What does it mean to read a book that has already read you, that has cataloged your every evasion and filed them under the name of a desert city that does not exist except that it does? 2666 - a five-hundred-thousand-word descent into the landfill of the twentieth century, where the critics chase a ghost and the ghost is just a man typing in a room, where the philosopher hangs a geometry book in his yard and waits for the wind to finish its lesson, where the journalist crosses a border he thought was real and finds another border just behind it, where the list of dead women grows longer than your capacity to feel - answers: nothing, unless you stay with the list until the list becomes a prayer, and the prayer becomes the silence that follows the last name, and the silence is the only honest thing you will ever say.