Roberto Bolano

I'm plowing through Nazi Literature in America right now. It probably owes more to Borges than anything else I've ever read by him. I'm enjoying it for the most part, but the best chapters out of it (the one on Irma Carrasco is my favorite so far) introduce characters so rich in potential that it's sad to see them disappear a few short pages later. That's a good problem to have, though.

The Savage Detectives was the first thing I ever read by him, and it's still one of my very favorite books. In some ways, especially in the middle section with all of the interviews, it does the same thing I mentioned above in introducing characters that are gone too soon. The difference is, given his format in that section, there's always a possibility that they'll pop up again, either as a person being directly interviewed, or as a character in someone else's version of events. And those are just the "minor" characters in the book. Joaquin Font, the bookstore owner, stood out for me. Seeing his name pop up on the next page is always a "yes!" moment, at least for me.

Then there's the main pair, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Belano is supposed to be a stand-in for Roberto Bolano himself, which gives any scene that he's a part of another dimension to explore, if you want. Again, the interview format for the long middle section of the book is perfect for getting to know these characters. Some people think they're brilliant, others see them as mere drug dealers, some are teenagers who look up to them, others sleep with them, and so on.

It's a really rewarding book, so good that I'm almost sad I started with it, because although I've enjoyed the other books I've read by him, I think he's at his best with more space to work with, letting his characters unfold over hundreds of enjoyable pages. That's why I'm so excited for 2666, later this year!

Arg, Nazi Literature in THE AmericaS.

amazing how the style in "savage" is so different than "night in chile" - almost like they were written by a different writer.
my impressions from the first part of "savage detectives" is that like a combination between hemingway,kerouak and cortazar's "hopsctch" with great irony towards it's characters, and more of a direct,sometiems brutal writing approach (sex and viloence scenes).

but i havent reach to the second part yet which is a totaly differnt story and style.

"by night in chile", in big contradiction was kinda surrealist, and full of images and dark atmosphere, like a long poem.

SO GREAT

I'm looking forward to the translations of his poetry, too. I remember reading somewhere that he pretty much dedicated his life to poetry until the mid-90s, when he turned to fiction to make some money to support his family, once he found out about his terminal illness.

except for belano and lima, most of the vicerrealistas are still alive > http://infrarrealismo.com/

the thin column that's at the left of this was afaik lima's only obituary.

Los detectives salvajes is really great, there's a lot of Cortázar in it. I have 2666 and am looking forward to reading it.

Wait, there really was a Belano? I thought he was modeled after Bolano?

He was. There was a real Lima though.

belano is modeled after roberto bolaño.
lima is modeled after mario santiago papasquiaro.

there are some pictures here.

i think the first part is more like a parody about cortazar's "hopscotch": the heroes here are young, naive, as oppose to those in "hopscotch" which are dead serious, and getting extremely deep (in thoughts and in action) in their quest for meaning.
in the "savage", it's more about the sex drugs and adventure of youth, while the "art" is usually and ironiclly of course, just a bunch of shallow words and/or name-dropping game,that covers naive and stupidity sometimes.

It's going to be a monster:

http://www.amazon.com/2666-Novel-Roberto-Bolano/dp/0374100144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207596123&sr=1-1

Somehow I want to start with that one, which I know is backwards.

Agh, November! I was hoping that 2666 was coming out during the summer, when I actually have time to read it. Then again, it would be a great Winter break read as well.

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

81% buy the item featured on this page:
2666: A Novel
$30.00

I don't trust Amazon sometimes. After viewing this page, 81% chose to buy the book 7 months in advance? Seriously?

I just got The Savage Detectives from the library, yay!

uh mentioned this in the other thread but savage detectives blew me away !!!

btw there's a great piece on it in the new yorker archives

I know the piece you're talking about...actually, I'd never even heard of Bolano before I read it, and it was one of those reviews that convinced me to immediately go out and buy the book.

just started it.

Maybe I should give it another go, but it bored the hell out of me. I was so disappointed after reading James Wood's rave last spring.

Meanwhile By Night in Chile was damn impressive.

Yeah, that New Yorker article was totally "Behold, a new dead genius in our midst" - it made me want to read everything by him too. I did read By Night in Chile, which was fairly interesting, though not exactly mind-blowing. Haven't tried anything else yet.

"savage" is much much better and totally different than "chile" in scope,style,everything.
infact, two weeks after ive done with "savage" i still cant get it out of my head.

I will give Savage Detectives another try, it seemed kind of wack when I tried the first time but then again I am myself wack.

OK, have got 'Nazi Literature' and 'Last Evenings' on the way in the post. Was very tempted by 'Savage Detectives' but bailed at the last moment due to its size (I just read the 900-page 'Fortunes of Richard Mahoney' and it exhausted me).

i thought the beginning bit was pretty wack but after that - huge improvement (for me)

Maybe I made a mistake in starting with Savage Detectives. By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas are good, but the at the same level of Savage Detectives. I'm hoping 2666 will be at least at the same level, or step it up a notch.

but NOT at the same level, I meant, agh.

Oh, and I meant to make some dumb analogy to starting with some band's best album, and then being left with the great but comparatively weaker material afterward.

GREAT POST, sorry

this dude has some major heat on him right now - first time in ages that a friend has just handed me a book and said "here, I want you to have this, I know when you read it you'll love it" with that kind of evangelical self-assurance y'know

started that book today so far quite good

savage detectives?

there's some good bolano backlash on the "what's a noize dude reading?" thread.

of course there is

did you finish it, nick?

yeah it was great

agreed

now i'm reading 'clockers' and it's like whoah how are there so many amazing books?

ha, i'm about to start 'lush life'.

2666 coming out november 11,

outstanding reviews all over.can't wait to read it.

“Bolaño’s masterwork . . . An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel’s narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, in the Sonora desert near the Texas border.” —FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, The New York Review of Books

“Not just the great Spanish-language novel of [this] decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature.” —J. A. MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, La Vanguardia

“One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time . . . to see . . . a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his life’s work but redefines it and raises it to new dizzying heights.” —RODRIGO FRESÁN, El País

"Bolano's savoir-faire is incredible ... The exploded narrative reveals a virtuosity that we rarely encounter, and one cannot help being bowled over by certain bravura passages--to single one out, the series of reports describing murdered young women, which is both magnificent and unbearable. We won't even mention the 'resolution' of this infernal 2666, a world of a novel in which the power of words triumphs over savagery." --Baptiste Liger, L'EXPRESS

"Splendid ... The jaw-dropping synthesis of a brief but incredibly fertile career." --Fabrice Gabriel, LES INROCKUPTIBLES

"The event of the spring: with 2666 Roberto Bolano has given us his most dense, complex, and powerful novel, a meditation on literature and evil that begins with a sordid newspaper item in contemporary Mexico." --Morgan Boedec, CHRONIC ART

"Including the imaginary and the mythic alongside the real in his historiography, without ever dabbling in the magical realism dear to many of his Latin-American peers, Bolano strews his chronicle with dreams and visions. As in the films of David Lynch (with whom Bolano's novel shares a certain kinship) these become a catalyst for reflection ... In such darkness, one must keep one's eyes wide open. Bolano invites us to do just that." --Sabine Audrerie, LA CROIX

"An immense moment for literature ... With prodigious skill and his inimitable art of digression, Bolano leads us to the gates of his own hell. May he burn in peace." --TECHNIKART

"Bolano constructs a chaos that has an order all its own ... The state of the world today transmuted into literature." --Isabelle Ruf, LE TEMPS

"To confront the reader with the horror of the contemporary world was Bolano's guiding ambition. He succeeded, to say the least. Upset, shocked, sometimes even sickened, at times one is tempted to shut the book because it's unbearable to read. Don't shut it. Far from being a blood-and-guts thriller meant to entertain, 2666 is a 'visceral realist" portrait of the human condition in the twenty-first century." --Anna Topaloff, MARIANNE

"On every page the reader marvels, hypnotized, at the capacity of this baroque writer to encompass all literary genres in a single fascinating, enigmatic story. No doubt many readers will find 2666 inexhaustible to interpretation. It is a fully realized work by a pure genius at the height of his powers." --LIRE

"His masterpiece ... Bolano borrows from vaudeville and the campus novel, from noir and pulp, from science fiction, from the Bildungsroman, from war novels; the tone of his writing oscillates between humor and total darkness, between the simplicity of a fairytale and the false neutrality of a police report." --Minh Tran Huy, LE MAGAZINE LITTERAIRE (Paris)

"The book explores evil with irony, without any theory or resolution, relying on storytelling alone as its saving grace... Each story is an adventure: a fresco at once horrifying, delicate, grotesque, redundant, and absurd, revealed by the flashlight of a child who stands at the threshold of a cave he will never leave." --Philippe Lancon, LIBERATION

"If THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES recounted the end of a century of avant-gardes and ideological battles, 2666, more radically, evokes the end of humanity as we know it. Apocalyptic in this sense, wavering between decomposition and totality, endlessly in love with people and books, Bolano's last novel ranges over the world and history like the knight Percival, who in Bolano's words 'wears his fool's motley underneath his armor.'" --Fabienne Dumontet, LE MONDE DES LIVRES (Paris)

"A work of genius: a work of immense lucidity and narrative cunning, written with a unique mixture of creative power and intimate existential desperation, the work of a master whose voice has all the authority and seeming effortlessness that we associate with the great classics of the ages ... It is impossible to read this book without feeling the earth shift beneath one's feet. It is impossible to venture deep into writing so unforgiving without feeling inwardly moved--by a shudder of fear, maybe even horror, but also by its need to pay attention, by its desire for clarity, by its hunger for the real." --Andres Ibanaz, BLANCO Y NEGRO

"Without a doubt the greatest of Bolano's productions ... The five parts of this masterwork can be read separately, as five isolated novels; none loses any of its brilliance, but what's lost is the grandeur that they achieve in combination, the grandeur of a project truly rare in fiction nowadays, one that can be enjoyed only in its totality." --Ana Maria Moix, EL PAIS

"Make no mistake, 2666 is a work of huge importance ... a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out. Bolano inspires passion, even when his material, his era, and his volume seem overwhelming. This could only be published in a single volume, and it can only be read as one." --EL MUNDO

"An absolute masterpiece ... Bolano writes almost without adjectives, but in his prose this leads to double meanings. The narration is pure metonymy: it omits feelings in favor of facts. A phone call or a sex act can express real tragedy, the sweep of the vast human condition." --Andres Lomena, LA OPINION DE MALAGA

I've still got 2666 to read, in a pile that includes the Recognitions by Gaddis and Underworld by DeLillo. I think I'll get to it first, really liked detectives salvages a lot.

