You’ll either think it’s hilarious, or wonder why the hell you’re watching four professors talk about themselves in the third person for an hour. Goodman really plays up Bolaño’s sense of humor here, adding Wes Anderson aesthetics and sight gags. “The Part About the Critics” remains a wry satire on academic obsession, as four scholars search for the legendary Benno von Archimboldi. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. All of the most memorable images from the novel have made the cut: the broken toilet, the book on the clothesline, the sun as a “carnivorous flower,” and the following passage where Professor Liz Norton describes the rain, perhaps the first sign that you’re in for something truly strange: All five books have been adapted into one-hour arcs, and the actors often use Bolaño’s prose verbatim.

On the whole, it’s more faithful to the novel than I thought possible. As a result, “2666” is an unprecedented, multimodal success that sneaks up on you like a knife in the dark. They wrote a play for people who are curious and tenacious enough to read Don Quixote all the way to the end, people who don’t expect art to hand-feed them. In fact, that probably would have been the smarter thing to do, from a box office perspective I’m sure a two-hour crime story is more marketable than a five-hour, postmodern meditation on meaning and madness.īut the Goodman adapters understood what makes 2666 the greatest novel of the 21st century thus far. I think they got it as right as you can get it. Robert Falls and Seth Bockley could have distilled Bolaño’s meandering narrative by focusing on the murder mystery and cutting the digressions.

You’re probably not interested in a theatre review so much as an appraisal of “whether they got it right.” You know 2666 is a dark labyrinth of a book that explores madness by provoking a little madness in you. “I’d rather watch somebody shovel snow for five-and-a-half hours.”īut if you’ve read the novel, you know Bolaño wasn’t interested in doing what art is “supposed” to do.

“It’s not doing any of the things art is supposed to do,” he bemoaned. The elderly gentleman in front of me stuck around until midnight, but used all three intermissions as opportunities to explain-red-faced, to anyone who would listen-why the play was a pretentious bore. The group sitting next to me left during the first intermission and never came back. Some people are going to hate the Goodman Theatre’s adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

2666 roberto bolaño review