2666
Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 has been hailed across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary.
Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But there is a darker side to the town. As in the real town of Juárez, on which Santa Teresa is based, girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate . . .
As 2666 progresses, as the sense of conspiracy grows, as the shadow of the apocalypse draws closer, Santa Teresa becomes an emblem of the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century European history.
Roberto Bolaño
The world-renowned Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), in the words of Susan Sontag, “the most influential and captivating prose writer of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world,” is the author of more than 10 novels, as well as collections of short stories and essays; his works have been translated into numerous languages and have earned him prestigious awards.
His iconic novel 2666, published posthumously, is an undisputed masterpiece, the crowning achievement of Bolaño’s work. He won the City of Barcelona Prize (2004), the Salambo Prize (2005), and the American Association of Literary Critics’ Fiction Prize (2009). Time magazine named it the best work of fiction for 2008.
