Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is perhaps the Great Latin American Novel of our generation. It's a sprawling unity of five distinct sub-novels, each revolving around different characters but with some intersections between them. One part, for example, follows the lives of several European literary theorists devoted to the study of a reclusive German writer invented by Bolaño, while a different part, coming much later, is a biography of that writer. Despite the fact that the plots of these sub-novels weave through many places and times - Europe, the US, Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia - they are all connected in one way or another to a fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa, lying close to the border with the US, itself modelled closely on the real Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. Santa Teresa, as Ciudad Juarez in real life, has seen something like an epidemic of feminine rapes/murders over the last 20 years, which may or may not have been the work of unknown serial killer(s). Much of 2666 is devoted to painstaking description of many of these murders, their victims, and the ineptitude and corruption of local police. Those parts are not easy reading, but neither are they suffering porn.

This is a brilliant book, wide-ranging, psychologically precise, often funny, at times painful to read. If you're mainly reading for hedons, you would probably not like it. My mind has been enriched through reading it, and I highly recommend it.