2666

Product Description [*Translation into English by Natasha Wimmer] [Read by John Lee, Armando Duran, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick, Grover Gardner] Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book's subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death as it explores how humans make sense of senseless events. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, writers and cops, pursuing their own separate yet interrelated quests for meaning: an enigmatic Prussian novelist who disappears from the public eye after the death of his lover; a group of literary critics who bond through their shared love of the novelist's works; an African American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat in the wake of his mother's death; and a Spanish professor and widowed father whose mind is beginning to lose its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juarez on the US-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved. Review ''This winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction is the master work from one of the greatest and most influential modern writers.'' --James Wood, New York Times Book Review About the Author ROBERTO BOLANO was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. From AudioFile Roberto Bolaño's surrealist magnum opus, set in Europe and South America, is divided into five books, each read here by a different narrator, each in his way extraordinary. John Lee is especially subtle with accents, Armando Duran brings his mostly Spanish-flavored section to vivid life, G. Valmont Thomas lends The Part About Fate a deadpan humor, and Grover Gardner gives the saga of the writer Benno von Archimboldi a compelling pace. Scott Brick takes a risk that might have worked but doesn't: presumably to convey the mythic and irrational nature of his part, about horrifying serial rape-murders in Mexico, he tries a singsong narration as if he were reciting an epic poem. A smart idea, but tiresome to listen to. His characters' voices are outstanding, though. B.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine