In the porter's opinion, "Michael knows things the rest of us don't". The mysterious author may or may not be related to a series of sadistic killings in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, where an investigative journalist known as Fate has a curious conversation with a hotel clerk about Michael Jackson. It takes some force of will to make it through this sequence of five separate, tangentially linked novels, the recurring thread of which is the identity of a reclusive author named Benno von Archimboldi, whose impenetrable books have become cult objects among academics. The quality really varies, some of it is clearly unfinished or in draft form, and thus more interesting the completest rather than something you would want to pick up. In fact it concerns a pair of rival literary critics who find sex difficult, one of whom "could screw for six hours (without coming) thanks to his bibliography" while the other "finished half dead sheerly on the basis of strength and force of will". One last thing to note is that, after 2666 came out (which was posthumous) there was a bit of a Bolano boom, and a lot of stuff was released in Spanish, then English translation). T he posthumous appearance of BolaƱo's mammoth magnum opus caused one reviewer to proclaim that it "makes difficulty sexy".
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