RaveThe Boston GlobeReviewing Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is like reviewing the ocean. To call it a thing of nearly unfathomable breadth elides the intimacy of experiencing it; to focus on the relentless, pounding rhythm of its violence does no justice to its shimmering beauty ... Each of the five parts of 2666 is written in a distinct style ...offbeat quests of literary figures are a staple of Bolaño's fiction... Reams of information and anecdote swirl toward the black hole at the novel's center, knowable only by the force of its gravity ... Everywhere in Bolaño's work, there is an unquantifiable precision to the absurdity; when a character insists that she believes in the existence of nothing except storms and Aztecs, the declaration makes sublime sense even before the explanation comes ...a work of devastating power and complexity, a final statement worthy of a master.
PositiveThe Boston GlobeBoth narrative voices are superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight even when the material turns dramatic … If Oscar is not the first ‘ghetto nerd,’ he is one of the most vividly rendered, and Díaz does a masterful job of using Oscar's referential palette - from Tolkien's Middle-earth to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Marvel Universe - to illuminate the absurdity and horror of life under Trujillo and the daily strain of American marginality … Díaz's narrator can switch from arch, romantic prose to flippant slang, from English to Spanish, from manga to In the Time of the Butterflies. Some readers will find this level of democracy unrealistic - particularly once the novel's main narrator is revealed to be a college professor - not realizing that this kind of gleeful cross-stitching is a hallmark of hip-hop-generation fiction.