This was a squeaker.

Where 2666 is bombast, a triumph of imagery, A Mercy is a tiny masterpiece, deftly told. Where Bolaño effuses, carving great thicknesses of paint upon the canvas, Morrison exacts a tale of equal depth with an economy of words. Both authors get where they mean to go—and pushed my senses in so many ways along the way—though arrive there by very different paths. Neither story, in fact, is superior to the other.

And here, for once, the scale of Bolaño’s novel wasn’t going to work against him. Given A Mercy’s slender presence, the two books read together equaled the size of two respectable novels. However, I do suspect 2666 could have been a great deal shorter; likewise, A Mercy could have told a larger story—and over a lot more pages.

So, why a squeaker? Because the gulf in these comparisons kills all the above arguments. So for me, it came down to my reading experience.

I marched my way through 2666, and was exhausted—thrilled, but exhausted—each time I set it down. I pushed through A Mercy in three bouts, and at the end of each sitting felt I’d returned from a journey. Because where Bolaño pounds away with unrelenting imagery and blind plotlines, Morrison points you in the direction and lets you figure out the rest. She captures the magic of what reading a novel should be: transportive, not just narrative.

It’s the style of A Mercy that makes Morrison’s novel the more rewarding of the two—the one I’d recommend you read to capture the same experience I had—and the one I’m pushing through to the Finals.