Wow, another Seattle critic who has read more reviews than books in the oeuvre. Thanks in particular for this Brendan: "The prose is also mysterious—flat and journalistic (more so than his other books, which have been celebrated for their Byzantine sentences), but elegant and poetic." Nazi Literature? The second half of Savage Detectives? Good work. Once again Roberto is right. About critics.

Bolano's work is nothing like Jorge Luis Borges, as Mr. Kiley states. Nothing. They're both from the Conosur but that's about as much as they have in common. Mr. Kiley would have done better to compare Roberto Bolano to the Argentine Julio Cortazar, whose seminal novel "Rayuela" ("Hopscotch") is much more similar to the prose found in 2666.

@2 Argentine=made of silver, silvery; Argentinian=person from Argentina

@3: We're both wrong in our original comments. "Argentine" is an adjective. Had I said, "the Argentine AUTHOR", I would have been grammtiaclly correct. Your definition is certaining an esoteric use of the term at best.

Read Aura Estrada's essay about the Borges-Bolano connection:

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=…

@5: the third paragraph in Estrada's essay is spot on, mareada...doesn't your name mean "sea sickness"?

Jason, you might also re-read what Kiley wrote: "With 2666, Bolaño joins that cabal of writers—Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William Blake—who suck critics, college students, and other literary cryptographers down a hermeneutic rabbit hole."

He didn't say Bolaño wrote like Borges (or like Blake). He said they inspire similar reading.

@6: joder, tia...tranquila, que me estas mareandome a mi,cono...next thing you'll be trying to prove is that "Gravity's Rainbow" is similar to Edgar Allen Poe's short stories...