+ don't want to wait 'til next year to be reading it of course.

man that does sound exciting. just pre-ordered that 3 volume box set now.

savage detective was awesome.
the ambivalent of Bolano's thoughts and feelings towards art and artists (supreme or pretentious/naive? maybe both at the same time)
is deliverd in a highly original way

oh man, i want to read this but after finishing infinite jest i don't think i'll want to read another 900+ pager

I'm put off by the size, but the boxed set is a thing of beauty

i think i might order this as a present for myself to read once i'm done with this semester of grad school. i can't handle anything this heavy while i'm doing school, unfortunately

^^yah me too. this might be my winter break book. heard mixed stuff about savage detectives but i may give this one a go.

savage detectives was great. i never actually ordered 2066, i should do that now.

done ... now i just need to forget i ordered it before next week so it'll be a pleasant surprise when it arrives

I ordered it a few days ago, along with Saramago's Death With Interruptions. I probably will not get a chance to start either until May 17th, 2009, my 26th birthday, graduate school graduation day, end of a personal nightmare, and beginning of the better part of my life. I'm really looking forward to that day.

You could say that 2666 got a fairly positive review in the NYT today:

“2666” is the permanently mysterious title of a Bolaño manuscript rescued from his desk after his passing, the primary effort of the last five years of his life. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaño’s final intentions — a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer, the indefatigable translator of “The Savage Detectives”) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book’s present form. They needn’t have bothered. “2666” is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. “The Savage Detectives” looks positively hermetic beside it.

"The Savage Detectives" is beautiful. I can't wait to see if "2666" lives up to the hype.

just got 2666 in the mail. it looks beautiful

me too

What do you think about the slip cover paperbacks versus the hardcover?

i got the paperbacks but i kind of wish i'd gotten the hardcover. the package looks nice but i'm worried it's going to fall apart and start to look ratty very quickly

will be easier to read though

i got the hardcover. its not really that unwieldy tho i dont have any plans to be truckin it around

i got the paperbacks, because we're on vacation next week and it will be easier to carry around. the question is, do i take one volume or two??? don't think i will be able to get through all three in a week. though we have two long plane rides to get thru. i think i will hide the second volume in my luggage somewhere for the plane ride back.

got the paperbacks also, just bcz i hate lugging round hardcovers

just bought the hardcover.
CANT WAIT TO READ (but have to wait, busy..)

i pre-ordered 2666 (hardback) on amazon when i was really drunk, forgot about it, then a package showed up at my door, and i'm about 200 pages in. great, great, great.

mr. que i would honestly take v. 1 with you just because it seques so nicely into the v. 2 that i've read so far.

no no i am taking vol. 1 the question is, will I be able to finish it in a week and should i take vol 2. along with me and the answer to both is yes. i am like 40 pages in so far and hubba hubba

the part about the crimes is giving me nightmares

I'm getting this through the library because I'm poor. Hopefully I can read it before it's due (since there will probably be a line for it by the time it's due).

yeah so i liked 2666 a lot. i loved the part about the crimes, which is the most haunting thing i have ever read, and i loved parts about everything else. i'm not a poetry reader and i'm not crazy and i'm not very well-read. i think being more of those things would have helped me enjoy this even more.

bought this yesterday

i think i said something out loud in the store when i saw how expensive books are these days, but then i figured eh, at least this one should last me a while.

the box set was like $20 on amazon, which is really reasonable for a new book

the two adjectives i would give 2666 are wild and uneven. it was a fun, fast read for me but i think i would have appreciated a little more cohesion between the 5 sections. . . just a touch more, really. highlights were all of sections 1 and 4 and the beginning of 5, until Archimboldio gets bogged down in WWII. 3 came off as this weird DeLillo-ish chunk. 2 seems a little pointless in retrospect. he's an interesting writer, the digressions just got a little old towards the end. considering how awesome 1 and 4 are, though, it hardly matters.

yeah, list price on the hardcover at Borders was $30.

just about to start book 4, loving it (although 1 is definitely the best so far). i hit book 4 during a really choppy plane ride and didn't want to read about death and make myself even more tense. i like how the sections are connected, there are definite ties but it's not overdone (like if the reporter would've crossed paths with the critics in a cafe or whatever).

i agree 100% with this guy on 2666 http://quarterlyconversation.com/2666-by-roberto-bolano

I'm looking forward to the translations of his poetry, too.

― Z S, Sunday, March 30, 2008 8:12 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark

finally out btw

I think I'm gonna read Savage Detectives as soon as I finish Yiddish Policeman's Union

i'm somewhere around page 300, and for now, i think Savage Detectives is better.
2666 is a good,philosophical page turner but it has it's flaws, esp. with the somewhat too obscure surreal scenes, some of them impossible to decipher, but Bolani is talented and smart enough to keep me going.
maybe iill change my mind by the end.

Anyone read The Romantic Dogs poetry collection? Some of them are pretty good. It also makes sense to read them in conjunction with the Savage Detectives, since many of them actually seem part of that book: esp. the ones about N. Parra, northern Mexico, la revolution, Spain

from one poem: "But back then, growing up would have been a crime"

"Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666":

http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780374100148&m_type=4&m_contentid=5953#cmscontent

those are some very helpfull comments.

the book is getting better and better.(i'm in the middle)
it's the sort of a book one's need to get used to, i think.
David Lynch,Witold Gombrowicz, and the other Bolano's usuall suspects of influence are presented (Cortazar,Dellilo,Sebald and so on)
it's less focused than "savage",yes, (which wasnt focused as itself), but it's deeper, and more complex.
still, not a hard read.
Bolano gives a fresh, look at the old theme of life vs. death, logic vs. madness, order vs. chaos. etc.. while the latter will always win, trying to find the point of it all, art and life, with the horror of death around us.
so realism and surrealism collide together,with endless details, places and names creating a huge picture of the modern modern world on which we live in, where we can only imagine we have control over our lifes, while death and misunderstanding are around the corner.

part 4 is more of an endless,detached report about the endless women murders,with some inside stories, so it's the weakest of the parts in terms of literature (though it also has it's many moments of great prose to be sure), but it delivers the largest emotional impact upon the reader,digging deeper into THE theme of the novel - the horror ofdeath,forcing the reader to confront the subject in thoughts and emotion, turning back on his mind to the previous parts, trying to build the big picture, connect the parts to a whole.

and to think that Bolano himself was dying while writing the book , makes the impact more profound.

This is really a book written for undergraduate students. I just finished book one, and I can already imagine about 50 undergraduate paper topics waiting to be handed in.

The Role of Dreams
Morini as Outsider
Women in Academia
The Whore/Medusa Complex
The Eruption of Violence in Educated Academic Society
The Writer v. The Critic
Etc, etc.

I gotta say, I love it :) I chatted with a friend on AIM about the first 150 pages for like two hours last night.

after savage detectives, it's weird reading a bolano book with modern references (rap, robert rodriquez)

part 4 sort of teases with movie hero-type saviors (the loner cop who's teaching himself criminology, the FBI profiler, the obsessive reporter who starts getting tips), but you it's not that kind of story and it's not going to go down like that.

the fake robert rodriguez anecdote is great

xxpost that part in the first section where the academics watch the ring!

part 4 is more of an endless,detached report about the endless women murders,with some inside stories, so it's the weakest of the parts in terms of literature

i found part 4 incredible but also near impossible. the litany of dead women was hard to read but that was certainly the point, right?

yeah, it becomes pretty numbing and i started to skim through those paragraphs, which has got to be the intended effect.

this book was fuckin rad

srsly! co-sign

Was on holiday in Chile few weeks ago. Having drinks with some of my dad's friends, the ex-husband of one asked me if I had ever read Bolano. I said yes, I really like him and was currently reading 2666. Turns out he was best friends with him as boys. He had recently been sent interview questions about the young Bolano and his relationship with him. He said when he was young he was a storyteller, and all the boys in the crowd would crowd round him while he made up, on the spot, fantastical stories that they all really enjoyed. Also he told an anecdote about a time when he had shot a bird with a homemade slingshot, Bolano shouted at him, calling him a murderer, and then rung the bird's neck as it was still alive, but suffering.

wow!

dude was a totally unremarkable accountant, living in a provincial city. Forgot to ask him where he was from, because I've never read anything telling me where Bolano was from in Chile, though I suspect it was probably just a suburb of Santiago. Also it was this newspaper that sent him the questions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clinic and he didn't seem to think they had ever used his material.

can someone whos read more bolano clue me in on what 2666 is? i gather its a date that shows up a few times in his work?

