Customer Reviews

2666

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I, like most other readers, was first intrigued by the reviews of this book. From The New York Times and The New Yorker all the way down to my local paper, everyone had something to say about it. Dreamlike, epic, worldly, etc.

I don't normally purchase books, but I purchased this one.

I adored the first part, the second part, the last part, but the third part left me cold and confused and the fourth part, as you may have gathered thus far, is a collage of police response, political response, and personal responses to the hundreds of murders on the Mexico/US border.

I felt as though Bolano was trying to weave together his ability to write the personal narrative of a few characters, his ability to write almost fairy tale-like history, and an objective, raw account of reality. Instead of weaving them together, though, he placed them side-by-side, a sort of sampler plate of Bolano's abilities. It meant that most readers will most likely enjoy only some of the five sections.

His knowledge and perspective are astounding. The prose, when meant to be, is unique, intriguing, whimsical, or completely emotionless and succinct. Definitely written for a modern audience, as, unlike past authors, Bolano doesn't stretch anything beyond necessity, doesn't linger on any side story unless it's something the reader will inevitably feel to be vital. He keeps up a swift pace.

I recommend reading it. I recommend it for the pithy little quotations, for the little things that tie each part together, details from one clarifying mysteries from another, for the feeling that you're being taken on a crazy journey across multiple continents throughout the twentieth century, for the fact that you, as a reader, are bound to adore at least one of the five sections.

It's not perfect. We know that Bolano didn't have the opportunity to give it the time it deserved. But it's worth your time.

`2666` is a writers novel, best appreciated by academics (or so inclined) and other writers, often commenting on itself, the craft of writing and the creative process. For the average reader the ending lacks coherence, seemingly 900 pages of often depressing anecdotal tangents about death. It's a generous work in that regard, there are 100s of stories, within stories, most of them entertaining and worth reading, but characteristic of Bolano, they don't really "end" in any traditionally satisfying way - one doesn't read this novel to find out what happens - although paradoxically, mystery is what drives the book forward.

Bolano successfully breaks one of the basic rules of fiction writing - rather than showing what happens, he tells what happens, like a journalist. Thus he is able to say as much in one paragraph that others take in a chapter. Bolano says as much in 900 pages that might normally take 2500. He does not use line breaks and quotes for dialog (except in book 5), so there are often long blocks of text with no white space - it's a 900 page novel of high word count, but smooth reading. Ironically I never felt I was wasting my time, as if every detail mattered, even though I guess none of it did, all of it did.

The novel is certainly an investment of time and energy. I would recommend it to anyone interested in European avant-garde literature, Latin American literature, literature in translation and a sprawling kind of dreamy (strange) ambiguous work resistant to classification and open to interpretations.

According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?"

Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolaño, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolaño's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives."

Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolaño, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juárez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began.

With Bolaño, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolaño their first time they tried to pay attention:

"It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote."

His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and absence of quotations is a turn off) and the story itself is superb. If this was unfinished. If this novel was not how Bolaño envisioned or felt represented him, help us all what a complete "2666" would look like. Nevertheless, this is Bolaño's masterpiece. The hype is for real.

The three-volume paperback edition of Bolaño's masterpiece is a joy. Each of the volumes fits comfortably into the hand. Each has a quite different cover design, yet all three form an indisputable whole when boxed together. You might say the same about the book itself. At one stage, the author apparently thought of publishing his 900-page magnum opus as five separate novels or novellas, but his heirs decided to issue the book in one volume. This edition is a worthy compromise, respecting the unity of the whole while emphasizing Bolaño's amazing diversity.

The cover of the third volume, for instance, which contains the last section, "The Part about Archimboldi," is based on early 19th-century engravings of seaweeds, lucid and mysterious at the same time. And the book it contains is much the same: full of fascinating twists and turns, but sheer delight to read. The life story of a reclusive German novelist who takes the name of Benno von Archimboldi, it is a Bildungsroman with picaresque overtones, following the self-taught writer in love and war, through the rise and fall of the Third Reich and its numbing aftermath, into self-imposed isolation as his fame gradually grows. Although Bolaño is Spanish, and I was reading in English translation (superbly handled by Natasha Wimmer), I had no sense of anything secondhand, but rather that I was reading a German primary source from half a century ago.

