Lylas.

ST, your post on the last page perfectly encapsulates what this author can do to people.

The one were I said, "Fascinating"? Yeah, I thought it was a Top 10 post as well.

So I re-read the story "Detectives" this morning because it has been bugging me for a month or so, but for some reason I was afraid to pick up the book. Maybe because I thought it wouldn't be as good as I remembered, or maybe because it didn't actually contain the secrets I was hoping to find there? Wasn't sure. But I finally caved and threw "The Return" and (for no apparent reason) "Amulet" into my bag to take them to school.

What's been haunting me about "Detectives" is the form, this nothing-but-dialogue style that (as far as I can remember or know about) doesn't appear anywhere else in Bolano's oeuvre. It's sparse, right? Especially the first few pages or so, there's not much going on, nothing being described. Like much of Bolano's scariest stuff, this is happening in a void; we know these guys are in a car, driving somewhere, but where? It immediately feels like a road in the desert in the middle of the night, even though he doesn't describe the landscape at all. It's all painted through the way things are delivered, the way the characters just talk to fill the dead air that's sucking the life out of everything around it. Crazy good shit here.

It's also a pretty important piece of the Arturo Belano puzzle. I haven't done much thinking about this, but I think a fruitful project would be to look at everywhere he comes up and figure out which of the stories take place before 1973 and which take place after. He undergoes such a drastic change in this story (or, rather, in the story that's related in this story) and that scene where one of the speakers (Contreras?) sees him in the mirror and is terrified is absolutely key. Remember: he asks if there's a room on the other side of the mirror, if it also functions as a window. "What's outside the window?" "Like Ciudad Juarez, which is our curse and our mirror." I don't think these connections are accidental.

This also feels like a sketch, an exercise. I had to check and see if this was published before or after Bolano's death; I was shocked to see it was put out before he was alive (in "Llamadas Telefónicas" in 1997). Maybe it was, who knows, and he just threw it in a collection. Or maybe that's part of it's power, how we're just yearning to figure out what's outside the text we have in our hands ("Il n'y a pas de hors-texte"), or at least outside of this little exchange here. It's as if the entire world of the story is contingent on Belano and the mirror, or on his arrest or his being freed, and outside of this one event the world doesn't exists. Only the witnesses remain. Man, this is heavy shit.

It also reminds me of Chapter 19 of "The Pale King" in a lot of ways, and just adds more fuel to the (hopefully not fruitless) pursuit I have of intimately connecting Bolano, David Foster Wallace, and (for good measure) Jason Molina.

That is all.

I had The Return in my hand to check out from the library today but ultimately wasn't able to because of an embarrassing amount of money that I owe the library. If I had read your post before any of that, I would have at least made time to read 'Detectives' before I left.

Still, I can relate to your post in a general way. There has been no author that has ever stuck with me the way that Bolaño has. I view my city differently after reading him. I experience the everyday differently. I read differently. The fact that I can take this sort of thing away from his novels to such extremes without having near the literary education or palette as anyone else in this thread speaks volumes about how he is able to cut to the core. Still, I would love to be able to put in the time to study him (literature in general, actually) so that I could get into some of the deeper layers in his novels. Perhaps one day.

Update on this: I Tweeted at New Directions and they said it will be out next May.

At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we (Mario Santiago and some of us) heard laughter coming from the penthouse of a 9-story building. They didn’t stop, they kept laughing and laughing while below we slept propped up in various phone booths. There came a moment when only Mario was still paying attention to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something and Darío Galicia had told us that it’s always watched by the cops). We made phone calls but our coins turned into water. The laughter continued. After we left that neighborhood Mario told me that actually no one had been laughing, that it was recorded laughter, and up there in that penthouse, some stragglers or maybe a single homosexual had silently listened to that record and made us listen to it.

It tastes like Rayuela.

he lives

https://plus.google.com/115442467066300500678/posts

Members of the Bolaño clique should check out this awesome documentary. It's so powerful. It's not directly related to Bolaño, but it's a great way to learn a little bit about the recent history of Chile, about the fallout from the dictatorship. It's superbly well-made, amazingly photographed, tear-inducingly touching, and it's just fucking beautiful. I'm guessing Bolaño himself would've loved it. Some great characters with great stories to tell.

ass just melted

pattinson is on board

Your signature has never been more true.

new short story from the secret of evil in the new yorker this week

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/featur ... ion_bolano

and interview with new directions publisher

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b ... olano.html

oh god

2666 part 6?



Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished, novel.

The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers paintings to wealthy Texans—that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life.

Woes of the True Policeman is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense yet darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art, it marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

From what I've read about that one (and there hasn't been much out there), It's more of an expansion of that one story than a 'lost part' or new novel.

Didn't internet user rafa_garcia read this in the original Mexican? Am I misremembering that?

yes he read it in mexican

Have you seen any more info on it, publication date and such? I think It's going to be a FS+G release, but I'd imagine Wimmer has to translate it.

November 13, 2012

yes, wimmer

FSG