This is really a book written for undergraduate students. I just finished book one, and I can already imagine about 50 undergraduate paper topics waiting to be handed in.

The Role of Dreams
Morini as Outsider
Women in Academia
The Whore/Medusa Complex
The Eruption of Violence in Educated Academic Society
The Writer v. The Critic
Etc, etc.

"The Ghost of Herbert Plantilla: Pynchon, Borges & the Specter of American Literature in Roberto Bolaño's 2666"

about the title,from Amulet:
""...a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else"

the 5th part took me by surprise:
in style, it's like a tribute to German literature (from the Grim bros. and Hoffman to Mann,Broch and Thomas Bernhard), trying to explain the decadence and horror of the post-modern world described in the previous parts, through history, and by that also connecting the narrative dots between archimboldi,art and the crimes in mexico.

finished 'savage detectives' today

interest piqued a little by mentions of the 27th century in it; wonder quite how far ahead of himself bolano was thinking

those of you that read it before me, a couple questions:

i) can you detect any references to the narrator of the first & third sections in the second, apart from the one right at the end?
ii) what's the solution to the last of the narrator's schoolboy-riddle things?

apropos ii, the uk cover for it uses the 'mexican smoking a pipe' etc. motif in the design, which is totally awesome

natasha wimmer on translating 2666: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/11/natasha_wimmer_on_translating.html

btw the end of 2666 was surprisingly satisfying. part 5 wasn't necessarily my favorite, but it tied things together in a pretty necessary way (not just in the obvious relationships between the characters but thematically).

ha i just finished it on saturday and i think that part 5 was my favorite part

2666 poll

I did like Bolano's poem "Los Neochilenos" which was published in the most recent issue of n+1.

http://whatisoutsidethewindow.blogspot.com/

i just picked up* savage detectives a few days ago at Barnes & Noble...i like it; it's an exciting read...and I have just started the second section...

(*picked up =/= stolen)

one thing abt the savage detectives..the font is driving me up the wall. it's the same font they use on those cheap-o B&N classic reprints...bland and unaffecting...not a criticism on Bolano or Wimmer,of course, prolley just a quibble, though not quite as minor as I would have at first guessed...

do British people read n+1?

"ii) what's the solution to the last of the narrator's schoolboy-riddle things?"

my interpretation:
the first riddle is a star, but it's only a small part of it. - mildly abstact.
the 2nd - a sheet - medium abstarct.
in the third - the window is broken - highly abstract=chaso=the end of logic.
or: it could be also the horizontal and vertical bars of an unseen jail cell, which conects to the end of the narrative..

I didn't really want to assume Bolaño made it up, though. On the other hand, I haven't found any reference to the Mexican-hat thingies anywhere else, either ...

no opinions on "last evenings on earth"?

also I rly want a paperback vn. of 2666, no way I'm reading tht big-ass hb

you mean other than the 3-volume paperback set that came out at the same time as the hardcover?

cozwm do you live in the uk? cuz yeah i only saw that hardcover in uk stores. you can amazon the paperbacks tho

I am lolbritish, yeah. it's OK, I took the plunge on the hardcover cs I found it cheap and figured I can read it in bed

sorry for whining

dude i understand. that book is massive + it's one of those ones i would prob buy + then never end up reading cuz it's too hard to carry around.

xp. least you can use it as a dumbbell to sculpt your pythons when you're done with it.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/78685-picador-buys-brand-bolao.html.rss

Picador has announced its first acquisitions under new publisher Paul Baggaley, including 11 novels by the cult Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Bolaño's epic work 2666 has just been published by Picador to critical acclaim, hitting the top 10 original fiction bestseller list. Baggaley bought The Third Reich, a novel completed by Bolaño shortly before his death in 2003 and as yet unpublished in any language, from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. It will be published in 2011.

it's not that big you guys, jeez

i don't like big hardbacks, I don't like hardbacks in general. I had a paperback though so I was cool.

read it on the bus and shit.

Baggaley has also acquired 10 other Bolaño titles, previously untranslated into English, from Tim Bates at Pollinger on behalf of the US publisher New Directions. The first of these, Amulet, will be published in hardback this autumn, alongside the paperback of 2666. The remaining Bolaño novels will be published over the following two years.

Huh? Publishing 10 other titles, previously untranslated into English, starting with Amulet? Which has already been translated into English by Chris Andrews and published?

Baggaley said: "We are creating a whole look for Bolaño, creating a brand. We could never have expected the level of response that 2666 has created and you do have to take advantage of that." He described Bolaño as, "a cult writer we can all discover, producing challenging, weird, extra­ordinary but also completely readable novels".

ugghhhh...

Still, glad that the burgeoning Bolaño Brand means more people will get to know his stuff, and more will be published than otherwise.

it's not that big you guys, jeez

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan), Thursday, 5 March 2009 02:52 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

umadd

I have a question about The Savage Detectives. I'm almost afraid to ask it, considering how I've built a reputation on ILX as being one of the more refined and intuitive contributors, but I coudn't ever tell, and I was wondering what you guys think:

do Xochitil and Maria Font hook up?

(I know, I know, Drugs A. Money-is-a-total-cad SHOCKAH!)

I'm more perplexed by the talk of a 6th section to 2666, given that they already published that book.

i guess that makes everyone more certain that it shld never be published?

I'm increasingly convinced Bolano faked his death, and has kept writing, and slipped this stuff into his papers, and is laughing his ass off.

I'm about half way through The Savage Detectives now and it is astonishingly beautiful and evocative. I think this is how students are supposed to feel when they read On The Road.

Thinking back over the Savage Detectives, I can't think of many other novels that devote so much time and space to their central characters, and yet resolutely refuse to let you anywhere near the inside of their heads. I'm none the wiser about what's going on with Belano and Lima after 600 pages than I was at the beginning.

Reminds me of growing up

Bolano loves that distance from the character. Not going to spoiler alert so I'll be elliptical, in 2666, with Hans Reiter and Lotte you're shown their whole domestic arrangement and really close to the characters while they live in the run down old building, then when they start their travels, but then they get to Italy and we totally miss out a whole really dramatic incident, only hearing about it through another character in passing.

Also I'm sure I read a short story of his where one character is dispatched by something like, "he didn't hear any more from him, and sometime later found he had died".

i'm finding 2666 a really hard-sell when recommending it to people ("it's 1000 pages and about serial murders in Mexico, but it's not really about that"). I don't think Savage Detectives will be much easier ("it's 600 pages and it's about obscure avante-garde Mexican poets and their search for an even more obscure avante-garde Mexican poet).

"he didn't hear any more from him, and sometime later found he had died".

i think this must be in savage detectives or 2666 too because it sounds really familiar

the two adjectives i would give 2666 are wild and uneven.

So I just finished The Savage Detectives, after working on it off and on for what feels like forever. I did think it was terrific, and I'm really glad I read it, and I don't think there was any point in that reading where I questioned that Bolano had the capacity of an incredibly gifted writer, but I do have to admit that there was a long stretch where I was starting to dissent from all the praise and find myself dissatisfied with him. Now I'm trying to decide if those two words, "wild" and "uneven," really get at why. Basically I think there were times when it felt unsorted. I don't want to criticize the format it takes or the perspectives it uses, because I thought those were fantastic, but I think there are points where its desire to encompass everything, and to swim around in this sort of real-world perspective on things, can become bothersome, where you either feel like you're being dragged through this almost mundane multiplicity and gossip of everything that happens in life, or else like the author is working so much from some kind of lived experience that he hasn't sufficiently sorted that material into something wholly useful. That bothered me over some stretches. One of the chapters I turned out to like best, in the end, was one toward the close, the one where each individual bit ends with "Everything that begins as comedy ends as ..." -- something that presented as a bit of a scaffolding, so that the material did feel well-sorted. But there's a stretch in there, maybe a third of the way through the middle section, where there's no feeling of that, and a sense that the book's just feeling its way around a whole pile of experience without having yet made anything of it -- and while that's not unusual for any novel, around that point, something about it in this one seemed to point up a general thing I don't enjoy about Bolano, something he maybe either didn't care to do or just wasn't good at.

u have to make your words soft and clear for me to hear them...

sometimes its hard because one word means another word and two words that seem similar can sometimes mean something completely different used in conjunction irl and it can seem like they arent sorted that they are diffuse but ilx poster as the cat says to the mouse lets play a game if u wrote down everything that happened to u what would it say and what would it sound like? \\\

there was a time or an occasion that stood out but does it matter is it wholly useful and too whom and what are u saying the persons face changed several times while looking at it but the words are similar - this makes sense to me but then it doesnt i remember reading books that felt like shadowpuppets softly weeping

im sorry i lost my train of thought everything that begins as rebuttal ends as...