The first of the paperback volumes has a darkly mysterious cover in the manner of Gustave Moreau. And indeed, each of the three parts that it contains is about a search for some veiled mystery. It opens with a richly humorous parody of academic life, as it traces the meetings and affairs of four academics, all Archimboldi specialists, none of whom have ever seen the master comic. Bolaño pulls out all the stylistic stops in this section; at one point, there is a single unstoppable sentence running unbroken for five pages. But that is the thing about Bolaño; even his least interesting bits have the ability to keep you turning the pages, following him through every twist of style and subject, even as he moves to the rather melancholy life of an Chilean philosophy professor exiled in Mexico in the second part, and the lowlife world of an African-American sports reporter in the third.

All of this converges in the middle volume, "The Part About the Crimes," which is based on a ten-year run of rape-murders of women that took place in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in the 1990s. The cover of this section is a series of almost random pencil scratchings, barely forming a pattern, and the book is like that too. Bolaño writes of crime in the furthest way possible from the typical mystery writer. Rather than concentrating on those cases that might lead to the apprehension of a serial killer, he gives the autopsy reports from every single woman murdered during this period, easily-solved cases mixed with the baffling ones, in mind-numbing detail. This 280-page section is the antidote to the eroticism of much of the rest of the book, and it is frankly difficult to get through. But it is also the part that poses the deepest questions about human nature.

Read the whole five-part cycle; it is magnificent. But don't expect it all to connect up by normal narrative means. Bolaño's world is full of loose ends, and he thrives on them. He can hardly see a by-road without following it to somewhere interesting, and often taking a detour off that road as well! But ideas and references crop up everywhere that link with something else. Bolaño's range is such that by the end of the book you feel you have explored a whole world. Something reminds you of something; was it in an earlier part of 2666 that you read it, or somewhere else entirely? Enter this labyrinth of wonders at your own risk; you may totally lose your bearings along the way, but you will emerge transformed.

I was really looking forward to reading "2666." Not only did this book make the 2008 top-10 list of just about every fiction critic in the country, but the book's ostensible subject matter, the unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican state of Sonora, certainly deserves serious literary attention. It took me two months to read, however, and while parts of it were interesting, even compelling, most of it was a slog, and there never comes a point at which it all came together in any way at all for me, let alone one that cried "genius."

I fully admit that Bolano is smarter and better-read than I am. So is Umberto Eco. But when Eco starts rattling off the names of other literary works, as he does with some frequency in, say, "Foucault's Pendulum," it always feels like it's relevant to the plot. In "2666," it feels like Bolano is just throwing out laundry lists of literature, philosophy, art, history, and even biology and math, solely to impress you with the depth and breadth of his knowledge. It may or may not relate to the plot, which isn't surprising, since there really isn't much of a plot. The five books that make up this volume are only loosely related, and even within the different books, there is not always much cohesion. Bolano will start out talking about one or more characters, but the minute he sees the literary equivalent of a shiny object, he runs off after it. While chasing said shiny object, he may see another shiny object and abandon the chase for the first one. At some point, he might remember what he was doing before he wandered off-course, but not always. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness with lots of accounts of people's dreams. If you don't mind rambling thoughts and "deep" philosophy that goes on for so long that when he does occasionally return to an early character you find yourself wondering who he's talking about, you might be enchanted. But if you need to have characters that you love or like, or even ones you hate, you're out of luck here.

As an example of the character problem, let's take Book 1, which focuses on four scholars who are obsessed with the works of an obscure German writer named Archimboldi. Three of the scholars are male, and all are in love with the one female scholar, although I was never sure why, since Bolano doesn't give her any traits that would seem to inspire that level of devotion. Two of the three men are completely interchangable -- other than the fact that one is Spanish and one is French, they might be the same person. Maybe that was the point, but if so, I missed it. The third one is Italian and in a wheelchair. Otherwise, he is just as sketchily drawn. I didn't like them, I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them and when their story suddenly ended, along with Book 1, never to be taken up again, I wondered why Bolano had wasted so much time with them.

