898 pages
English language
Published Jan. 4, 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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.
There is some fantastic writing and characterization in here. Doesn't make up for the middle 300 pages.
This is a fantastic book. It's amazing in its depth, breadth, dazzling storyline(s) and style. At almost a thousand pages, it's very demanding, but completely worth the effort. A masterpiece, and certainly one of my favorites.
This is I'm sure a very literate and well written book but it just became too much hard work.
I can take the post-modernist view ( "Dorian" by Will Self ) of the world and don't wear rose-tinted glasses, (I loved "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy), but the endless list of rapes and murders was not my cup of meat.
If this will lead to the solving of some of these murders ( or the prevention of new ones) then it's worth anybody's distaste, but I don't think it will...review fades to ambiguity and obscurity...