I think there are points where its desire to encompass everything, and to swim around in this sort of real-world perspective on things, can become bothersome, where you either feel like you're being dragged through this almost mundane multiplicity and gossip of everything that happens in life, or else like the author is working so much from some kind of lived experience that he hasn't sufficiently sorted that material into something wholly useful. That bothered me over some stretches. One of the chapters I turned out to like best, in the end, was one toward the close, the one where each individual bit ends with "Everything that begins as comedy ends as ..." -- something that presented as a bit of a scaffolding, so that the material did feel well-sorted.

one reason why 'the part about the crimes' in 2666 works as well as it does is that it provides the same kind of 'scaffolding' youre talking about here.

oddly enough though im not sure that 2666 falls into this trap as readily as you might expect a book that long and dense to; i havent read savage detectives, so i dont really know how the two compare, but i wonder if the five-part structure helped bolano focus his energies (i was able to read the book in a couple days, as opposed to the weeks ive spent reading gravitys rainbow on and off recently, due in part to those kinds of structural choices that help divide/focus/sort the ideas).

not that 2666 doesnt come apart every few hundred pages--none of the sections, with maybe the exception of the part about the crimes, are as, um, tight, as they could be.

lol did lamp just explain his display name

he for certain appeared to explain something, i'm not sure what

scaffolding is the sort of word that is like scraping your fork across your teeth while eating when u say it not that im hearing it so much obv im reading these words, right now, my fingers tracing their edges striking sparks from my scrn

savage detectives is i think better than 2666 he used crude oil to do it and electronics (lol) not these clumsy construction material other ppl keep bringing up

Just for the record, I don't want to suggest that it's some necessary/sacred duty of novelists to create a feeling of the work having been rigorously culled or ordered or sorted from raw material or experience, but it is something that's usually beneficial and pretty basic to the form, no matter how diffuse the effect winds up -- I'm guessing most people who read Bolano can see where this might be an issue even if they don't mind it much? To be honest I don't know that it'd have really gotten to me in a shorter novel, but at a certain length it does start to seem like ... like the writer's "flaw," by which I don't just mean a failing but maybe the main thing about how they write that presents a difficulty or a possible weakness for the reader.

fwiw i feel uncomfortable trying to offer any judgement on bolano, considering i know nothing about south american lit in general and that seems pretty key to this book in particular, and considering how recent his death was and how much that defined his recent appearance as a writer in english.

but the inability to reconcile lived experience with the urge to make art, or the ludicrousness of wanting to - that seems kind of key to me - i mean, i don't want to say it's not a failing of the book - but it'd be hard for any book to have a more apt failing

xposts: lamp r u high right now?

my take on 2666 is that its sort of "about" the shaping of raw experience, the way we encounter and construct our world, the sorting systems we use, etc.--each main character, academic, journalist, policeman, novelist is a world-shaper (or some less corny term) charged with the ordering and structuring of the unbelievably senseless chaotic outside world. SO in some way i wonder how acutely bolano was aware of his 'flaw,' of the problems that nabisco describes, i mean, i dont wonder, i KNOW he was aware of it, cause he was a smart guy to say the least, but (and i say this without having read savage detectives so for all i know the same concerns are being addressed) its clearly something that he considers at the heart of what hes doing

xp ya the creation of art in the face of some kind of terrible murderous nihilism thats in some way equivalent to LYFE in the broad sense is bolanoid to the extreme it seems to me

thomp im just pretty sad because ilx poster nabisco is a professor and general smart guy - and i feel like he just doesnt "get it" but maybe that means that i dont "get it" - for the record.

i think theres a strong strain of corniness in bolano like a trust exercise about falling backwards thats a lot less corny when u r falling or failing in the space btw shrugging your shoulders and cheerful, hands-y landing. savage detectives is about a lot of things not one or two things cleanly parceled i guess sure this could be a difficult weakness for the reader making minute and careful judgements all the time - these book ppl are so sloppy!!!!

Truth To be Told!!!! i identified a lot with the watchmen's "inarticulate howls" which is pretty lame but there it is the black (dark?) getting blacker (darker?) &c and &c and &c

wow, excellent take on 2666 max. i don't think world shaper is a corny term either, seems somewhat accurate? haven't read The Savage Detectives but from what people have told me, i don't think i'd like it.

also, i dig wild out there writing but unless there's a system/scaffolding in place (and world shaper can certainly be that), like nabisco says, after awhile, in 2666, it felt like a flaw or a writing tic and became too noticeable

I'm 2/3 of the way through 2666 so I can't comment with any authority but it seems like the value of what he's doing is inextricably bound up with how he's doing it.

no doubt if he had lived longer and it went through a couple of more iterations it would be a stronger novel, and a candidate for one of the GOAT. but I find myself quibbling about 3-5 page stretches rather than with larger sections or the overall enterprise so far.

i wrote a blog post about 2666 when i first finished it thats not specifically relevant to this topic of conversation but could be applied toward it: http://maxread.net/mindgrapes/books/2666/

btw sorry for linking to my blog and having a blog and even using the word blog and being alyve

never apologize for having a blog with the word mind grapes in it

haha many clarifications:

- I am so definitely not a professor
- I so definitely don't imagine that Bolano was unaware of this quality in his writing
- I also definitely do not think that mimetic capturing of diffuse or chaotic LIFE is in any way mutually exclusive of "sorting" on the author's part -- the process of writing is inherently a matter of organizing a reader's experience, and that experience can be organized for the purpose of presenting diffusion or chaos
- When I talk about "sorting" I am not talking about visible structure or the creation of a reader-friendly experience but basically just the sense of effectively drawing out or organizing meaning, or even just a sense of meaning, which I think Bolano does extremely well through the bulk of the book, which is obviously a lot of why the portions that don't achieve this seem less like aesthetic choices and more like portions of the writing that just aren't firing as well, you know?
- Part of why I said a writer's "flaw" isn't his/her "failing" is that yes, usually that thing is part and parcel of what a writer is trying to achieve and what they do well
- I am not presuming to "workshop" Bolano here, just attempting to describe what it was that made me think, through some portion of my reading experience, that I was turning out not to be a fan

^^ sorry that is long, but if I were surer of my understanding of the terms "imitatio" versus "mimesis" it would have been longer and way worse

it is also probably worth noting that I have only read Savage Detectives (and not 2666) and I'm pretty sure I'm having this conversation with a few people who have only read 2666 (and not Savage Detectives)

i think i may be the only one that has read both probably why my posts are so fluid and accurate

I can't read your posts in bullet point format, nabisco, paragraphs only please.

on some level the book's about our shifting, restless, relentless quest for the unknowable and providing a handy-dandy hook to hang it all on would seem like a capitulation for the reader's desire for sense to be made. and that might sound like a copout to forgive a writer's excesses but I don't think bolano's just flexing style muscles here.

he's clearly influenced by lynch and it's interesting because the arguments about bolano's excesses are similar to the ones made about lynch's. 2666 and inland empire strike me as related works, both inherently and in the way people react to them.

lol i will admit that i am trying to turn nabiscos salient point about the writerly mechanics of savage detectives into a discussion about the metaphyiscs of presence and absence in 2666

haha lookit, I strive to be open-minded and to confess those things I do not understand as well as I could, but I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about" to suddenly solve the experience of those 150 pages or so where I just didn't think the writing was working as well

(If we want to get really professorial we could go into this, which is actually from an abstract of a thesis by someone who I think once posted to ILX: Michel Jeanneret has defined imitatio as the replication of pre-existing literary forms . . . and mimesis as the physical replication of the real world. . . . What Jeanneret cleverly shows is that imitatio and mimesis are actually mutually dependent. Without mimesis, imitatio is the lifeless replication of mere form; without imitatio, mimesis is the mechanical generation of indigestible data. -- basically this seems right to me and I think I experienced like 150 pages of Savage Detectives that felt like they swung a bit too hard into the, umm, hahaha, visceral realism of pure mimesis, which even if we stipulate that this is a profound aesthetic choice I just kinda don't think was very, umm, good?)

hmm nabisco if you want i will try to explain the concept of "meaning" to u from plato to the present, maybe that would help

oh so thats what deeznuts has been up to in his absence!

How awesome! deeznuts sd to me, that u have asked for pencil & paper

nabisco maybe if you listed the page numbers where the writing wasn't working for you we could get to the bottom of this

pps 15-35, 112, 125-137, 199, 211-253, etc

as the replication of pre-existing literary forms . . . and mimesis as the physical replication of the real world

poll

shit forgot the other option for the poll

imitatio

i have read the both of the books. no, wait, i still didn't finish 2666.

i haven't really felt like investing falling-backwards-into levels of trust into anything i've read/seen/heard lately, which is why i've spent so much time this year on things i don't really feel tempted to get into in that way, like anthony powell and jrpgs.

let's just go read max's blog

haha lookit, I strive to be open-minded and to confess those things I do not understand as well as I could, but I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about" to suddenly solve the experience of those 150 pages or so where I just didn't think the writing was working as well

― nabisco, Monday, July 13, 2009 4:29 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fwiw tho homie i dont think any of us are trying to "solve" anything for u so much as attempting to encompass ur personal experience of bolano into a set of larger ideas abt his writing and themes and how and why it works, that being said im more than happy to tell u about heraclitus if ud like

y'know i saw this:

I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about"

and thought it was a snarky comment at me, because i thought i'd said something about the failing-or-flaw of bolano's that nabisco is talking about is what the savage detectives was about; then i scrolled up and saw i hadn't even phrased it that way at all

anyway it's about 600 pages

i still want find someone who has seen the riddles in the end section before reading the book.

one of those abouts should be an "about".