Books 2 & 3 fare somewhat better, but Bolano can't stick with the interesting characters. I loved Book 3 when it dealt with Oscar Fate, a writer who gets roped into covering a boxing match in Sonora for his magazine when the sports writer dies, but first Oscar has to spend 75 pages or so with a formerly jailed black radical for no apparent reason. Then it's on to Mexico, where the raped/murdered women still rate barely a sentence background mention. We finally get to those women in Book 4. Boy do we get to them.

Book 4 is l...o...n...g and, as others have noted, filled with lots of gruesome and sad details about the girls & women who've been raped and murdered. At first I thought, "yes -- someone is giving these women an identity and a voice," but after awhile there are so many of them, and so little story to them, that you stop caring. Again, this could be the point. There are some interesting characters in this section, but there are so many people, it's hard to know who or what is important. Maybe none of it is. And when Bolano talks about how the American police profiler was always referred to at home in the U.S. by his young lawyer and doctor neighbors as Mr. ______, you doubt he even knows what he's talking about. Is anyone in your neighborhood under retirement age referred to by everyone else as Mr.? Bolano has clearly read a lot, but it feels like most of what he's writing about he learned in books, rather than by experience, and it creates a sense of distance that doesn't seem intentional but is off-putting nevertheless.

The final book is about Archimboldi's days as a strange, young German named Hans Reiter, but the story wanders all over Romania and Russia with a lot of divergences, most of them unconvincing. I kept waiting for Bolano to tie it all together, but he never did. Ultimately, the book seemed to be a portrait of despair and indifference, which was represented at its most perfect by Sonora.

As a final warning to potential readers, the middle three books are written without paragraphs, and sections often go on for pages. There is even a sentence at one point that is about 5 pages long. 900 pages is not actually that long a book, but those pages are extremely dense and the translation is grammatically awkward in places, making it slower-going still.

If you like rambling, philosophical musings, and don't mind characters, stories and events that just end whenever the writer gets tired of exploring them, you're not in a hurry when you read, and you don't mind reading being hard work, you might like this book. Certainly a lot of people did. I just wasn't one of them.

Roberto Bolaño was born about the same time as myself; he lived the life I was too chicken to live; wrote books far better than I could imagine; and died the death I have so far been spared. I feel no jealousy, just exhilaration: somebody of my generation made the hard choices and did what needed to be done. The flights of metaphor embedded within unpretentious workaday prose, the angry arrogance, the fury at what we all are and can become. 2666 hurts, a lot. It's also funny, very funny, funnier than almost anything else, but not funny enough to assuage the pain. If you want a novel to distract you from life, do not read 2666. If you want fiction to hurt you, to intensify and clarify the pain of being a member of a murderous species, read 2666.

As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).

Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).

This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.

The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.

I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.

Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.

I have never been compelled to write a review on amazon, until today, upon completing 2666. For those who have difficulty reading 'The Part About The Crimes' - which for me, induced nightmares - I'd like to offer a passage from the fifth section, 'The Part About Archimboldi', in which the Baroness reveals the artistic output of Conrad Halder:

"Occasionally news came of him, always preceded by some small scandal. His Berlin paintings were left in the care of my father, who didn't have the heart to burn them. Once I asked where he kept them. He wouldn't tell me. I asked him what they were like. My father looked at me and said they were just dead women. Portraits of my aunt? No, said my father, other women, all dead." (Bolano, 683)

This passage, among others within the fifth section, helped fashion my appreciation for Bolano's exacting description of death in Santa Teresa: death, upon death, upon death. Such deaths do occur, they have occurred, and their history must not be forgotten; moreover, work that attempts to examine such death, though some may find it 'degenerate' or displeasing, should not be hidden, buried, or burnt. As Entrescu offered, "culture [is] life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar." (Bolano, 683-684)

Although they may be unpleasant, devastating, and tremendously sad, even the most horrible moments in our history deserve remembrance through our culture, through our literature, through our art.

