This five-part mega-novel has as its thematic centerpiece the sexual crimes against women in the city he calls Santa Theresa. Not only is the posthumously published, nine-hundred-page, relentlessly brutal and apocalyptic 2666, which came out in November in a wonderful English translation by Natasha Wimmer, the great Juárez novel I dreamed about, but it is one of the great “everything” novels that a writer fantasizes about someday having the fortitude to pull off.

Fortunately for me, the late Chilean au thor Roberto Bolaño beat me to it. But I was convinced that writers, even unpublished ones, should dream on large, improbable canvasses, if only for the thrill of risk-taking. I was aware of the immense, even ludicrous challenges I had set for myself as a young, unpublished writer who doesn’t speak Spanish. The more I read about the city, the more my conviction grew: I would one day write a novel about Juárez. As with the photographs, Bowden’s furious, poetic words seemed to both denounce and exalt the paradoxes that make the city so fascinating. With savage grace, he lays bare the grisly mechanisms of a city notorious for drug-cartel violence, grinding poverty, rampant political and police corruption, and the largely unsolved sexual homicides of hundreds of women, most of them poorly paid factory workers. Bowden’s gritty tales of cardboard slums, malnourished rag-pickers and narco executions, all accompanied by photographs of murdered men and women, were impossible to forget. – SEįour years ago, I came up with an idea for my first novel after reading Charles Bowden’s Juárez: Laboratory of The Future, a hair-raising chronicle of the American journalist’s experiences in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez. Today seemed like a good day to bring it back. In the porter's opinion, 'Michael knows things the rest of us don't'.Prior to launching The Rumpus, during our test phase, we ran this incredible, thorough, and thoughtful review of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 by Michael Berger.

The mysterious author may or may not be related to a series of sadistic killings in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, where an investigative journalist known as Fate has a curious conversation with a hotel clerk about Michael Jackson. It takes some force of will to make it through this sequence of five separate, tangentially linked novels, the recurring thread of which is the identity of a reclusive author named Benno von Archimboldi, whose impenetrable books have become cult objects among academics. In fact it concerns a pair of rival literary critics who find sex difficult, one of whom 'could screw for six hours (without coming) thanks to his bibliography' while the other 'finished half dead sheerly on the basis of strength and force of will'. T he posthumous appearance of Bolaño's mammoth magnum opus caused one reviewer to proclaim that it 'makes difficulty sexy'.

Bolano 2666