Roberto Bolano

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?