I hope Bolano's choice to recount the murders of Ciudad Juarez through Santa Teresa does not dissuade you from acquiring the novel or completing it. 2666 was wholly satisfying, often astounding; it deserves a second read. I cannot recall the last time I've been so enthralled by text, and I do hope you enjoy a similar experience.

It took me a very long time to get through this book. Usually I read one or two books a week, depending on the length. A 900 pager like this one, usually a solid week, unless I have a lot of free time, which I never have these days. If it's a very dense nonfiction or biography work, maybe two weeks. But it took me three months of on-and-off attention to get through 2666.

Normally, if I don't get into a book, I'll just put it aside and move on. Even if it's an author I really enjoy. 2666, however, was not like that. I'd read it for a day, put it aside for several weeks, and then get curious again and pick it back up. Slogging through the interminable Part Four, I almost gave up... but the prose was so strong, and I kept getting hints that it would all add up to something... so I kept going.

And now I have finally finished it. Looking back, I realize now that I read the first three parts of the book in about two weeks. Then Part Four took me two and half months. And the final Part Five I read over just the past week.

My main reason for reading 2666 is that it received awards out the ying yang (that's a technical, literary term, I'm told). It topped the National Book Critics Circle in 2008. Time Magazine gave it Best Book of 2008. It's been lauded by readers all over the world. And, just to add some icing to the cake, it was the final book by author Roberto Bolaño before his death. He apparently handed over the manuscript to his publisher while he lay dying in the hospital.

According to the introduction, Bolaño had intended the five parts of 2666 to be published as five separate novels, each a year apart. But after his death, his heirs decided to publish all five parts as one massive work, which they believed was more fitting to the manuscript.

So, I bought 2666 and dove in. The first thing I'll say is that I sure wish there was a Kindle version of this! 900 pages in hardcover is very heavy. Weighs almost four pounds. Not an easy book to read in bed, that's for sure. Just picking it up, I immediately understood why the author had intended it as five separate books.

Ok, all well and good. But what's the story about? Well... it's kind of hard to say. If judged by the amount of words and pages dedicated to plot, then it's the story of a series of murders in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (a thinly-veiled fictional version of Ciudad Juárez, near the Arizona border). Hundreds of young women are brutally raped and murdered there, in a decade-long series of unsolved crimes. Every part of the book briefly touches upon this storyline, and three of the book's five parts are set almost completely in Santa Teresa.

We follow a local University professor, as he moves in his own world, nearly oblivious to what is going on around him - included the danger than his teenage daughter puts herself in on a nightly basis (Part Two: The Part About Amalfitano). Why does the distracted instructor hang an out-of-print geometry book outside to sway on a clothesline, refusing to take it down for months?

We follow an African-American reporter, send to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, as he gets drawn into the circle of that city's underworld, and to people who may (or may not) share responsibility for many of the murders (Part Three: The Part About Fate).

And, for nearly three hundred pages, we follow the discovery of every single body over nearly ten years. In an episodic, non-narrative form, one after the other, date by date. Some of the victims are identified. Many aren't. Several people are arrested for some of the murders, including an odd German man who's a naturalized American citizen - but living in exile in Mexico (Part Four: The Part About The Crimes).

But if judged by what is at the heart of the book, what (at least to me) the real story is, then it's about a German novelist named Benno von Archimbaldi. In the opening pages, we meet four European academic literary critics, all of whom specialize in studying and critiquing the works of Archimbaldi, and each of them from a different country (Part One: The Part About The Critics).

And in the climatic last section, the book concludes with the life story of Archimbaldi, and we loop around to where we began (Part Five: The Part About Archimbaldi). The story of Archimbaldi and the people who study him is what got me hooked, and what kept me reading through the rest of the book.

It was Part Four that nearly lost me. This is the most difficult part of the book, mainly because there is no plot thread for this entire section. It really is just a narrated crime docket. A body is found, its condition is described, and various connections are followed up. We meet the many different police officers and detectives trying to solve the crimes. We meet many of the criminals. We follow one of the possible murderers into prison, and bear witness to an incredibly brutal torture-murder session as justice is served by prisoners on their own behind bars.

