano. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. FSG, 2008. 898 pp. Cloth: $30.00.

Spanish writer Javier Cercas, a contemporary of Roberto Bolano, once described an overly adulatory critic: "[H]e more or less said there was an immense gulf in universal literature between me and Cervantes." That kind of reaction is only a slight exaggeration of the well-deserved response 2666 has enjoyed from the international critical community. It's already taken a place among "the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown," an extremely dark, violent, confrontational book that "struggle[s] against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench" as a much-cited self-descriptive passage from the novel puts it. It's an allusive and literary book strongly concerned with the role and function of art, but it's also deeply engaged with the mundane world, from global politics to the smallest domestic detail. Bolano is occasionally lyrical but more frequently direct, demonstrating a facility with styles and tones from broad comedy to blackest despair. The five discrete sections that make up 2666 could stand as novels in their own right, twists on different genres from academic satire to ...