Roberto Bolano

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.