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A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008
Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008 Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008
San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008
Seattle Times Best Books of 2008
New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008
Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals." Robert Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He spent much of his adult life in Mexico and in Spain, where he died at the age of fifty. His novel The Savage Detectives was named one of the best books of 2007 by The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the PEN Translation Prize A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year
One of The Washington Post 10 Best Books of the Year
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year
A Village Voice Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman—these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared. Published posthumously, 2666 is, in the words of La Vanguardia, "not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature." "Bolaño was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as the head of the Swedish Academy has annoyingly but rightly pointed out, don't read much fiction in translation anyway. But when the first of Bolaño's major novels, The Savage Detectives, a massive, bizarre epic about a band of avant-garde Mexican poets, was published in the U.S. last year, it instantly became a cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics. Bolaño's second (and last) major novel is titled 2666, and if anything, it is even more massive and more bizarre. It is also a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year."—Lev Grossman, Time "Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic's one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaño's conceptual play and you risk missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is it's hard to think of a writer who is less of a snob, or—in the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and carrying seeds for the future—less sterile . . . 2666 was published in Spanish in 2004, a year after Bolaño's death. It runs to 898 pages in English and was not quite finished—yet one doesn't really feel the lack of final revisions doing much to diminish its power . . . With his skill at letting small details and their implications work in our minds, Bolaño allows us to start to map out for ourselves the larger social pattern. From description, we could probably sketch the city of Santa Teresa, quadrant by quadrant, from upscale condos to sports fields to bus stops and shacks by a makeshift latrine. Factories beckon migrants from all over Mexico to work, but offer no transport home at night beyond long, solitary walks in the dark. A creepy German national—whose height and blond fairness give him, in the Mexican context, a rather monstrous aspect—is held on suspicion of murder. The worst police seem wired to power; the better police are under pressure to nab a suspect—and the crimes go on. Fascinatingly, the United States appears as a part of characters' remembered visits; a Mexican-American sheriff from Arizona crosses over to find out what happened to a blue collar woman from his town. But the United States's relationship to the drug trade and the history of the assembly plants are not explored directly or at length. Instead of belaboring the obvious, Bolaño seems to have chosen the challenge of representing something pervasive . . . Bolaño's vision is fierce . . . Near the end of the novel, we learn the reason Reiter is headed for Mexico. And then he is gone. Instead of completion we have the physical sense of being in the presence of a controlling object, which we are not yet done investigating. For a while yet, our brain feels rewired for multiplicity. This is not just a cultural or geographical question, though if 2666 contains a lesson it is that people are always from some confluence of factors more bizarre than a country. And it goes deeper than the question of multiple voices. We have eavesdropped on characters and then felt ourselves in the funny, sad, and dangerous process of needing and making meaning. Since there is no logical endpoint, we close with an image from the novel that is out of time. A world of 'endless shipwreck,' but met with the most radiant effort. It is as good a way as any to describe Bolaño and his overwhelming book."—Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books
"Shortly before he died of liver failure in July 2003, Roberto Bolaño remarked that he would have preferred to be a detective rather than a writer. Bolaño was 50 years old at the time, and by then he was widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist since Gabriel García Márquez. But when Mexican Playboy interviewed him, Bolaño was unequivocal. 'I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer,' he told the magazine. 'Of that I'm absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts.' Detective stories, and provocative remarks, were always passions of Bolaño's—he once d...
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National Bestseller In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year A New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Top 10 Book of the Year
In the novel that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. "When I began reading The Savage Detectives last month, I had already devoured the first three of Bolaño's books to arrive in English—two short novels, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, and the story collection Last Evenings on Earth—and become a devoted fan. But I was still unprepared for The Savage Detectives, the work that made his reputation when it first appeared in 1998, and for which he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Available now in a seamless translation by Natasha Wimmer, this novel is an utterly unique achievement—a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaño's unsettling mix of precision and mystery. It's a lens through which the strange becomes ordinary and the ordinary is often very strange."—Vinnie Wilhelm, San Francisco Chronicle "Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño’s reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, The Savage Detectives, will ensure that few are now untouched . . . The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly literal, sensibility . . . The Savage Detectives is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family."—James Woods, The New York Times Book Review
"Bolaño's fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and The Savage Detectives hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bolaño legend. The novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, 'Manhattan Transfer'-like collage featuring more than fifty narrators . . . When The Savage Detectives was published, Ignacio Echevarría, Spain's most prominent literary critic, praised it as 'the kind of novel that Borges could have written.' He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaño's novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bolaño fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It's a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism."—Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker
"A magnum opus of serial narration and collective testimony . . . A work that established Bolaño's reputation in the Spanish-speaking world as a successor to Borges, García Márquez, and Julio Cortazar, this 600-page novel has finally been published in English in a translation by Natasha Wimmer . . . It is an extraordinary work; obsessive, uneven, and magnificent, The Savage Detectives is a picaresque of late capitalism that demands utter submission from the reader as it presents an account in multiple voices of the adventures of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of a short-lived poetry movement called 'visceral realism.' Ostensibly about a quest by Belano and Lima for a mythical woman poet from the 1920s, The Savage Detectives is a hustler of a book."—Siddhartha Deb, Harper's Magazine
"The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsized, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the 'visercal realist' poets, pot dealer, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively—it was Bolaño’s most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel’s many surprises . . . But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all—jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others—and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author’s own biography . . . The savagery of the title is the savagery of youth—poetry, poverty, fiery idealism, quick fucks, blind drive, the threat of violence, and violence itself . . . The Savage Detectives can be read as a love letter to the Mexico they knew in the '70s, but much of the book sees Belano and Lima in Europe, and one, climatic chapter takes place in Liberia’s killing fields. Like the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Savage Detectives is kaleidoscopic and antiprovincial—and the world it describes is recognizably our own . . . The Savage Detectives is good art. When it is dark, it is very dark. At other times, it is very funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic. At its best, it is dark, funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic at one and the same time, in a way few novels before it have been . . . Natasha Wimmer's translation, too, is lucid."—Alex Abramovich, Bookforum
"While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, a dyslexic, gl ...
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National Bestseller In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year A New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Top 10 Book of the Year
In the novel that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. "When I began reading The Savage Detectives last month, I had already devoured the first three of Bolaño's books to arrive in English—two short novels, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, and the story collection Last Evenings on Earth—and become a devoted fan. But I was still unprepared for The Savage Detectives, the work that made his reputation when it first appeared in 1998, and for which he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Available now in a seamless translation by Natasha Wimmer, this novel is an utterly unique achievement—a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaño's unsettling mix of precision and mystery. It's a lens through which the strange becomes ordinary and the ordinary is often very strange."—Vinnie Wilhelm, San Francisco Chronicle "Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño’s reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, The Savage Detectives, will ensure that few are now untouched . . . The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly literal, sensibility . . . The Savage Detectives is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family."—James Woods, The New York Times Book Review
"Bolaño's fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and The Savage Detectives hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bolaño legend. The novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, 'Manhattan Transfer'-like collage featuring more than fifty narrators . . . When The Savage Detectives was published, Ignacio Echevarría, Spain's most prominent literary critic, praised it as 'the kind of novel that Borges could have written.' He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaño's novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bolaño fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It's a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism."—Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker
"A magnum opus of serial narration and collective testimony . . . A work that established Bolaño's reputation in the Spanish-speaking world as a successor to Borges, García Márquez, and Julio Cortazar, this 600-page novel has finally been published in English in a translation by Natasha Wimmer . . . It is an extraordinary work; obsessive, uneven, and magnificent, The Savage Detectives is a picaresque of late capitalism that demands utter submission from the reader as it presents an account in multiple voices of the adventures of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of a short-lived poetry movement called 'visceral realism.' Ostensibly about a quest by Belano and Lima for a mythical woman poet from the 1920s, The Savage Detectives is a hustler of a book."—Siddhartha Deb, Harper's Magazine
"The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsized, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the 'visercal realist' poets, pot dealer, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively—it was Bolaño’s most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel’s many surprises . . . But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all—jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others—and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author’s own biography . . . The savagery of the title is the savagery of youth—poetry, poverty, fiery idealism, quick fucks, blind drive, the threat of violence, and violence itself . . . The Savage Detectives can be read as a love letter to the Mexico they knew in the '70s, but much of the book sees Belano and Lima in Europe, and one, climatic chapter takes place in Liberia’s killing fields. Like the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Savage Detectives is kaleidoscopic and antiprovincial—and the world it describes is recognizably our own . . . The Savage Detectives is good art. When it is dark, it is very dark. At other times, it is very funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic. At its best, it is dark, funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic at one and the same time, in a way few novels before it have been . . . Natasha Wimmer's translation, too, is lucid."—Alex Abramovich, Bookforum
"While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, a dyslexic, gl ...
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“He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.” —Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.
A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers. ....
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National Bestseller In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. ...
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A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books).
As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet." ....
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The first story collection by Roberto Bolaño —"the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag).
Roberto Bolaño's story collection Last Evenings on Earth was acclaimed by Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review as "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.... Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."
"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. His narrators are usually writers living on the margins and grappling with private (and often unlucky) quests. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin American and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," these stories are unimaginably gripping. One story begins: "Mauricio Silva, also known as 'The Eye,' always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us born in Latin America during the fifties and sixties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death." Last Evenings on Earth has been hailed as "sheer brilliance" (The San Francisco Chronicle), "vaguely, pervasively frightening" (The Nation) and "brilliant" (Kirkus Reviews). The stories, as Publishers Weekly noted, are "perfectly calibrated: Bolaño limns the capacity of a voice to carry despair without shading into bitterness."...
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A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer....
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A "biographical dictionary" gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7). ....
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Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolaño as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...." ....
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Occult sciences, César Vallejo, WWII, hopeless love, and a final “Epilogue for Voices”: Monsieur Pain is a hallucinatory masterwork by the great Roberto Bolaño. Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness, and unable to stop hiccuping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the Mesmerist Pierre Pain. Pain, a timid bachelor, is in love with the widow Reynaud, and agrees to help. But two mysterious Spanish men follow Pain and bribe him not to treat Vallejo, and Pain takes the money. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, however, he does not intend to abandon his new patient, but then Pain’s access to the hospital is barred and Madame Reynaud leaves Paris…. Another practioner of the occult sciences enters the story (working for Franco, using his Mesmeric expertise to interrogate prisoners)—as do Mme. Curie, tarot cards, an assassination, and nightmares. Meanwhile, Monsieur Pain, haunted and guilty, wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris... ....
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A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature in our hemisphere by Roberto Bolaño: "his generation's premier Latin-American writer" (The New York Times).
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Composed of short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the USA, Nazi Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers' works, cross references, a bibliography, and also an epilogue ("For Monsters"). All the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as "Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment," "Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Individuals," and "North American Poets."
Brisk and pseudo-academic, Nazi Literature in the Americas delicately balances irony and pathos. Bolaño does not simply use his writers for target practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and disquieting sui generis novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund literary imaginations of our time.
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With the release of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in 1998,journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer “capable of befriending his readers.” After exchanging several letters with Bolaño, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bolaño’s last.
Appearing for the first time in English, Bolaño’s final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is “a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.” As in all of Bolaño’s work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author’s many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.)
The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bolaño’s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease....
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Bolano’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.
Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard―which Bolano chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)―as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.
Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano.” Antwerp’s fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone....
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