Roberto Bolaño

[Refus de Sejour]

Speaking of bothersome sexual exploits. . .

I just got around to reading that story in The New Yorker, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," and I am just blown away. It is SO GOOD! It's only the second thing by Bola?o I've read - the other one being the short story "William Burns," also in The NY, which I also thought was fantastic.

The strange thing is, a while before reading those stories I tried to read the first chapter of 2999, but I just found it dull and lifeless, nothing like these two stories. Does the style change? Or are these two stories not typical of his work?

[Peeping Tom]

I think Bolano's "big" novels feed off his short stories, which are intense and incredibly good. They leave you breathless. In both of his two major works, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (not 2999 as you stated) there are numerous chapters and episodes that I re-discovered in one of his short stories that I read later on. This fascinates me because they're somehow all related. In the novel you're currently reading, 2666, the first chapter is probably the most conventional (at least that's the way it seems to me). And for many readers, it's their favorite section, precisely because it seems conventional. But there's a lot more to 2666, each of the five sections has a very different style, and sometimes seemingly different and unrelated narratives. So, keep reading. There's quite a lot more going on.

[Daniel del Real]

Prefiguration of Lalo Cura is an amazing short story. It reminded me so much The Book of Illusions from Auster. Bola?o did what Auster tried to do with silent movies with porn instead, but not typical porn. He adds the psychodelia, the surrealism and the atmosphere from a David Lynch movie into a porn film. Bola?o's is also better because he did what Auster should've done. Keep it short. While Auster bores you with so many descriptions of the Hector's movies Bola?o has the touch to put everything in just a few pages and leave the reader with the impact.

Regarding 2666, I think it has the same style than his short stories, but you have to go further in the book to get the similarities. If you want to get to the core of Bola?o's 2666 style with one chapter would be the equivalent of getting it in any of his short stories in 1 page. I recommend you continue, because as DB Cooper says, many of his short stories seem to get intertwined in the different books of the novel as it advances, creating a very rich web of stories and characters.

[Refus de Sejour]

I'm definately going to give 2666 another try (funny about the "2999"; I actually googled "Bolano 2999" to check I had it right, and came up with quite a few hits - guess I'm not the only one to be confused. . .). I read the short story "The Return" today (my local cafe gets Harpers in, albeit a few weeks late). Bizarre and perfect!

[Clarissa]

Reading 2666 at the moment. Came across this on BBC Online:

BBC News - Audio slideshow: The missing women of Mexico

Found it a bit weird that fact should reflect fiction so closely.(cf. Book 3 - The Part About Fate)

[lenz]

I thought the novel addressed that exact situation - not so weird or so fictional, then?

[Clarissa]

I didn't know that. The novel takes place in the early '90s. This BBC report was in 2010. Has it really been an ongoing thing all these years?

[miercuri]

It seems so. There's even a wiki entry on it
Female homicides in Ciudad Ju?rez - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Clarissa]

WOW! That was revealing. I never knew about these murders. Really thought by some bizarre coincidence, they were taking place now after Bolano's book.
Looking at all the films, newspaper articles that have appeared since the 1990s, I feel as if I have been living on the moon.
Thanks for that, Lenz and Mieruri!!!

[Refus de Sejour]

It's appalling that they're still going on.

I confess, I feel a little conflicted over getting such pleasure from a book grounded, however obliquely, in such horrible reality.

[Mirabell]

review of three new bolano translations

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/bo...html?ref=books

[Refus de Sejour]

Thanks for those, Mirabell.

[Daniel del Real]

El Gaucho Insufrible and The Return (Originally titled Assasin Whores) are short stories books with a similar quality. Some short stories are better than others but I can't tell which one is better. Probably the tale that gives name to the first one is the best of them all. However this is a very good example of Bola?o's skills as a short story writer.
Antwerp is a very strange literary exercise. It was his first attempt to write prose and it has to bee seen as an embryo of his forecoming works. Don't go to Antwerp if you're not a truly admirer of Bola?o, it can give a wrong impression of his books, specially if it's your first one.

