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Shop now2666
A Novel
Translator
Natasha Wimmer
Length
39 hours 15 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
various narrators, John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick & Grover Gardner
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreComposed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book’s subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death as it explores how humans make sense of senseless events. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, writers and cops, pursuing their own separate yet interrelated quests for meaning: an enigmatic Prussian novelist who disappears from the public eye after the death of his lover; a group of literary critics who bond through their shared love of the novelist’s works; an African American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat in the wake of his mother’s death; and a Spanish professor and widowed father whose mind is beginning to lose its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juárez on the US-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved.
Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, France, and Spain. He has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” and as “the real thing and the rarest” by Susan Sontag. Among his many prizes are the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Bolaño is widely considered the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry before his death at the age of fifty.
John Lee, is a stage actor, writer, and a coproducer of feature films. An AudioFile Golden Voice narrator, he is the winner of numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
G. Valmont Thomas, a longtime member of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has also been a faculty member at the Johnny Carson School of Film and Television at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His voice may also be heard in a number of video games and in advertisements for radio and television.
Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.” He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbert’s bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weekly’s Narrator of the Year.
Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year."
Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and New York Times. Her translation of his 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.
Reviews
“Bolano’s masterwork…An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force.”
“This surreal novel can’t be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory.”
“A display of novelistic mastery and as devastating a reading experience as you are likely ever to encounter.”
“Every scene is powerful and realistic; yet the overall effect is hallucinatory and dreamlike.”
“Think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp, and the Bob Dylan of ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers.”
“Should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist…Bolaño has joined the immortals.”
“Bolaño’s true masterpiece…He writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane.”
“Bolaño grabs us by the scruff of the neck and pushes our heads into the abyss. For Bolaño, the year 2666 is the symbolic culmination of humanity’s neglect and violence, a state of being that has become our modus operandi…That, Bolaño suggests, is where it all starts: at the very spot where we stop paying attention and slip into deadened stasis.”
“[2666] is divided into five books, each read here by a different narrator, each in his way extraordinary. John Lee is especially subtle with accents, Armando Durán brings his mostly Spanish-flavored section to vivid life, G. Valmont Thomas lends ‘The Part about Fate’ a deadpan humor, and Grover Gardner gives the saga of the writer Benno von Archimboldi a compelling pace. Scott Brick[’s] characters’ voices are outstanding.”
“It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.”
“One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time.”
“The book explores evil with irony, without any theory or resolution, relying on storytelling alone as its saving grace…Each story is an adventure: a fresco at once horrifying, delicate, grotesque, redundant, and absurd, revealed by the flashlight of a child who stands at the threshold of a cave he will never leave.”
“On every page the reader marvels, hypnotized, at the capacity of this baroque writer to encompass all literary genres in a single fascinating, enigmatic story…It is a fully realized work by a pure genius at the height of his powers.”
“[A] work of huge importance…a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out.”
“To say that 2666 is a novel is like calling a Beethoven symphony a collection of songs. If we must, though, this novel in five parts is without doubt Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork, epic in scope, labyrinthine, frustrating, disjointed, maybe a bit pretentious, always somewhat aloof—and brilliant.”
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