This book was a slog at times, but it's a marvelous and engaging read if you're excited about your own madness and depression.

Bolaño himself seems mad, weaving stories that are connected to one another by confusion, fear, frustration and sexual violence.

It's a "macho" book—the reader is invited to celebrate men's sexual violence and capacity for masochism (embodied in the form of a redeemed banality of Naziism), but an immense catalog of brutal rapes and murders also numbs you to the supposed thrills. (and kept me, at least, up at night)

Literary, highly-academic (though I reckon also enjoyable by non-academics), and powerful.

Recommended for Latin Americanists, Comp Lit majors, Sadomasochists, Historians and whodunit fans.

Read by Armando Durán.
Brilliant narrator.
Loved the The first part of The Part About Almafitano , a letter from his estranged wife Lola as she hitches around a Pedro Almodóvar style Spain of dropouts and druggies, Lola searching for a(nother) Artist in an asylum, but this time she seeks to ' cure him of his homosexuality' (!!!) Sleeping and fucking in graveyards as she bums around... brilliant!
But later in the chapter, as Almafitano loses his mind, and the books he reads are so discombobulating it's less easy to follow and compelling

I really wanted to like this book, but I was only able to get halfway through. The book didn't hold my attention.

I'm not blown away, as many reader's seem to be. This is a huge, sprawling epic. Yeah, it kind of comes together in the end, but the ties between the characters are so tenuous, I wondered, why bother? The murders (fiction based on the hundreds of women murdered in Juarez) are so important as a global issue, and even though a huge portion of the story is devoted to their details, I feel like they were minimized by so many extraneous subplots.

Give yourself lots of time for this one. It's heavy, and it can get rough. You need space to think on this.

Having just finished...I'm not sure what to say. I didn't realize that this 'book' (Like calling the OED a 'book') actually shares characters with Savage Detectives. Also, a tip, take notes. The 'Crimes' section 4 kind of ends up wiping out all that came before.

A parte de Amalfitano: Um ligeiro decair em relação ao primeiro livro, Bolaño continua um prosador engenhoso, mas aqui falta algo do seu melhor.

not a lot of dialogue & a more difficult read than I've had in a while-but so well written & weird & awesome.

Wow. Just WOW. This book was one hell of an undertaking! It is broken out into five parts but contained about a million short stories in between. The main stories in each of the five parts all link together in some way that is not always obvious at first. I was just happy that the last part brought together a lot of loose ends.

Be warned that the longest part, "The Part about the Crimes", is extremely disturbing and graphic. I want to say I liked the last part best, but perhaps that was because I was looking forward to it finally ending?

Overall, the book offered a lot of interesting characters and stories, but I felt it drifted way too much at times. It was like going through a maze that didn't always have an exit!

"I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat."

The second part of the novel chronicles a philosophy professor who is self-aware that he is going mad. He hangs a geometry book by a clothesline in his backyard and believes that when the wind blows, it can "learn" about the shapes humans have created.

I'm starting to get the feeling this is the type of book you read in your twenties, then thirty years down the road you are mumbling math equations and drawing mazes on the wall of your prison cell.