I picked up this month's Esquire just to read John H. Richardson's review of Roberto Bolaño's 2666--a book I've already preordered. No link on Esquire's website, so this must be a print-only review. It's short, only two paragraphs, but here's an excerpt:

Written under the death sentence of the liver disease that killed him, 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is even longer and more ambitious [than The Savage Detectives], and this time the exhilaration stems from the sheer glory of watching a dying man face down his death with such a massive--912 pages--final statement. Combining different story lines that overlap slightly, it rambles from a group of literary scholars who organize their lives around an obscure writer named Archimboldi to a journalist from a New York magazine who can't convince his editors that the unsolved murders of hundreds of poor Mexican girls is buzzworthy enough for publication, an elusive style that begins to reach lunatic greatness when Bolaño plunges into a seemingly endless series of documentary accounts of hundreds of different murders. "No one pays attention to these killings," he writes, "but the secret of the world is hidden in them." Every so often he teases you with a heroic character or sweet little plotline that offers some hope for resolution, then adds another murder and another and another, and you realize he will not be wrapping death up with the neat little ribbons demanded by pulp thrillers or mainstream journalism. As he himself puts it, writing of Archimboldi, "The style was strange. It was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left was the children, their parents, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in boiling cauldron until it vanished completely." With life slipping through his fingers, Bolaño was saving the world one word at a time.