Thanks for posting this. I'll check it out sometime this weekend. The prospect of reading essays from this guy really makes me excited. Another way to get in to his world and really wrap my mind around what he has to say in his novels.

Yeah I started with it too, and I feel like a lot of energy was spent just grasping the style and the form of the work. I'd like to go back and focus more on the characters and the words.

I've read before that he's really well-known in the Spanish speaking world for his ruthless essays.

There's one available from the VQR I think, that Simple Torture had, I'll send you the file. Some of his speeches and interviews are available online and they're all extremely awesome.

Man, Savage Detectives...great book

couldn't get through it.

Some news in the Bolanoverse today.

Apparently Bolano's agent presented the 2666 related book that was found recently in his papers at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Its not entirely clear if this is a different work or an expanded version of Amalfitano's part. Bolano is known to have written different versions of his books. Apparently there was a different version of The Savage Detectives found. There's been little English coverage exploring the details. The Third Reich was sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year.

Original Spanish: http://www.elperiodico.com/default.asp? ... io_PK=1013

Google Translate: http://www.google.com/translate?u=http% ... l=en&sl=es

Also, here Natasha Wimmer give a talk about Bolano here and she also reads from Entre parentesis ("Between Parentheses") forthcoming Bolano essay collection.

http://catranslation.org/blog/2009/10/1 ... mer-audio/

http://www.catranslation.org/audio/wimmer_10_6_09.mp3

couldn't get through it.

U missed out

The story is an eloquent take on a classical theme; deconstructing myth, disenchantment with youth, and disappointment. Except the novel is a riff on those subjects, and what happens upon the two main characters in slow, aging disillusionment - or is it? because we never actually experience them first hand. They are described differently by every narrator in the second act. This is the beauty of Bolano's search for truth, and it mimics the wanderings in the novel. He never fails to ask questions and rearrange our beliefs, even the last sentence of the novel is an inquiry. I love it.

Either way I think all the poetry/literary fetishism is a bit pretentious and silly but it is more or less a part of the subjective themes about art and reality that Bolano intends to explore. It makes perfect sense in the context of the novel as a whole to write about dead poets and authors as if they were actual characters in the novel.

Anyways, Bolano's prose is stupendous and I think you sold yourself short. The last 100 or so pages are revelatory. It's a challenging, rewarding book. Ultimately it's an adventure novel, and I would say the same thing about 2666.

"Monsieur Pain" sounds like a Morrisey album title.

I am pretty sure it's "pain" in the French sense. It took me a while to realize that.

Maybe it's about a man made out of bread. So they call him "Mr Bread." Or he could be a baker.