BLOG My BLOG Blog BLOG Links BLOG To BLOG Max's BLOG Blog BLOG Now BLOG . BLOG

max there better not be any 2666 spoilers in yr blog

uh theres like one mild hinted-at spoiler in a footnote i think

Look for about 100,000 new hits per day thanks to my linkage, Max. That's what I like to call my "reader runoff".

Well now I mostly want to know how strongly I should consider reading 2666, given that there was like 1/5th of Savage Detectives where I kind of thought Bolano was being a bit of a bore (somewhere in the manner of people who have a lots of stories about doing drugs but the stories don't add up to much, and it's possible you just had to be there)

xpost - I didn't mean that all snarky, I just meant that my complaint was maybe (like Max says) more mechanical than thematic, and so I'm resistant to "but you're not getting X" as a rejoinder, I guess? Whatever.

turns out 2666 is just one long bob newhart dream where he wakes up at the end, whew

nerd-o loves his book-y book imo

also: I think I experienced like 150 pages of Savage Detectives that felt like they swung a bit too hard into the, umm, hahaha, visceral realism of pure mimesis, which even if we stipulate that this is a profound aesthetic choice I just kinda don't think was very, umm, good?

okay i was assuming u meant the part of the book i quoted maybe u didnt but i still think this is a weird judgment 2 make weird clause to stipulate weird pause to deflect away u r misunderstanding ^_^

nabisco i am obviously totally unqualified to tell you how much youd like 2666 since i never read savage detectives but i think that 2666's specific five-part structure (and in the case of the one about the crimes the individual murder-based structure) help avoid some of the problems youre talking about; that being said, the book is hardly absent those moments/stretches where youre just kind of like... "oh." i remember the last 10+ pages being like that, which was really frustrating at the time but which i have since rationalized away due to special postmodern arguing tactics such as "oh if you were frustrated by the end it was because you didnt GET it"

2666 is worth reading, strictly for The Part About The Crimes

also--i mean this in a totally real way--sometimes reading stuff you don't connect with all the way can help your brain grow and causes you to think about stuff in a way that you wouldn't with a different book

that is what you tell people when they catch you re-reading Twilight, isn't it

Look for about 100,000 new hits per day thanks to my linkage, Max. That's what I like to call my "reader runoff".

― save your lover! (Z S), Monday, July 13, 2009 4:43 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

by runoff do you mean overflow or some online version of white flight

i assumed he meant semen

I liked "The Savage Detectives" and the first section of 2666 well enough, but I had to abandon the 2nd section of 2666 to read other stuff and now find I'm not really motivated to go back to it. I'll no doubt pick it up and give it another chance, but I'll be surprised if I don't decide I'd be likely to get more pleasure from other books.

I read both but don't have smart words bout them

yes u do i can feel it

I liked books 2-3 of 2666! tbh book 5 is the part that's slowing me down.

2666 is worth reading, strictly for The Part About The Crimes

instead of "strictly" I'd say "especially"

I don't know exactly what this is but I got a free galley proof of "The Skating Rink" at ALA

i don't know what that is but i'm jealous.

reading 2666 & Savage Detectives was like the Cien años moment I had at 12 and the La ciudad y los perros moment i had when i was 18, the Pedro Páramo moment i had at 20 etc. Renewed my love of Latin American letters. Not to say that there's not been a lot to take notice of in the interim, even old Marito Vargas Llosa is still cranking out good books, but, e.g. Lemebel is no Bolaño. I'm not really sure if I can put in to words how awesome he is.

"the skating rink" was great. it's very different from savage detectives and 2666: shorter (less than 200 pgs), only has three narrators, and tells a much more direct story. probably more "conventional," but i enjoyed it a lot.

It looks really interesting--I think I'm going to have to get it.

Yeah, Skating Rink's right up there w/ his best novellas. Only ones I haven't read yet are the Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star. Would anyone who has read those strongly recommend them? So far, Amulet was the weakest - still solid just seemed to cover a lot of the same territory as SD.

nazi literature is a great idea, when i flicked through a copy it made me sad i knew so little about s. american lit

spotify keeps advertising the paperback of 2666: it seems weird, that it does

Not that I know an awful lot about Latin American Lit, but I saw these bunch of essays on it that might be prove to be a good point of departure. The author is a playwright and novelist (really a playwright: Konfidenz is a play trapped inside a novel, if that makes sense)

Just got 'Skating Rink' in the post last night--looking forward to it.

nazi literature is a great idea, when i flicked through a copy it made me sad i knew so little about s. american lit

every book i've read by bolano makes me feel this way. i have a suspicion it makes most s. american readers feel the same way.

I found these essay/review quite nice (there's a nice review of 'the skating rink' as well):

http://quarterlyconversation.com/roberto-bolano-the-geometry-of-his-fictions

good timing -- I just picked up Distant Star from the library yesterday (2666 has been sitting on my shelf mocking me since last christmas, so I decided to start small). read about half of it last night; really enjoying it so far.

I liked the Skating Rink; as one reviewer said, it seemed like he had fun writing it, and you'll have fun reading it, and I did. Distant Star is a good place to start with him; that's his tightest book I think, with the least amount of (as another reviewer wrote:) "extraneous details that actually turn out to be extraneous." Of course some of his stories are pretty tight; Last Evenings on earth is another good starting point

Whaddya think of By Night In Chile? Just got that one from the library, although I'm too busy with school work to start on it just yet...

I also picked up Romantic Dogs, and it's quite good, despite seeming at times like a Latin American version of my least-favorite variety of hard-boiled American tough-guy poetry.

By Night In Chile is great. Probably the best of his novellas. I'm more a fan of his big messy novels so you should start on 2666 or Savage Detectives asap.

"the skating rink" was great. it's very different from savage detectives and 2666: shorter (less than 200 pgs), only has three narrators, and tells a much more direct story. probably more "conventional," but i enjoyed it a lot.

skating rank was p amazing

Yeah, Skating Rink was great and the short story collection, Last Evenings on Earth, is up there with his best. He's a great short story writer. A lot of his novels tend to have a bunch of short story digressions that work perfectly within the whole.

Been thinking about -- ever since the great Bolano backlash of 2009 -- what it is that I enjoy personally about Bolano(I've read his big novels and a few of the smaller). Seems to me that the primary pleasure I get from him is largely formal. The self-contained and cross-referential universe he creates, the epistolary novel's degeneration into a mass of random voices in Savage Detectives, the pages long sentences and novel length paragraphs, these are the things that I've found myself really enjoying and remembering from Bolano. The strange thing is they aren't the kinds of things I typically (ever) enjoy in contemporary novels, yet with Bolano I do. Wondering if anyone else has had this experience or if they find something else going on that I'm missing.

Just read Skating Rink, and it was rather ace--quite unlike what I was expecting (only having read 2666 and Nazi Literature before). I can see what Gregor means--there's stuff Bolano does I would normally roll my eyes at, and yet he gets away with it.

ever since the great Bolano backlash of 2009

wait, what?

ha!

finally finished part v of 2666 tonight. i took a break after the part about the murders which was incredibly powerful but left me too raw to continue for a short time. the ending is very sudden and well...possibly arbitrary, but there's something that feels very fitting about it.

i think i need to page through the entire thing, or maybe go back and re-read it in a month or two to try and wrap my head around it as one work, because while i enjoyed reading it and found it by turns dazzling, hilarious and incredibly moving, i can't really assimilate the five parts into a cohesive thematic or literary whole.

Another reason to love Bolano: http://latercera.com/contenido/1453_237403_9.shtml (link is in Spanish).

95 year-old Chilean "anti-poet" Nicanor Parra receives Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells in his home and she asks him "are you opposed to being made a millionaire?" A year later a new anthology of his work "Parranda larga" is being published by Alfaguera. Parra credits it to Bolano, saying that Balcells came to him because of Bolano and that before he was just one of 20 Chilean poets, and now Roberto has put him at the head-of-the-table.

I think i'll be purchasing this, at the usual exorbitant price that books command in Chile, when i'm there later in the year.

http://www.alfaguara.com/uploads/imagenes/libro/portada/201003/portada-parranda-larga-antologi-poetica_grande.jpg

oh typo, alfaguara

I read about the price of books in Chile mentioned here amongst other things.

What is the reception of Bolano in his own country?

can't really answer that but last time i was there, a year and a half ago, there were some pieces in the newspapers - el mercurio and la tercera: the two most widely-read papers - about his international success, including his success in English translation. They weren't particularly large pieces but they were happy to claim Bolano and his success for Chile, despite it being somewhat problematic to call him Chilean without some qualifier.

how expensive are books over there? and can you get copies in english there jim? that looks perty.

in that link xyzzzz posted it says that a slim paperback is about £15, and that seems to be about right if memory serves. Keeping in mind that most things in Chile are a lot cheaper than they are here (bottle of spirits for £3 so i definitely couldn't live there without dying!).

No english translation i'm afraid.

We will be publishing Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich—our first serialized novel in forty years—with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/09/a-year-of-bolano-announcing-our-spring-issue/

OK, this book sounds very much like my cup of tea

Reading Dorfman's Hard Rain at the mo - v pre-Bolano, who surely must have read this - starts off talking about how the dictatorship apes Nazi Germany in torture techniques, then follows it up w/a discussion on Chilean/Latin novels of the period (and how he/his character failed to publish a novel). The third chapters is introducing characters (who are just names).

Bolano comes across as a much better teller, so far (Dorfman was just as much a playwright).

