The Year End Lists

The New York Times says that it knows what the 10 best books of 2008 were. That's good. The list is a refinement of a year end list of 100 notable books for 2008. The top 10 includes Roberto Bolano's 2666, about which the Times says:

Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered.

There's also an excerpt, the first chapter.

I am delighted that Bolano is now receiving deserved attention. But, because he passed on in 2003, it seems too little, and too late. I know that the world of translated fiction moves at an erratic, sometimes glacial rate. But it is nevertheless sad for Bolano only now to have found a large, adoring readership in English.