Roberto Bolano

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