In Spain, 'Los sinsabores del verdadero policía' by RB has just been published. I finished it last week and I think it's really good.

I assume it'll be getting a book pub once the Paris Review finishes serialising it

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

From The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy

One hundred pages into 2066. Wish me luck!

hey so am I

well like 120

2666, rather

can we make it a competition? that way I might actually finish the book

I don't mean like 'who can read 300 pages a day' I mean like if you post your progress you will guilt me into catching up

thoughts so far?

mostly just happy they finally got to mexico

It gets (even) better from here on, keep going! Although not all in Mexico.

I just got past the scene in which they meet Jones the painter.

so many great little scenes that pop up in my head 2 years after reading it.

i still have yet to start part 3.

is that one about the professor? i think that might have been my least favourite, but they are all worthwhile

was just thinking about rereading savage detectives but im p much illiterate now

just after that, the reporter.

i love sd & 2666

2666 was so enveloping, i almost feel like im getting deja vu of some irl shit when i randomly recall parts of the book (thankfully not the part about the crimes, though)

I'm almost done with the Amalfitano section.

I'm thinking past 2666. Besides The Skating Rink, which other short novels should I try? I loved By Night in Chile, my favorite so far.

I really like his short story collections, esp "Last Evenings on Earth"

'Nazi Literature in the Americas' is great, if you don't have a problem with unconventional structure

yeah 'nazi literature' was the one i liked best, was sorta lukewarm on 'skating rink', really, i had a hard time taking it seriously

what did u like about 'chile' alfred? its so difft from everything else

He found a correlative for the intensity of the narrator's recollections in feverish prose. It's one of the best sustained compressed flights of invention I've read.

I'm halfway through the Fate section of 2666, btw.

I haven't had time/energy to read, I doubt I'll ever catch up

maybe I'll try saturday

Is Amulet underrated? Certainly looks like it. Not as good as By Night in Chile but better than just a rehearsal for that concentrated burning fever (actually don't know the chronology).

Also is anyone working on a biography at all? Don't do biogs but I'd think about it for this guy.

I know Melville House published a book of interviews which includes a lot of biographical info: http://mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=313

Now that I've started "The Part About The Crimes" some questions:

I wasn't clear exactly (I lost concentration) how the unfortunately named Fate wound up in Saint Teresa: the boxing story to which he was assigned changed to an investigation of the murders? Also: how is Rosa relevant?

I know Melville House published a book of interviews which includes a lot of biographical info: http://mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=313

― the most cuddlesome bug that ever was borned (James Morrison), Friday, March 18, 2011 Bookmark

Thanks James - don't think I've even read an interview w/him.

there's a Spanish bundle with interviews as well:
http://www.ediciones.udp.cl/colecciones/huellas/braithwaitebolano.jpg

A geometry of Bolano:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/roberto-bolano-the-geometry-of-his-fictions

OK so I made it past "The Part About the Crimes" and am almost hundred pages deep into the Archimboldi section, specifically the Ivanov part.

My question: do these five fragments cohere?

I'm only just at part 3

I saw someone in the subway reading it the other day, while I had my copy out. I almost said something but that would have been potentially awkward.

sort of? xp

OTM:

the fake robert rodriguez anecdote is great

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan),

Also: So far I'm enjoying Part 5 best.

I'm about 130 pgs from the end, and I hate to discuss books before I'm finished, but I gotta talk to somebody since I've lived with this book for nine days.

So far it's been perverse the way Bolano has developed characters as promising as Lalo Cura, the female Mexican reporter (and her female lover?), and Klaus Haas, then either dropped them or buried their arcs in reams of prose.

Also: it helped that I've spent bored moments at work the last six days watching old Robert Stack-hosted "Unsolved Mysteries" clips; they prepared me for "...Crimes."

So far it's been perverse the way Bolano has developed characters as promising as Lalo Cura, the female Mexican reporter (and her female lover?), and Klaus Haas, then either dropped them or buried their arcs in reams of prose.

this was simultaneously maddening and wonderful, in that i kind of cherish what we got of them even more, and kept anticipating their return. like a literary cocktease.

In 'The Return' there is a story on Lalo Cura, and in 'Los Sinsabores...' the main characters are Amalfitano and his daughter Rosa. There, the characters are much more 'deep' in the sense that you get to know them better than in '2666', where they seem to pass by and are dropped. Not that that is a bad thing though. That's actually why I like to reread Bolaño's books, they all seem to give you clues for why certain things are happening in the other books.

Yeah the girl hiding in the toilet in The Savage Detectives is also in Amulet.

Yes the sections do cohere (those from the second half of the book especially) by the end. Although it's worth remembering that 2666 is technically unfinished and we don't know exactly what the final draft of the last section might have looked like.

I FINISHED IT.

The last part is def the best. The digressions are beautifully timed: loved the endless sentence relating one of the Sisyphus myths; the crucified Romanian general; Archimboldi's affair with the Baroness. The last twenty pages deftly tie up a couple of strands.

Whether the novel as an entity works I'm not sure yet. I have to think about it.

one of the things I liked about 2666 was when it seemed like it was drifting or starting to become a slog, these luminescent moments would happen like the romanian general/baroness stuff, or archimboldi's underwater dreams

my favorite part is still the part about the crimes, when ppl describe it they make it sound like nonstop clinical descriptions of the murders when it's so much richer than that, so many characters floating in and out, sweeping in scope, etc

I thought there was another book of 2666 that was slated to be published?

I sort of hope that's not true.

Pondering the title and the epigraph have been absorbing me since I finished the book. I'm sure it coheres but I'm not totally sure I can describe how.

The murders section is much too long, but I can't figure out where I'd start cutting.

That length is a necessary part of its effect I think.

Oh sure, but I wasn't even repulsed after a while, just bored.

a necessary part of its effect etc

"An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" isn't it?

haven't heard anything since this report back from 2009

Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, reported La Vanguardia.

The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/10/spain-roberto-bolantildeo

one of my fav parts is the section on the journalist who starts in detroit & goes to see the boxer & ends up falling for that girl & almost gets killed or something? idk i always remember my fav parts as if they were dreams i had

That's by far my favourite section but not sure I could really say why. Maybe because it seems realest? The bits in the various sections about just driving round Santa Teresa at night, ending up going for a drink or something to eat, they were my thing.

That section is the one that feels most pulp thriller to me - and I'm not holding it against Bolano because I'm sure that's what he was going for.

It's been a couple years, but wasn't there a whole section about a professor who hung a math book on the cloths line and heard voices. I remember him being very reminiscent of the father who eventually goes crazy in the first section of Savage Detectives.

Yep – it was in the second section. Then when Fate starts finagling the professor's daughter the book comes up again.

you guys are making me want to reread this

important related poll: 2666 poll

I already started rereading bits of it on the bus.

When Bolaño introduces Lotte in the last third, and you realize where he's going with this plot strand, I got a little buzz.

About to finish Distant Star, a quick one-day read in case anyone was curious. He's very good on describing figures of authority, specifically policemen.

i read a book called 'the daughters of juarez' about the murders that have taken place there over the past couple of decades and was surprised by the IRL presence of a klaus haas figure suspected of many of the deaths.

still have yet to read the last section, it's one of those books i've been doing over a very long period of time. reading the first two parts poolside on a windy night while at a desolate inn outside of palm springs was probably the most memorable experience i've had as far as the setting heightening and ameliorating the effects of a book.

Wonder what people in Mexico think of 2666? Especially that 4th part.

Distant Star was my first Bolano.

Do we have any Mexicans? If we set up a Spanish De Subjectivisten, maybe they would come.

the spanish wiki page is less helpful than i might have hoped, in that regard. it won a chilean prize and a spanish one, and apparently there is a theatrical adaptation.

Finished Distant Star yesterday morning. Entertaining but minor; it plays with a few motifs developed fully in The Savage Detectives.

What's next?

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbzi6h_2666-bolano-rigola-fsi-2010-mc93_creation

If we set up a Spanish De Subjectivisten, maybe they would come.

We'd get weekly updates from the Argentinian league hooray! Football and literature are what binds Europe and South America together.

Went to the library, saw and picked up Monsieur Pain (another 100 page novella, doesn't have an entry for it embedded in the Bolano wiki page, though it has its own page). In the one page note to it Bolano says it was written in '82, won a couple of provincial prizes...so he obviously wrote a bit of prose before turning to it, finally and full time, in the early 90s.

Kinda fascinating about how much there is to come. Wiki is listing one more novel/novella, one further short story collection, one non-fiction and a couple of further poetry collections kicking about in the Spanish are bound to be translated.

While half-despairing and thinking of many other authors that could use that kind of committed publishing of translated works I'd say its 1st time I've had this feeling w/an author that I'd want to hunt down every single thing, too..

this from his book of essays coming out soon - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/22/who-would-dare/

Daniel Alarcón reads Bolaño's “Gómez Palacio”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/03/28/110328on_audio_alarcon

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/roberto-bolano-edge-precipice/

Paper and pages keeps being devoured by Bolano's pen.

i bought a collection of all the stories that appear in english in the volumes last evenings on earth, the return, and the insufferable gaucho in barcelona last year. sometimes speaking spanish is awesome.

between parenthesis was great. added about 20 books to my amazon wish list because he makes everything he reviews sound so awesome.

I ignored this guy for years but then I saw this TV doc on him and it almost made me cry at various points (happy tears). Did I see the link here? Sorry if that's the case

(in Spanish)
http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/television/imprescindibles-roberto-bolano-21-10-10/908584

I just started Los Detectives Salvajes, it's a bit silly but good fun.

