Roberto Bolano

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 Baggaley bought The Third Reich, a novel completed by Bolaño shortly before his death in 2003 and as yet unpublished in any language, from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency.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