2666

I feel cheated - after laboring through almost 900 pages of weird, unnecessarily repeating descriptions and episodes not needed neither for the story nor for the character's development, I thought a reader deserves the conclusion by the end of the book. Instead, each of the five parts started with a different plot and new characters. Just as the reader gets used to it, the story would end with plot-lines left tangled and resolution nowhere on the horizon. When the same happened with the last part I wanted to hurl the book against the wall.
It almost feels like Bolano died before he could finish the book. If the book was supposed to be about the killing of women in the Mexican town of Santa Teresa, the endless list of the victims served more to annoy the reader than to illustrate how numerous the victims were and how inept the police was (which, I suppose, was the author's intention). Even so, the killings are barely touched in some parts of the book, and grossly overdone in the part about them.
If the story was supposed to be about the German author Archimboldi, we got an expansive history of his youth through the WW2, but precious little to learn why he was a reclusive individual he turned to be. His ties to the Mexican murders are worked into the book almost as an afterthought.
I am not sure how much was lost in translation from Spanish, but wish I never undertook this journey.