Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman — these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
Published posthumously, 2666 is, in the words of La Vanguardia, not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature. Bolano was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as the head of the Swedish Academy has annoyingly but rightly pointed out, don't read much fiction in translation anyway. But when the first of Bolano's major novels, The Savage Detectives, a massive, bizarre epic about a band of avant-garde Mexican poets, was published in the U.S. last year, it instantly became a cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics. Bolano's second (and last) major novel is titled 2666, and if anything, it is even more massive and more bizarre. "It is also a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year." (Lev Grossman, Time)
Source : http://www.powells.com/book/2666-9780312429218
