2666 poll

I should be finished this tomorrow, less than 100 pages to go. Part with Archimboldi is the best. My favourite digression in the book is the one about Ansky's notebook.

man this book is so good i feel like just straight up readin it again

I keep thinking about it. The last part is great, amazing reallyread by itself, (and Ansky's notebook IS a great digression, of which there are many), but I think The Part About the Crimes is the best, and has the novel's climactic moment. The fifth is basically anti-climax. (And, did anyone else sense a falling off in the fifth book, in the last 30 pages or so?)

Finished. I think I've taken 4 months to read that, even though I really enjoyed it and probably rank it as the best novel written in at least a decade, and definitely the best written by a Spanish language author who was born after 1950. I just have a really short attention span and have read four novels, a biography, a book of history and the majority of Gravity's Rainbow (which I'll start finishing later today) while reading this.

I thought the part with the crimes was good, and crucial to the book. The horror and the repetition really need to be in there to make the novel work. However I just really enjoyed the part about Archimboldi more, although yes, I would say the end part with Lotte is maybe not the best part of the book and serves more to tie things up than to really add much.

Another favourite bit of the last part was the guy who rents him the typewriter and his talk about minor and major works. Also interesting was earlier on in the book Amalfitano's talk of the prestige of shorter works going up while the magnum opuses are neglected. What a great book!

Now going to have to try and track down his other books in Spanish on abebooks or something, have only read the Savage Detectives so far.

haha ok how many people posted on this thread and forgot to vote

i do this all time including probably this poll.

jim fwiw while i loved savage detectives like crazy and deeply enjoyed 2666 i havent really felt his other stuff and by other stuff i guess i mean by night in chile and some of the stories from last night on earth. the metafictive stuff is there but the characters and stories are less compelling i think theyre kind of sloppy too.

damn, see, I was slightly worried about that. Like I've read what are considered almost unanimously the two best works and anything else I had worried would be anti-climax.

Quite saddened that By Night in Chile wasn't called "Storms of shit" as Bolano originally planned.

stoked, shd have my copy tomorrow :DD

not sure how i feel about this

The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666.

why feel bad??? if its terrible or boring than its terrible and boring wont change the fact that o.g. 2666 is fukkin dope just means more 2 read

i guess he means bolano prob never wanted it published

yeah true, bit i'd like to know a little more about why it wasn't included in the first place.

xp

not to rehash the same arguments from the dfw thread (where i definitely came down on the side of "publish that shit", btw), but this seems like a different situation.

ha r u guyz arguing about the nyer article? we talked abt it a little on ilc

i guess i generally just feel like its better than all those 19th c. dudes who had their letters and unfinished work and w/e else burned in a fyre by scandalized siblings. even publishing this 6th part is just a shamless cash grab from macmillan and co. better it has a lyfe than not

its also weird to me like if someone writes something bad now everything is bad its not like ppl wont understand this isnt nec how bolano envisioned things

i can sympathize w/ writers like john d and mr que about not wanting their shit published when they dye but as an unpublished wannabe 23 yr old writer w/ a ridic amnt of unfinished shit on my computer--yall can publish it if i die, please do, it wd feel nice, to know that someone wanted to publish, my writing

that comes 4rom the hart

i can sympathize but in the end ur dead and im not so i think publish w/e fsg will publish and sb u on the other side

i am really interested to see what the hell a 6th part would be about so chalk all this up 2 that

pls publish my twitter when i am dead thx

ghost twitter

i sort of hope the 6th part is a myth dreamed up as some kind of next-level art/promotion device btw bolano and his agents cuz having the book have this missing empty ending that no one will ever read would be more 2666 than 2666 itself

este huevón.

Random question - does anyone have any idea what font is used for the title on the book cover?

Still haven't gotten past "The Part About Archimboldi." Must. press. forward.

Wait - isn't that the last part?

First part, I thought. The book begins by focusing on the Archimboldi scholars.

