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With as much creative energy as Joyce’s Ulysses, and with as much history and depth as Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Bolano’s magnum opus is a bold statement against literature itself. However, with such a book comes all the tedium you would expect from Moby Dick. As a result, this book will only be truly great for a small selection of very patient readers.

Now let me unpack that a little. 2666 is a book about masterpieces; it is a book about writing books that don’t quite fit literary conventions. As readers, we like to slot books into nice and neat little categories that help us to understand what the book is. This isn’t one of those books. This is wild and untamed; it’s erratic and random and full of passion and life and death and tedium. 2666 is a book that dares to be different; it’s a book that dares to challenge the literary cannon, and it puts up an incredibly strong fight against normality.

And within it there are moments of real beauty and there are also moments of absolute abject horror. There are also some moments that boarder on the pornographic as the characters are filled with desire because they are so completely detached from the world and everyone it it so they scream out to be loved and to be close to someone, even if it is just for a few hours. It’s a novel that is politically charged and angry. It’s absolutely loaded with themes and motifs and it’s asking to be pulled apart and analysed, but it’s also terribly dull. It’s boring to read. It’s repetitive and it’s detached and it’s cynical and it’s just a real slog.

And there’s the rub: I really don’t think may readers will be able to read this from cover to cover, and those that do will find very little joy within its pages.

It’s not a pleasant book to read. It’s a book that graphically details the rape of 112 women with scrutinising facts. This section of the novel is like a police report, cold and almost like a documentary, as it navigates case after case of brutal murders and rapes. We even learn what type of rape it was and in what fashion it was committed. We learn how many rapists were involved and the quantity of semen left in and on the victim. All in all, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve read and at several points I did question why I was actually bothering to read it. What’s the point in putting yourself through such a painful experience? What is this book giving me?

And this raises another question the novel discusses: why do we read? What are we trying to get out of it? One of the novel’s five sections is a demonstration that we will never truly find the author in the books we read. They are illusive, and any attempts of pursing them will be in vain. Distance is the key. Bolano attempts to alienate the reader, as he frustrates him time and time again with countless character disappearances and a complete lack of narrative closure. It’s certainly not a book that was meant to be comfortable to read or one that takes you on a journey. The characters are flat and never grow. The plot is a mess.

Some critics have called this a feminist texts because of the way it criticises a culture that allows for the rape of women in such a causal way. Some call it political because it criticises a world that allows such atrocities to happen. But I call it an oddity, a book that dares to be different and to say things in a very different way. And I am so torn on my opinion of it, I haven’t struggled to rate a book this much since I read Ulysses (which I left unrated). I want to praise this book, and I also want to forget it's existence.

I suppose three stars will do for this insightful, intelligent and acute novel that left me bored, angry and depressed.

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