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Mucho Bolaño
March 21, 2007

I do plan to keep writing about literary magazines, but today I'm in the mood to write about something else (and isn't that the fun thing about blogging--that it's moody).  So, for those of you who are keeping up with the book press, you'll notice that there are a number of reviews and pieces in several big publications--The New Yorker, Bookforum, and, a few weeks ago, The Believer--about an extraordinary book by the late Latin American writer Roberto Bolaño, called The Savage Detectives.  This book deserves every bit of praise it gets, and congrats to FSG for publishing it (I can't wait until next year when they do Bolaño's last book, 2666, next year).  But, today, I want to briefly mention the other Bolaño that are available to us, which have been published over the last few years by New Directions

There are, I belive, four other books that have been translated so far, with many more--7, I think, is the number ND has in the works, according to one source at the house--on the way.  They arethe novels  Distant Star, By Night In Chile, and Amulet, and the story collection Last Evenings On Earth, which is about to come out in paperback.  Since finsihishing Detectives, I've read all the other books except for Distant Star, which I'm saving.  Bolaño gets addictive.  It's not just his world--which is not so unlike our own, except that everyone in it is obsessed with literarture--but his insistent voice that makes him impossible to stop reading.  I like spending time inside a head where everything is infused with a kind of importance tempered by a grim but playful sense of humor. 

By Night in Chile is a manic monologue delievered by a dying priest, who has also been a middling literary figure.  Over the course of the books 130 or so pages, he bitterly laments a life lived under the thumb of his ambition and his guilt.

The wonderful Amulet is the best place to go if the fevers that follows Detectives won't wear off.  Written after the longer novel, it continues the story of one of Detectives many narrators, forming a lyrical sketch of a moment in Mexico City and of a mind forever altered by a single event.

And it may be the case that Bolaño is at heart a short story writer (though he bagan as a poet)--his novels, especially Detectives, are essentially built out of interconnected short pieces.  So Last Evenings on Earth may in fact be the best place to see Bolaño do what he does best: short bursts of intensity.

His whole ouvre is interconnected, sharing characters and events (much of his work is based on his life, so it follows that the same figures keep appearing).  Anyway, as the buzz for The Savage Detectives is building, I just wanted to point the way toward the rest of his books. 

Posted by Craig Morgan Teicher on March 21, 2007 | Comments (0)