Great thread. key points incl Alfred's saying that one of the sections seems too long but he can't figure out what to cut and Max re it's *about* processing big raw chunks. Also reaching "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom", considering and tracing so many people, places and other things around those polarities, which go back to cave paintings to some extent and forward through the most popular and (also for other reasons) enduring chunks of culture, incl sacred texts, however you define those. Also lots of stuff:
To make a bigger book, indeed a series of books, in his final, disobeyed instructions, to leave more of a legacy for his kids;
Because he can, in his lordly way (looking down at the well-behaved minor works, incl those merely perfect, rather than rocketing into the unknown, "Metamorphosis" vs The Trial--and that's if he likes you)
Something he mentions about "treading water", and I thought of something about the fly treading buttermilk 'til it turns to butter, and they fly's on top. Seems like he could also be in the butter, as in amber, and I bet Bolano would think if that to, but still think it's worth a shot, what else can a poor fly do? True.
oh yeah, and this description from Amazon:
Publication Date: November 13, 2012

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished, novel.
The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers paintings to wealthy Texans—that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi (sic), a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life.

Bolaño’s last, unfinished, novel

Not sure I believer this--there seems to be an inexhaustible supply. Not that I'm complaining.

Um - is this an expansion of one of the sections from 2666? Because that just sounds like Part 2 or 3 - i forget which.

Let's call it his next last novel. Might be an expansion of Part 2, yeah, with Amalfitano, daughter Rosa, dead women, but I don't recall a mention of flight from scandal, Sorcha or Castillo, and Bolano's got a way with deep expansions and/or digressions. He already had intermittently recurring characters in some stories published during his lifetime, so this might be s stand-alone text, also adding to our overview, though apparently unfinished. What the heck, even the finished stuff has a lot of openings.

Anyone else here read Antwerp? I read on holiday this year and its, ahem, loose.

Last one I read was his book of essays which I enjoyed. Also read one of the poems from tres about a band on a tour going from Argentina to central America that was pretty awesome.

just downloaded a copy of Antwerp and might try reading it while on holiday next week. will report back!

will try and embrace its looseness, tho it's hard not to let suspicions of sketchiness creep in ime.

xposted from the what are you reading thread -

Antwerp by Bolaño and I'm struggling a bit. There is perhaps just about enough of an accumulation of empty houses, empty streets, edge-of-town spaces, woods, repeated mechanised woman/man interactions (lighting a cigarette for the other), the recurring hunchback to see patterns emerge, if not a narrative.

and with the continual reconfiguration of these elements you get a strong aesthetic sense of the desuetude of a desiccated international zone of being - people drifting places, borders, policemen, observers, trains, the sea, temporary encounters in temporary places that cease to be as quickly as they are brought into existence. (i'd just been reading it in a London restaurant, and when i walked out onto the street again, i had the peculiar sensation of being in a foreign city, which i guess I may be able to credit the book for - equally it might just be the experience of eating and reading alone and stepping out into unusually mild and humid evening).

But really that's me working pretty hard at it - the atomised monotony of the text may have a point, but it's not enjoyable to read, and i was reminded of that crypto-arabic proverb, 'he talks like a sheep shits, at random and everywhere'. ('loose' Matt DC described it on the Bolaño thread and that was being v kind). i realise that's the point (so what?) but none of this seems compensated for by any intensity of purpose such as might make a virtue out of the stylistic pain. it feels portentous, unwitty. Some of that may be the translation I guess:

Then an artillery barracks, through the open gates of which I could see a group of recruits smoking, their bearing far from military.

a sentence which i can hear my great aunt joyce saying, followed by a 'well I mean...'.

wd be interested to hear from people who like this, cos I feel suspicious of my kneejerk impulse to dismiss, but it's a tedious slog for me at the moment - thank god it's not very long.

Will get onto this. Skating Rink is one I forgot almost as soon as I finished reading, had a similar experience of toil.

He is the one writer published in the last 20 years I think I would read anything by, mostly because it adds to the themes explored in his best books.

Have had my patience tried by much of his posthumous stuff but not 'The Third Reich', I loved that and it flew by for me.

I enjoyed Antwerp, but it's a poem, not a story, full of beautiful images, half-remembered, from a dream or a film seen long ago.

I'm really looking forward to Woes of the True Policeman. The Amalfitano part was my favorite section of 2666.

I started enjoying it a lot more after I posted how much I wasn't enjoying it.

the point about a poem is an interesting one, Cherish, cos I was sitting there thinking hmm shd this probably be a short poem? What's the stuff here that cdnt be in a poem. the accumulated stylistic monotony (I mean that neutrally) is one thing + now I'm getting on with it a bit better it feels about the right length for its fragments. getting a feel for this non place. fragmentary articulated film images.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/23/roberto-bolano-the-return-review

^short story collection

See there is a bk by Clarice Lispector out so maybe I ought to switch my attention from one dead South American author to another.

There are $ books by Clarice Lispector out:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BBTxGzCEvTc/T7sUCVbtG1I/AAAAAAAAK-8/btRpGOvxZMY/s400/lispectors+1.JPG
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I7jugr599uY/T7sUEhFMu2I/AAAAAAAAK_I/nuR2RBv5NTk/s400/914.jpg

Got to hit my library again :)

i have the passion according to gh next to my bed right now, ive tried to get into it but really can't.

try this on for a first paragraph:

------ I'M SEARCHING, I'M SEARCHING. I'M trying to understand. Trying to give what I've lived to somebody else and I don't know to whom, but I don't want to keep what I lived. I don't know what to do with what I lived, I'm afraid of that profound disorder. I don't trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because i didn;t know how to live it, lived as something else? That's what I'd like to call disorganization, and I'd have the confidence to venture on, because i would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. Id rather call it disorganization because I don't want to confirm myself in what I lived - in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don't have the fortitude for another.

My reaction would be to keep reading to know what happened to her and how she lived, but maybe that's just me..

it goes on in that vein, i find it a real slog. the fact that i started it after reading the unnameable and it somehow makes that book seem a light, breezy read is pretty daunting to me. going to read something a bit easier instead, got mao II by delillo sitting around so might give that a bash instead.

back on topic, ive read one of stories alluded to in that piece about that new bolano collection (the one featuring necrophilia), but not the others. the way his stories are collected in spanish and english differs, i have a collection called cuentos that comprises a large chunk of his published short fiction but i really want to read the rest. i may even prefer his short stories to his novels, altho ive only read 2666 and savage detectives.

and 2666 is p much my favourite book of the last few decades so maybe im talking shite.

probably tied with infinite jest, jesus my taste is insufferable!

the third reich!!!

i never thought about it but nazis were kind of a wellspring for this guy huh

only totally

Certainly. His fascination w/Ernst Junger (a favourte of Adolf and the question of whether he was a fascist or not) ties into that.

at 135 pages i am less into the third reich than i was at 35 i guess

yup that was definitely a desk novel

So in 2666 and related narratives people struggle with something they're in the midst of, a part of living and killing history on the other side(s) of a curtain, just across the border. Call it Murder, Inc, but a non-profit, just played for kinky kicks, apparently. A hobby of gangsters, maybe. Nothing personal, just insatiably twisted. Spooky in a way a grand visionary conspiracy isn't. Not that the Nazis etc. don't figure, but we keep coming back to Santa Teresa. All those invalid writers in asylums, etc, have connections, even though they don't know it, and despite their lines of magnetism (they're figures of fascination for other characters), those are the same lines that lead us back. Even Archimboldi, who's lived through so much, and still roves the periphery of Europe at 80, is drawn into Santa Teresa, to sort it all out, or deal with it as he can. Disappears into that, as far as we know now (but I haven't read Woes of the True Policeman yet). It's the way things are.

As it still does occasionally, 2666 is finding its way through the traffic in my head tonight: the onslaught of monologues, but not to overload like in those early DeLillos: all the words find their voices again, still testifying, still trying to drown out the silence (of the killers, for instance, but also everything else waiting indifferently, obvliously, and thus ominously, at least for those of us who need the attention,or think we do)

this book is pretty unforgettable, i agree. i prefer early delillo though, to bolano's relentless, seemingly humorless bleakness. he really wants the reader to feel, palpably, the overwhelming cruelty that exists in the world, which is irreconcilable with most of the ways that people like to think about things. and this is, in a way, an ethical project... especially if it can sensitize people to the suffering of others in a way that allows them to be better "global citizens" or something. the issue is that, for bolano, a disillusioned ex-marxist iirc, i suspect this is impossible... that we are already too far gone, already living in the apocalypse but just don't realize it. so in this sense, the book feels -- at times -- somewhat gratuitous, even sadistic. but that's a part of why it's so powerful.

(Not to dismiss early DeLillo--I was thinking of Americana and Great Jones Street, with many appealing set pieces, but they pile up)Tonight I'm thinking of the old witch lady on a Mexican talk show, who wants to drive the murdering bastards out; and the old African-American man, telling his story and how to eat right and live right--that's what I meant, at the moment I wrote it, by testifying, and it seemed like Bolano was gentle with those characters, and holding them up to say, "Hell yeah---see?" Raging in his cage, as much as an authorial god can allow himself to do (even if I didn't know he was dying, I think I would still think this) But yeah, by-his-bootstraps ex-Marxist exile still droppin' science etc, that too.

