Since Roberto Bolaño’s premature death from liver disease in 2003, his name has spread like wildfire through the international literary community. Although he wrote much of his fiction during the last decade of his life, his reputation in America as a frighteningly prolific writer has been cemented by the rapid translation and publication of his two largest works during the the past year. Last year’s 577-page The Savage Detectives, originally published in Spanish in 1998, was his breakout hit, widely acclaimed as one of 2007′s best books. The eagerly anticipated follow-up, 2666, is out today as both a hardcover and a three-volume paperback, each edition totaling 898 pages.

Bolaño’s writing is nearly indescribable, a postmodern jumble of philosophy, pedagogy, and detective fiction. As in The Savage Detectives, the plot is loosely centered on the search for a mythic author by a band of admirers, whose quest takes them on an endless journey through an arid Mexican desert. But the novel is also a masterpiece of meta-literature, an epic of meanderings and ramblings in the vein of Julio Cortázar, while consciously rejecting the legacy of magical realism. 2666 is an analytical and vigorously difficult work, with multiple narrators, unsatisfying endings, and elaborate treatises. But it is also a celebration of the classic tropes of literature, and as such, it’s full of passion and humanity: a single father worries about his daughter during a wave of murders, journeying critics fall into a love triangle, the mythic writer turns out to be a disappointment.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith lays out “two paths for the novel,” one the lyrical realism of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Gabriel García Márquez, the other the avant-garde authenticism of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Wiliam Burroughs. She includes the following great authors in both schools: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, and Nabokov. Bolaño has earned his place among them.

2666 is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Image courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

KEYWORDS: books, literature, Roberto Bolano

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