Book Of The Week - 2666 by Roberto Bolañol

The choice for this week is 2666 (2004) and was the last novel written by Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolaño.

Depicting the unsolved and still ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juarez (Santa Teresa in the novel), the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers, the apocalyptic 2666 explores 20th century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories, influenced by the imagery and surrealist imagination of Arcimboldo's paintings.

The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes", and within the novel "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book's title, a date that is referred to in passing in Amulet as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."