[Clarissa]

Just finished 2666 - found the murders and sexual details a bit tiresome and repetitive.
Also wished it had been published in 5 separate volumes nstead of one huge doorstep So difficult to carry around.

[Mirabell]

here's a list of all Bolano writing that is available online
http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2010/09...f-roberto.html

poems, stories (LOTS!), letters and essays.

very cool.

[Daniel del Real]

An unpublished title by Roberto Bolaño will see the light this year. In January, Anagrama is publishing this new book, Los Sinsabores del Verdadero Policía (The Upsetting Experiences of the Truth Policeman) a novel written from the late 80's to late 90's. The novel is based in what later in 2666 would become, La Parte de Amalfitano, the shortest part of the book that deals with a Chilean profesor living in Santa Teresa and working for the University. This is supposed to be a skeleton, the raw structure of what later came to be 2666. Still this is no short book at 328 pages.
Here's the cover:


untitled.JPG

[Caodang]

It's wonderful, I wish I could get my hand on it right now

[Eric]

There was a review in this morning's paper about Bolaño's poetry. A collection called, in Swedish, Det okända universitetet (The Unknown University) has just been published. Evidently, the Spanish original versions of these poems appeared in 2007. The poems were written between the 1970s and 1994.

The reviewer, Sebastian Johans, of the UNT newspaper, appears to be in two minds about Bolaño. While he praises some aspects of the authors writings, he is a little cautious about all the hype surrounding his person and his early death. He goes on to discuss hype in the context of a number of Swedish authors and alsoJonathan Littell, the French-American Holocaust author.

Evidently, the first book of Bolaño's in Swedish translation was The Wild Detective back in 2007, published with a small publishing house called Tranan, not with one of the big conglomerates. But then, when a bigger publishing hosue realised that the author would sell, they took over, which in effect robbed Tranan of further income from Bolaño sales.

The reviewer suggests that the seeds of a lot of what Bolaño wriote in his prose was already present in his poems.

[Bubba]

I had been thinking about reviving this thread, which had been lying dormant for some time until Eric's post. I was going to do so, in part, to argue that the dearth of new posts on Bolaño's work was evidence that, as a writer, he has been a bit of a flavor of the month (mint chocolate chip, perhaps?). I don't really like a lot of Bolaño's work (though I think such stories as "Sensini" are excellent), but neither do I think it should drop off the radar, as it seems to be doing, so quickly. In short, the hype around Bolaño's work, engineered mostly, but not exclusively, by his American publishers and by American reviewers, brought Bolaño to the attention of a lot of readers who thought they saw what they wanted to find in his work and to readers who, such as the author of this review--a review despicable where it's not boring--seem to worry above all whether it's still "cool" to read Bolaño.

I would dearly love to see sales figures for English translations of Bolaño's work--I imagine that, as with so many books that are victims or beneficiaries of hype, they peaked early and have been in free fall ever since.

In the United States, the smallish publishers New Directions were the first to bring out Bolaño's books. But they were apparently outbid for the translation rights to the two big novels by the larger house Farrar, Straus & Giroux (foreign rights to Bolaño's work are handled for his estate by an agent whose real name escapes me just now; no matter, everyone knows him by his nickname, the Jackal). New Directions may well have been disappointed to be outbid for these books, but the house is unlikely, as Eric says of Sweden's Tranan, to be "robbed of further income from Bolaño sales." In fact, the hype that FSG whipped up for 2666 and The Savage Detectives, probably much bigger than anything New Directions could have created, could only help New Directions sell more of its own editions of Bolaño's books. New Directions, in short, is free riding.

[DB Cooper]

I dont think the interest is fading per se, but Bolano hasnt had a major work come out since 2666, which was a few years ago. There are tons of great authors whose threads only have a handful of posts here. When an author bursts on to the scene the interest does spike, and it will inevitably wane a bit also. Everybody was discovering him at the same time, so there were a lot of people reading his books at the same time, equals a boom in interest.