Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pages of 2666 are divided into five parts. The first concerns four literary critics--three men and a woman, all friends, all Europeans, all authorities on a mysterious German novelist named Archimboldi, whom none of them have ever met. Eventually they get a tip that Archimboldi has been seen in a backwater town in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa. But by the time they get there, the trail has gone cold...
...School of Design two years later. “I wanted the challenge of verisimilitude,” Hannah says. “There is something in me that wanted to make narrative paintings, which of course abstract does not offer.” Hannah cites the narratives of novelist Graham Greene as particular sources of inspiration for his paintings. “[Greene] creates an emotional and psychological terrain that is recognizable no matter where his books are set,” Hannah says. “I set out to do something similar, to create a world that...
...misleading title. The opening act of 2666 is about four literary critics, three men and one woman, all friends, all European, all of whom are authorities on a mysterious German novelist named Archimboldi, whom none of them have ever met. The four friends go to conferences, talk about Archimboldi, gossip, visit one another, sleep with one another. Eventually, they get a tip that Archimboldi has been seen in a backwater town in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa. Three of them make the trip there in search...
...nylons and hematomas and vaginal swabs, mingled together with the stories of the detectives who are working the case and of their principal suspect, an enormous German named Klaus Haas. It is a police procedural straight from the precinct of hell. It is also as bravura a display of novelistic mastery, and as devastating a reading experience, as you are likely ever to encounter. By the time the novelist Archimboldi does show up in Part 5, a belated Godot, we are very far past the possibility of anything resembling a redemptive epiphany. The world of 2666 has been irretrievably shattered...
Crichton is best known, of course, for Jurassic Park, his novel about a scientist who clones dinosaurs from their fossilized DNA, with disastrous results. It may be the most effective showcase for Crichton's gifts as a novelist, but even setting that aside, its predictive power remains astonishing to this day. Just this week, Japanese scientists announced that they had successfully cloned mice from tissue that was frozen for 16 years. Can the resurrection of the woolly mammoth be far off? Crichton probably wouldn't have approved, but it's a shame nonetheless that he didn't live...