2666: a critical odyssey

So it looks like the fat advance copies of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 in English translation have begun arriving in reviewers' mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how this book is received, after the gush of critical (and reader) enthusiasm for The Savage Detectives last year. My opinion, which goes against the opinion of many writers and critics (such as pioneering Bolaño booster Francisco Goldman), is that The Savage Detectives is the better work, more satisfying, less self-conscious, more fun, more a book that will outlast whatever hype becomes attached to it. And I think The Savage Detectives is a deeper book in the end though the themes of 2666 would seem perhaps to carry more ballast: death and evil.

I wrote about Bolaño for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2004, the year after Bolaño's death, and the review/essay was finally published on the cover of the Lit supplement in early 2005. I wouldn't add much more to my appraisal of Bolaño, except maybe a more detailed analysis of The Savage Detectives and how it fits into the context I lay out in that essay.

Scott Esposito also has an essay in Hermano Cerdo about Bolaño hype, his slight embarrassment over it, and what it might say about Bolaño's future place in the English-language literary marketplace (read: "world" literature canon).