(dropping the other hobnail boot too; def relentless)

Like James Agee circa Let Us Now etc.: evan more than (or at least, in the midst of)art-in-your-face/King James Bible shitstorms/smell of brimstone looming, a gut reaction to the state of things is palpable.

maybe it's most similar to das kapital, especially the parts where marx leads you through the awful conditions of the factories and forces you, at the same time, to consider the relationships among people in a much bleaker way than you are accustomed to doing. so like, what you are seeing is in a sense familiar -- urban squalor in the case of marx, terrible violence in impoverished areas of latin america in bolano -- but due to the way it is presented, it is like you are seeing it all for the first time, and recognizing that you live in hell in a way that you haven't before. the main difference, i think, is that revolution/redemption seems out of reach in bolano's universe.

Yes, maybe especially like when Marx is writing with Engels. Also, it's like B.'s gotta be Walker Evans, seemingly austere, *and* Agee: deadpan and audacious. Dante and Virgil too (who are both Dante).

(but it can be pretty entertaining too, in different ways: the first section can seem like a Woody Allen movie at times, until...and no wonder that science fiction writer finally fell out of favor with Stalin!)

really concerned about the idea of bolano being 'humourless'

I think his is a kind of humorlessness that knows what humor is, and can mimic it, but ultimately the absurd elements if 2666 dont add up to levity, in my view.

Springtime 2010, and fancies lightly turn to what are you reading?

Interesting. I find lots of things, like Poe for instance, hilarious when other ppl dont comment as much on it. This wasnt my experience of 2666 though, clearly

'that's when the battle began. the visceral realists questioned álamo's critical system and he responded by calling them cut-rate surrealists and fake marxists. five members of the workshop backed him up; in other words, everyone but me and a skinny kid who always carried around a book by lewis carroll and never spoke.'

The Third Reich -- yea or nay?

Qualified yea - it's pretty obviously an earlier work while he was still finding his feet but the conceit is good and the central character is very funny. It's enjoyable enough if you don't expect anything near the level of The Savage Detectives or 2666.

Agreed, I enjoyed it. Sort of a mood piece, where the characters don't really act like humans but it's all internally consistent, reminded me of Lynch that way.

It also has the unexpected pleasure of Bolano talking about the Judge Dredd role-playing game

https://twitter.com/mookse/status/475153356780888064/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpgVddACIAAtp1h.jpg

epigraph for bolaño’s a little lumpen novelita

Artaud otm

Hey! Some of my best friends are pigs.

I had a strange Bolaño-moment this week. In Bolaño's ´Between Parentheses´ he writes about the movie and book ´84 Charing Cross Road'. Watching that movie this week, I noticed that someone in the moview asks about a book on Archimboldi in a book shop. In the movie, Archimboldi's a graphic artist but I guess that's where Bolaño took his name from for ´2666´ (I havent´t read the book ´84 Charing Cross Road´ so I have no idea if his name is mentioned there).

I just finished Between Parenthesis. I'll need to find that film.

As a result of finishing the book I was doing some Bolano research tonight (or googling). Many (if not all the pieces) were written while he was feverishly writing 2666, so actually this turns into a keeper, something to read in parallel.

I made a little list of stuff to get (or keeping until it is translated):

Rodrigo Fresan - Mantra (not translated, although Kensington Gardens has been translated)
Juan Rodolfo Wilcock - The Temple of Iconoclasts
Jaime Bayly - I Love My Mommy (not trans.?)
Roberto Arlt - short stories (not sure, but there is a bk)
Rodrigo Rey Rosa - (couple of things knocking about)
Carmen Boullosa - (as above)

Bolano is clearly made by Argentinian writing from the 30s and 40s (the group around Borges although he talks about Macedonio Fernandez (whose Museum of Eterna's Novel has been translated), then Sabato (keep meaning to read The Tunnel), Arlt, Borges of course (he loves his poetry which isn't as well regarded in English at least) (he is the absolute central figure and why not..), Bioy, Ocampo (NYRB really helping here, the latter just issued).

Bolano does have this love/hate r/ship w/the Latin American boom, seems to love as originally conceived but then hate with an equal zeal because of what it became in the hands of Isabel Allende and the like. Then again he seemed to have made a ton of friends through writing - so combative but v sociable too. Really good newspaper reviewer.

On the poetry front he idolizes Parra (whom I've read now), likes Lihn (not a hope in finding) and then Catalan and Spanish poets I'm not going to find.

Sorry Macedonio Hernandez is the person who invented Borges

that movie is available in the itunes store. i need to reread ´Between Parentheses'.

apparently he was friends with javier cercas, who casts him in his novel ´soldiers of salamis´. i think the swordfighting-on-the-beach scene in ´the savage detectives´ is about him and enrique vila-matas.

there´s a spanish book called ´bolaño por si mismo´ which is quite good if you want to know more about his influences.

apparently he was friends with javier cercas, who casts him in his novel ´soldiers of salamis

Yeah Bolano reviews the book in Between Parentheses - such a strange reading experience..

like the poem from romantic dogs you posted several thousand years ago upthread, xyzzzz. waiting to pick it up from the library, read some in a bookstore & felt prepped to really like it.

Cool, I actually have only read a couple of poems from that myself.

I do not own any Bolano, its all read from libraries. The copy I see of 2666 is so horrible looking though.

The Rebeca Nodier bookstore is tended by Rebeca Nodier herself, an old woman in her eighties who is completely blind and wears unruly white dresses that match her dentures; armed with a cane and alerted by the creaky wooden floor, she hops up and introduces herself to everyone who walks into her store, I'm Rebeca Nodier, etc., finally asking in turn the name of the "lover of literature" she has the "pleasure of meeting" and inquires what kind of literature he or she is looking for. I told her that I was interested in my poetry, and to my surprise, Mrs. Nodier said all poets were bums but they weren't bad in bed. Especially if they don't have any money, she went on. Then she asked me how old I was. Seventeen, I said. Oh, you're still a pipsqueak, she exclaimed. And then: you're not planning to steal any of my books, are you? I promised her that I would rather die. We chatted for a while, and then I left.

thank you for that. Ms. Nodier deserves our boundless admiration.

There's now another theatrical adaptation of 2666 in Chicago, though this interview with its directors strangely never mentions the earlier attempt by Pablo Ley Fancelli and Alex Rigola in Barcelona, 2007: http://lithub.com/adapting-bolanos-unadaptable-masterpiece-for-the-stage/

i read Amulet last week and couldn't put it down. the reclusive painter honing in on Erigone and Orestes, Arturo Belano negotiating like he's in the mafia, the singing ghosts in the valley, Auxilio covering her missing teeth when she speaks. i enjoyed it despite not knowing anything about the Tlatelolco massacre, the topic the whole fucking book is dancing around. someday after i've learned one or two more things about the world i look forward to circling back to Amulet and reading it again.

the character of Auxilio was based off of the story of Alcira Soust Scaffo, who really did remain hidden in a bathroom for 15 days during the military's occupation of the university.

https://i.imgur.com/Rhl2fl6.jpg

https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Alcira-la-poeta-del-68-mexicano-entre-Roberto-Bolano-y-Jose-Revueltas

Distant Star is fuckin' great.

My favorite of his, so haunting and sad.

Been rereading Savage Detectives as well, now that I actually live in Mexico City it's so much fun recognizing all the places! Even the beginning has held up better than I thought, and how the second part gets more and more melancholy and mysterious as time moves on never fails to amaze me.

Had no idea I needed a novel about Roberto Bolaño, but holy shit, LAST WORDS ON EARTH by Javier Serena, translated by Katie Whittemore, coming from @open_letter this year is 🔥🔥🔥. Anyone who loves Bolaño or understands the uncompromising pursuit of literature will love this.

— Mark Haber (@markhaber713) April 28, 2021

After obsessing over this guy in my 30s, I honestly haven't thought much about him in a while. Mostly due to starting a family, but I also just burned out on him a bit. I should revisit one of his novellas. My favorite Bolano character type is the old friend/acquaintance who reappears in your life in an almost menacing way, now adrift and depressed, mumbling dark things to himself.

has much in common with Sebald in that respect

found out that a friend of mines parents are depicted in the savage detectives, in the first part of the book theyre part of the artistic milieu like a sculptor and... something, been a while since i read the book, and since he told me lol, not a close friend

Influencers!

lmao

Is that the foul-mouthed American woman?

yeah must be i know one of his parents is american

finishing up Distant Star rn, pretty good! I do like the concept of "how do you process it when someone in your little arts circle becomes a politically aligned psychotic murderer," because I am thinking of similar things now that I recently found out that someone I grew up with created a giant company that does new slavery or whatever.

for some reason this book is kinda reading like a musical to me, where things are happening in a semi-realistic way or whatever and then suddenly the plot takes off on these (kinda corny) flights of fancies and then comes down (like the skywriting poetry, or the the torture photography exhibit or w/e). Anyway, I tried to read him like 10-15 years ago and thought he was pretty overrated, couldn't get through anything, now I'm having a good time reading this book, not sure why. 10-15 years ago I was able to dive into Marias and Sebald and other more "it helps to be divorced to get it" authors, but whatever it's nice to have something to be into now.

"Aged 19, he ghosted the autobiography of Cliff Bastin, the former Arsenal and England player, and three years later wrote his first novel, The Reluctant Dictator (1952), about a footballer who becomes a leader of a south American republic."

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/may/18/brian-glanville-obituary