A magnificent masterpiece, a towering achievement. 2666 is five short novels that rotate around an axis.

2666 is organized around a mysterious German novelist writing as Benno von Archimboldi, on one pole, and the murders of enormous numbers of women in a northern Mexican town clearly modelled on Ciudad Juarez on the other. Between these two mysteries-- one at the pinnacle of human achievement, the other at its nadir-- are stretched a web of filaments, constructed of the vast number of lives that are touched and drawn or repelled by the forces at work.

The identity and personality of the German novelist are finally revealed to us-- he is but a man, with human failings, yet he has a quiet integrity. The identity and motives of the killers are never revealed, although in some way they seem to be the common knowledge of many of the characters in the book. Everyone involved has a part of the story, which will never be complete.

2666 confronts the question of the purpose of fiction and of its own purpose. It suggests that we ignore the killings only at the cost of becoming complicit. It suggests that the search for the identity of the author is pointless and reveals nothing about the work. It suggests that our societies are founded on collusion with evil, and in a post-colonial world, on the outsourcing of evil. It erases the Manichean trap of success vs. failure and posits a difficult and unrewarding struggle for integrity instead.