Pick one, /lit/.

>>9974584
I just finished The Savage Detectives. Is 2666 any better?

>>9974623
It's very, very different from basically anything else Bolaño wrote. It has some recurring themes from him in the first 200 pages, but becomes pretty different afterwards.

And yeah, I do think 2666 is better. I assume you didn't like TSD?

>>9974628
I thought it was just ok. The second portion felt thrown together in a few parts. A lot of the interviews felt like they were all written by Bolaño at the same time. Others, right in the middle, felt like they were added on later to add depth.

Also it felt like part 1 was almost kind of unnecessary, after finishing the whole thing (which is funny, because that was my favorite part). It just didn't contribute to the incomplete picture painted in the following two sections.

>>9974656
I pretty much feel the same, although I wouldn't exactly call Part 1 unnecesary. I think you might really like 2666 if you thought TSD was okay tho. It really is Bolaño's magnum opus.

>>9974683
Alright, I'll add it to my list. Thanks, Anon!

>>9974584
The Savage Detectives any day.
The second part is the best thing Bolaño ever wrote.

>>9974902
Curious what you liked about the second part so much

>>9974584
Is it true that 2666 was a first draft? I'm gonna read next it summer.

I hope 2666 is better, I'm about halfway through The Savage Detectives right now and it's really gone downhill since we stopped following Garcia Madero chase poon

>>9975408
From a formal and structural standpoint, it's the most interesting thing Bolaño ever wrote (perhaps excluding his more Borgian outbursts like Sensini).

For me the second parts is masterful in that we are following the two protagonist through a retelling of second hand accounts. We glimpse the lives of Belano and Lima through multiple unconnected anecdotes and (mis)adventures. Each of them is told by a different narrator with a distinct voice and idiolect of Spanish, and then has been recopilated by an anonimous interviewer (who is not Bolaño himself, so there's yet another layer there). Our heroes appear as shadows, spectres, they are almost anti-protagonists. We can never look at them directly, for they always appear in third person and their experiences are mere reflexes or shadows of the original experiences. The whole second part is a fucgue towards their death.

The accounts are disjointed and sparse, so we can never get the full picture. Of course the whole book is a play on Rayuela so the reader is always playing a huge part on it (IMO this is also the point of the pictograms). What we imagine and make of these re-retellings is as important as what is written. The accounts become more and more sparse until our heroes finally die. We see them flicker until they finally disappear and are presumably forgotten despite the efforts of the interviewer.

>>9975413
2666 was written in a rush when Bolaño realised he was about to die so he probably had no time to rewrite and finish it as well as he would have liked. While no doubt it could have been improved upon, I don't think this detracts from its value at all. Also, in the words of Bolaño:

>He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all.

TL;DR: Read it, faggot.

Savage Detectives, the second part is a masterpiece.

>>9974584
2666, but I also enjoy Bolaño's novellas

>>9974584
Neither, Roberto Bolano is a DFW for beaners.

>>9976321
Interesting... The dialects are COMPLETELY lost in the English translation.

Also, Bolano and Lima don't die at the end of the second part. It's implied that Arturo is heading off to a mortally dangerous area and has had reckless wishes to die, but it's left beautifully open. And Ulises Lima isn't dead by the end, is he? Now that I'm thinking about it, and I just finished the book a week ago, I don't remember what happened to him...

>>9978500
>And Ulises Lima isn't dead by the end, is he?
No, but now that i think about it, it woulld have been very eerie. Mario Santiago, on whom Ulisses Lima is based (and Bolaño's best friend) died shortly before the publication of TSD. Bolaño hadn't talked to him in a long time, so there was no way he could have predicted his death.

>>9978500
>Ulises Lima isn't dead by the end, is he?
My bad, you are right, I read it a long time ago. Last thing I remember is that he came back to Chile and met with Octavio Paz, but I don't remember what else happened to him afterwards

>>9974656
The incompleteness of some sections only adds to it. Think of the novel as partially based in the oral tradition, it might give you a different take on the sections you disliked.

>>9980004
>Think of the novel as partially based in the oral tradition
What does that even mean

>>9980539
Is this bait?