Four passionate professors of German literature seek the traces of the Prussian writer Benno von Archimboldi. The last time he was heard from, he was in Santa Teresa, a desert town on the border of Mexico and the USA where hundreds of women have been found brutally murdered.

From the devastated Europe to the Sonoran desert on the Mexico-Texas border, haunted by the unsolved murders of women, Bolaño tells the story of the life of Hans Reiter, born in 1920, who evolves into the great German writer under the pseudonym Archimboldi. At the same time, he records with the chilling sobriety of a police report the chain of murders, mirroring the killings that haunt the real Ciudad Juárez at the USA-Mexico border.

Through numerous grotesque portraits and flirting with all literary genres, a picture of the twentieth century is created with touches of the Apocalypse. The literary legacy of the prematurely lost Chilean author is ambitious. It connects the gangster novel with the Bildungsroman, vaudeville with war testimony, science fiction with reportage, and embodies what is most essential in literature: the courage to speak of horror, death, the absence of meaning, and love.

Heralded by critics worldwide as the work of the century. With a stunning display of courage and narrative power, "2666" indicates a new and radical way for the total novel. It categorically confirms Susan Sontag's verdict: "The Spanish-speaking author who had the greatest influence and was admired more than anyone else of his generation. His death, at the age of fifty, is a great loss for literature."

"What is achieved here is the total novel, which places the author of 2666 in the same league as Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Proust, Musil, and Pynchon." ("Que Leer") "Bolaño has proven that literature is capable of revealing the morbidity of our world and finding the words for the unspeakable." ("The New York Times")