Roberto Bolano

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