The only thing that kept me going was that I could see the table of contents promised that we'd finally get back to Archimbaldi after this horrific tour of Santa Teresa was over. I wish I could say that at the book's end, it all ties together - but not really. Yes, it's not surprising to find out there is a connection between Archimbaldi and the angry young German man who's the prime suspect in the murders - but I'm going to warn you right now that this is not the kind of book that ties things up.

By the end of the book, you do not know who's responsible for the murders. You don't know if the mysterious German man with the connection to Archimbaldi had anything to do with the murders or not. You will not get a conclusion to Archimbaldi's story. Nor will you ever see or hear from any of the critics again after Part One. Nor will you find out what happens to Fate or Amalfitano or any of the other characters. Part Five loops back to Part One, and I suppose you could just go right back to Part One and keep on reading the book forever if you wanted to. You still won't get any answers.

As a novel, 2666 is pretty unsatisfying. It's not a true novel, ignoring most storytelling conventions. Characters weave in and out, speaking and thinking in long, unbroken pseudo-paragraphs that go on for pages and pages. A lead character may stop in to rent a typewriter... and for the next ten pages, we jump into the point of the view of the storeowner, and hear his life story. He never appears again, and has no bearing on any part of the story. And we don't even get to the end of the scene that brought us there in the first place!

There are a great number of dreams in 2666. Everyone is always waking up and recounting a dream that is vivid and surrealistic... and yet not a single one, to my mind anyway, had anything to do with what was going on either in that character's life or anyone else's in the book. Another running theme is insanity - particularly any variety of insanity that involves making some sort of sacrifice for the sake of art.

So. Why read 2666 at all? Because what this book adds up to, when all is said and done, is a testament to the craft of writing. It's the prose that kept me turning the page. Despite the fact that this book is translated from the author's original Spanish, the words are beautifully crafted, even (and maybe even especially) when used to describe brutal or violent deaths.

I would not have awarded it such high honors as those listed up at the beginning of this review. To my mind, the novel as an art form and as entertainment has certain expectations, certain loose rules, and 2666 is simply too unstructured and rambling to fit even those loose rules. It's a collection of hundreds of incredibly well-written scenes, but just putting a bunch of scenes between two covers does not make something a novel. To me, that is the true art and craft of the novel: combining fantastic prose with well-conceived characters who act within a compelling story.

In the end, I can't overtly recommend 2666. It's a dense work. I suppose if you really truly enjoyed Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow, this will be right up your alley. For me, it was an interesting glimpse into another writer's mind, and I'm glad I made the trip - even if it was a trip which I have no desire to repeat. Your mileage, however, may vary.

And by the way - I don't have the slightest idea what the title means.

Maybe I just don't get this book. Like many, I bought this on the strength of the reviews, and it's the positive reviews that forced me to plow through this relatively incoherent mess.

It seems that most reviewers readily acknowledge that the book doesn't have much by way of plot. Fine, I'm a pretty highbrow sort of person. I watch PBS. I do the Sunday crossword. I'm willing to accept the premise that a great work of literature doesn't necessarily need a plot. I'm a fan of Beckett, for instance. I'm a grown-up, more or less. I don't have to get a rip-roaring tale from everything I read.

The great disappointment isn't just the plotlessness, it's that this book provided nothing much of anything else, either. There is not a single character to care about here. Not the critics, not Archimboldi, not the dead Mexicans, nobody. The prose, while definitely competent, is nowhere near as engaging as the author clearly thought it was. There are no grand ideas introduced. There is no new light shed on the human condition.

Maybe I'm supposed to delight in the wicked send-up of literary academia. Maybe the ossified ineptitude of the Mexican bureaucracy is supposed to raise my dander. Maybe the dispassionately related saga of Reiter cum Archiboldi is supposed to fill me with awe. Maybe it's something else that makes this the greatest book written since the dawn of time.

Whatever it is, I just don't get it. I did not enjoy this book. I did not grow as a result of reading it, except in the sense that whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Let the academics and posers wax lyrical over the merits of this book, such as they are. But if you're just, say, a typical college-educated person who loves books, move on. There's nothing to see here.