Roberto Bolaño by Carmen Boullosa. A Bolaño Syllabus. If I could read just one book by Author X, which would it be?
This may be the hardest question we can ask a fellow reader, insofar as it assumes that we can teleport straight to the heart of aesthetic experience, rather than journeying there over weeks or years. In fact, we often come to the books we love – and learn to love them – by way of other books: Dubliners primes us for Portrait, which shapes our expectations for Ulysses, which earns our indulgence for Finnegans Wake. In this way, the justified hype surrounding the English publication last year of late Roberto Bolaño‘s 2666 (If you read only one book this year…) may have done some readers a disservice. Like Joyce’s, Bolaño’s is a sensibility that demands immersion, and for the kind of person who prefers to adjust to the swimming pool by inches rather than jumping straight into the deep end, the massive 2666 may have felt a lot like drowning. 1. 2. 3. 4.
A Bolaño Syllabus. IS "2666" A MASTERPIECE? Reading "2666", "it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Roberto Bolaño's genius from his excess.
Indeed, it starts to seem that Bolaño's genius is his excess", writes Garth Risk Hallberg... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE In his treatise on drama, "Three Uses of the Knife", David Mamet cribs a distinction from Stanislavsky. Some narratives, he suggests, leave us saying, "What a masterpiece! Let's get a cup of coffee," while others ask us to wrestle with them for the rest of our lives. Summer voyages: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. 'An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom' ...
Roberto Bolaño. Photograph: Julian Martin/AP A long novel is a voyage in its own right. You can be changed forever by a work of fiction that's just a few pages long, or even less, but the time you spend with a really long novel – I'm thinking, over 500 pages – breeds a particularly intense relationship. When I was eight years old I read The Lord of the Rings, which took me the better part of a year.
Length presents significant extra-literary challenges to the reader. In the Labyrinth: A User’s Guide to Bolaño - The New Yorker. Amulet — Roberto Bolaño. When one takes on the project of reading the novels of Roberto Bolaño — and 2666 is the sort of beast that is likely to hook a reader into such an endeavor — it becomes increasingly impossible to separate and compartmentalize his fictions.
Instead, the reader becomes ever more entangled in a labyrinthine Bolañoverse, a chilling, dreadful mirror-maze world that discharges its echoes across continents and epochs. In a fascinating essay at The Quarterly Conversation, Javier Moreno attempts to map out this world. I’d read the essay (and commented on it) a few years ago, but I revisited it after finishing Amulet, mostly because I was pretty sure Moreno had already succinctly stated a key idea that I wanted to bring up in my review. He writes— Amuleto, which tells the story of an Uruguayan poet that claims herself to be the mother of all Mexican writers, may be seen both as an extra chapter to Los Detectives or as a short introduction to 2666—or both at the same time.
Like this: Like Loading... “His romantic ancestor, his ancestor of the romantic death” Jorge Luis Borges is first mentioned in the sixth paragraph of Roberto Bolaño’s masterful short story “The Insufferable Gaucho.”
In this paragraph, the narrator tells us that the story’s hero, an ex-judge named Pereda, believed “the best Argentine writers were Borges and his son; any further commentary on that subject was superfluous.” Several paragraphs later, Bolaño’s narrator explicitly references Borges’s short story “The South,” the precursor text for “The Insufferable Gaucho.” The reference to Borges is tied again to Pereda’s son, the writer Bebe. Leaving tumultuous Buenos Aires, basically destitute from the Argentine Great Depression, Pereda heads to the countryside to take up residence in his family’s ancient ranch. Departing the train and arriving to a rural town, Inevitably, he remembered Borges’s story “The South,” and when he thought of the store mentioned in the final paragraphs his eyes brimmed with tears.
And Pereda then? What I mean to say: Amulet — Roberto Bolaño. Amulet by Roberto Bolaño. ShareThis Amulet by Roberto Bolaño Review by Scott Bryan Wilson Tags: Roberto Bolaño Roberto Bolaño was the type of writer most writers want to be or think they already are: stylistically bold, thematically engaging, readable and re-readable; in other words, undeniably exceptional.
Bolaño, who died in 2003, was a writer whose style is deceptively simple yet whose books and characters take hold of one’s brain–all or most or perhaps some small unguarded part of it–and frequently return to one’s thoughts, living and breathing and growing. Amulet is his most recent novel to be translated into English. With its simple premise, written in a warm style not overly laden with linguistic or syntactical fireworks, Amulet is a careful internal study of this woman and is utterly engaging. Roberto Bolaño: A naïve introduction to the geometry of his fictions. ShareThis.
