![]() In a program note he writes, sensibly, that “2666” is “probably the last novel that one would consider adapting for the stage.” Consider it he did, nonetheless, and he and Seth Bockley, sharing adapting and directing credit, have wrestled Bolaño’s loose, baggy monster of a book (to borrow a Henry James phrase) onto the stage, transforming it into a five-and-a-half-hour production that opened on Tuesday. Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater here, apparently never met a challenge he didn’t jump to meet. ![]() ![]() The book spans two continents, nearly a century, two converging story lines - each dangling digressions like an overtrimmed Christmas tree - and runs to around 900 pages of dense prose. Reviewed: 2666 by Roberto Bolao, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 898 pp., 30.00 The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolao, translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy New Directions, 143 pp., 15.95 (paper) Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolao was an exemplary literary rebel. who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass. The task is particularly confounding in the case of “2666,” Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus, published after his death at 50 in 2003. With 2666, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel. ![]() The obvious challenge in adapting a novel to the stage is how to make a story lying flat on the page leap to three-dimensional life. ![]()
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