A review by jonathanelias
2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Did not finish book.
Bis S200 gearbeitet. Ein echter Genuss kam aber nicht auf. Der Stil hat mich keine Nähe zu den Protagonisten aufbauen lassen, sie waren mir egal. Das Sujet ist auch irgendwie 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️. Diverse Tangenten und Nebencharaktere für die man genau so wenig Interesse aufbringt. 
Rezension (Kehlmann) sagten vorraus, dass Teil 2/3/5 noch deutliche Längen hätten. 
Eine Abgrenzung zu Knausgard: da geht es um Gefühle, echtes Leben, das ich mit meinem in Verbindung setzen kann. 
Suche nach Expression meiner Gedanken in Goodreads: 
Instead of being the epitome of the art of the novel or its salvation, 2666 is, for me, an ambitious attempt at greatness that fails. It represents also the failure of literary critics to recognize the difference between great literature, mediocre literature in the shape of great literature, and pretentions to greatness that are bolstered by a romantic life and an early death. Typically, a good novel will have an interesting plot, significant character development, or thematic or political significance. 2666, though, lacks all of these things. It has a merely perfunctory plot, a total lack of character development as characters remain flat and distant and conme and go with no fanfare, and any central theme or political significance is deeply buried within the overwhelming level of detail. Even more, a good novel is one that does something: creates an emotional response in the reader, teaches something, illuminates an issue or makes a political statement. This novel does none of those things. My primary problem, though, is that this a novel with no joy in it. The characters are all deadened and distant, lacking connection with others and satisfaction with their lives; the plot, such as it is, focuses on rape and murder, lost people, and war; and the style consistently holds the reader at arm's length from all of this. This joylessness seems to be intentional, but that doesn't make it any more pleasurable, interesting, or rewarding to read. 

Yet the first thing one notices about Bolaño is that his writing, at least the surface of his writing, is rather unimpressive. He clearly does not excel (or at least chooses not to excel) at the kind of fine prose studded with shimmering visual specificities, aback-taking turns of phrase, and vital figurative language that is the stock in trade of many contemporary novelists. Samuel Johnson said: “Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” It is unlikely that Bolaño ever had to go to such trouble. His books often read as though writing them was the third most important thing he had to do that day: “For five seconds, his hair stood on end”; “a dark cloud seemed to be looming over us day and night”; “The critics’ hearts leapt at his words.” Bolaño writes as if Flaubert had never suffered his passion of style; his characteristic register is almost pre-modern—loose, rambling, digressive, choked with redundancy and solecism, and always ready to tell the mot juste exactly what it thinks of it. 
... 
For Bolaño, however, failure is not only a theme: it is a modus operandi. In this respect, 2666 is the culmination of Bolaño’s career, as so many have claimed. It doesn’t so much “transcend” the novel form as deny or reject it. Rounded personalities, incidents, evocative description: Bolaño seems to have no use for them. Samuel Beckett, the original laureate of failure, needed only a few pages of dialogue or prose to suggest an infinity of excruciating boredom; Bolaño chooses to actually subject us to that boredom, for 900 pages. This epic minimalism is a dubious enterprise. One result is that the book runs the risk of being boring, formless, and ugly, a risk that, to my mind, it does not altogether skirt. I didn’t exactly hate 2666, but I often got the feeling that 2666 wasn’t so fond of me 
... 
By contrast, 2666 is a desert of negative space covered with smudges and chaotic scrawls. What the critics come to realize about Archimboldi in Part One—that he “was always far away” and that “the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers”—is true of everyone in the book. Characters are sketched briskly, impatiently, with few if any telling details, as though Bolaño is simply getting a formality out of the way. After all, why waste time and effort on a person who most likely will disappear in a few pages? This, at least, is often how reading the book feels: that Bolaño is conducting an experiment in how much he can remove of what is usually considered fiction’s principal pleasure—getting to know imaginary characters—without driving us away 
... 
The same goes for the prose, which is consistently underwhelming. Even if we grant that Bolaño is writing badly on purpose—that his bland, imprecise, unnuanced prose is a deliberate rebuke to the supposedly pampered, artificial beautification of a more conventionally literary style, and should therefore be viewed as one more facet of his general skepticism about the ability of art to encompass and faithfully reproduce the world in language—the fact remains that 900 pages of it can be numbing. “In literature,” said Henry James, “we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it.” What James blesses, Bolaño damns: his style ensures that we know little beyond our own ignorance, that his locales lack all plausible density, that everything seems always far away. Again and again it seems that there is little happening both on the surface of the writing, in the texture of the prose, and “behind” the writing, in the minds of the characters.