Or maybe that's the part about the critics?

thats the part abt the critics

Makes sense. I haven't gotten past that part yet, is what I meant.

By all means, keep going. And then, in the event that you get stuck for a bit during The Part About the Crimes, keep going through that, too. It's worth it.

But yeah, what font is that?

I abandoned this book somewhere in the middle of The Part About the Crimes about a month ago. I keep meaning to pick it up again but it's pretty grueling stuff.

"And then, in the event that you get stuck for a bit during The Part About the Crimes, keep going through that, too. It's worth it"

in retrospective,after reading through it, my advice to Number None and Daniel is the opposite.
don't let this over long part disturb yr reading, skip it if you get tired, it's not getting anywhere till the end of that part.

Which font - the US version or the UK version?

Heh - good question... I'm an American who lives in the UK, and the book was a gift. I've not paid close enough attention to which version I have. Looks like this, though:

http://bookfinds.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/2666.jpg

Bolano's name is in Facade MT Condensed: http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=205963

The '2666' isn't done with a normal font--it's scanned from an old woodcut typeface: the designer says, "Ideally, I didn't want to use a digital typeface, so I was pleased to discover the woodcut face that eventually made its' way onto the final designs." ; http://www.faceoutbooks.com/#13855/2666

Hope that helps!

Bought this back at the end of December last year (back when it was still being published in a three volume box set), but life and other books and insane work hours conspired to get in the way. Finally had time to take it down off my shelf last week and I just finished The Part About the Critics. Blown away thus far.

By all means, keep going.

I will. In fact, I'll turn back to 2666 right after I'm done with Nixon: Alone In The White House.

James, that's incredibly helpful - thank you very much. Great stuff at that link!

Finished The Part About the Crimes a week or two ago, needed to take a break for a bit. Started The Part About Archamboldi this afternoon. That was friggin' intense.

Has anyone re-read this yet? It's tempting me, but my queue of unread books wants to get in the way.

Has anyone re-read this yet? It's tempting me, but my queue of unread books wants to get in the way.

Having just finished it, I already want to if only to try and get a handle on the whole, but I have too many other books that I've ignored while ploughing through this the first time. Perhaps in a month or two.

Oh, and Part V, despite the rushed ending, is probably my favourite, followed by Part I - I'm never clear if his intentions in Part I are to lampoon or sympathize with his characters, whereas the rest of the book is filled with people understood without condescension or irony (or at the very least described with a clearer measure of affection). Part II and III have faded for me - both seem slighter, somehow, but perhaps a return to them will reveal depths that I missed initially.

i voted pt. v. it was definitely the most old-school literary section of the novel, meaning it read like it could have been written in the '40s or '50s (maybe because of all the WWII stuff) but i don't know, i enjoyed it the most and archimboldi was the best character and i'm glad he made some effort to tie things together somewhat

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, January 12, 2009 11:16 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

pt. III was the worst, a lot of it seemed awkward and false and fate never really resonated as a character

n/a and I always agree on books.

I thought it was a mess.

i hadn't noticed that A,LS. we disagree a lot on music and movies and other things so that's interesting.

Your David Mitchell recs were spot-on, and I agree with just about everything you've posted about him.

My rankings:

5
1
4
3
2 (I really thought this was the most expendable)

He could have folded a lot of the Amaltifano material into asides and digressions in Pts 1 and 3 imo.

most expendable but also one of my favorites

everybody hates 4, and finds it hard to read, and right on with that, but I feel like it's a kind of apotheosis of something

*checks to make sure that word is being used correctly*

the scene at the very end of pt 3 thru pt 4 was my favorite. I'm a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me gave me chills

then pt 4 with its information overload of murders really made me feel like i was lost in a burned forest

i dont think i disliked any individual part, it was more that there were parts that read & you really got into it & then it slows down & feels more laborious, but all the parts had essential moments to the degree that i cant really space them out like that ... it feels like 50 different patchy memories thrown together

i mean that in a good, not entirely unorganized way

everybody hates 4, and finds it hard to read

crazy talk