Images of birds of prey, their wings and claws, litter the novel, as do images of ravines, craters and crags, along with many other recurrent motifs. The web is utterly complex, but in luminous moments like this one, multiple motifs briefly align. It's in these alignments that Bolaño gently urges the reader to begin to see the hawks as an incarnation of whatever force is killing women in Santa Teresa, and the ravine — that ravine at the bottom of which many of the girls' bodies are found, that public grave into which every unidentified body is tossed, that mass-grave into which Jews on the Eastern front are pushed — as the abyss on the brink of which we all stand, facing away.

It is easy to see why 2666 is a critics' favourite. It has a depth far beyond what one reviewer is able to touch on, and in its enormous size, incredible variety and detail it will be an almost inexhaustible goldmine for those willing to really commit to it. It will justly exert a major influence on other writers. But there will also be many readers who decide that some of the stories in the sprawling universe of 2666 work better than others, and that the quest for totality has resulted in a work that is not just imperfect but diluted.