An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.
"Even before his death two years ago at 50, Roberto Bolano was emerging as his generation's premier Latin American writer. But with the posthumous success of '2666,' an extravagantly encyclopedic novel that traverses two continents and eight decades, Bolano's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent. . . . Divided into five sections that Bolano first envisioned as separate novels, to …