EoFF Monthly Book Club - Book Suggestions

[The Man]

Title: 2666
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Genre: Hyper-realist fiction
Synopsis/reasoning: A collection of five thematically related stories that converge around the still unsolved murders of hundreds of female factory workers in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (here represented as Santa Teresa). Clearly intended as Bolaño's magnum opus, this posthumously published work manages to be the most fitting commentary I've found on the state of humanity in the post-9/11 era to date, comparable to the masterworks of authors such as Borges and Pynchon (who are honestly the only two major stylistic predecessors I can even name). As befitting a Bolaño work, there's also quite a lot of reflection on the nature of literature (several major characters are either authors or literary critics). When the English translation came out in 2008 it was named by a number of publications (including Time magazine) as the best novel released that year, and while I still haven't read a number of the other major contenders for that honour, I'm having a hard time imagining anything being better than it. Not exactly light reading though.

Here's the book's entry at The Complete Review. Some of the most insightful reviews linked there come from the Financial Times, Time, and the New York Review of Books.