This morn­ing I expressed hes­i­ta­tion about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 on account of my expe­ri­ence with The Savage Detec­tives. This after­noon, Wyatt Mason laid those wor­ries to rest:

There are many ways of explain­ing the sudden, stratos­pheric pop­u­lar­ity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. At his essence he was a writer who was always think­ing of new ways to use fic­tion, attempt­ing to get things across to a reader who has seen it all. Bolaño him­self was such a reader, and his books cun­ningly incor­po­rate that aware­ness of fic­tion with­out turn­ing the enter­prise too ter­ri­bly self-​conscious (I would argue that The Savage Detec­tives courts, and some­times is over­come by, a preen­ing lit­er­ary self-​consciousness that leaches life from the enter­prise it’s trying so vig­or­ously to stim­u­late, but that’s a 5,000 word con­ver­sa­tion for another day). 2666, how­ever (as in his per­fect By Night in Chile), evades that tendency.