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Rumpus Book ClubNational Reading 2666 Month
In perhaps the greatest blog idea of all time, The New Yorker has declared January National Reading 2666 Month. They’re posting a daily group blog and also publishing letters from readers also in the midst Bolano’s thousand-page-plus opus. Here’s what one reader had to say:
Bolaño is a poet more than a novelist. He deals in open-ended images, one after another after another after another, their weight burying us in “2666” with dark meaning…well, some sort of dark meaning…yes, there has to be a meaning to all of this…there has to, but…what? I’ve read review after review of this novel that praise it to the heavens but haven’t yet found a critic who can say what this novel means. It’s as though Bolaño wanted people to labor over it, to praise it, to parse it, to cite it, to puzzle it, and for what end? So we can say we believe we know what it’s about?
Read more at The New Yorker book blog.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:09 am
I agree, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the novel is gigantically wonderful.