2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Picador £8.99, 898 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19

Lofty accolades were heaped on Bolaño’s posthumously published five-part novel.

The opening book recounts the literary and sexual jousting of four European academics whose search for their reclusive hero, the German writer Archimboldi, leads to the sprawling US/Mexican border city of Santa Teresa. A professor uncertain of his own sanity, and a Harlem journalist sent there to cover a boxing match, occupy books two and three. In the fourth, 200-odd cases of women viciously murdered in Santa Teresa are flatly recorded, redeemed by precious little psychological depth or narrative tension.

Only the final book, a compelling mittel-European picaresque of Archimboldi’s rise from Prussian peasant to an author sought by the Nobel committee, brings out Bolaño’s gift for intense, erotically charged encounters, subtly nuanced relationships and assured, complex plotting.