I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano recently, courtesy of my South American colleague, who introduced him to me. A longtime fan of the previous generation of Latin American writers (Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig, etc.), I jumped at the chance to familiarize myself with the latest superstar of L.Am. fiction. Bolano is certainly not writing classic magical realism, but the gritty and at the same time transcendent prose he writes is another kind of realism of great power. 2666 is an exhausting 900-page journey in which the reader is frequently lost or at least drawn down baffling but beautiful or horrible alleys. The journey doesn't have an obvious ending but is ripe with potential endings. The book was discovered and published posthumously in 2008 and consists of five parts, which could stand alone very well as shorter books and are tenuously related. At the center of the book is the mysterious German writer Benno von Archimboldi, who is tracked by his academic fans (maybe) to the squalor of "Santa Teresa", thinly-disguised border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Central to this location is a series of unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women. The book is intense and horrifying but contains moments of tremendous beauty. I highly recommend reading the review of the book by Jonathan Lethem below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
