1. AMNESIA I’m not quite sure if I’ve actually read all of Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp. Normally this fact would disqualify me from discussing the book, but in this case, as the U.S. Supreme court might say of certain kinds of pornography, it’s intrinsic to the experience. The book consists of 56 numbered and named sketches, most of them less than a page long. I started reading at the beginning, but soon found that I was suffering from […]
Over the last week or so, I’ve re-read the opening section of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives—the diary of one Juan García Madero, the seventeen-year-old law student, who joins the visceral realists, stops attending classes, loses his virginity (several times in close succession, with several different women), and squeezes several years worth of reading, writing, fucking, and wandering around Mexico City into the two months between November 2, 1975, and the first few minutes of New Year’s […]
This weekend I read Nazi Literature in the Americas, the latest novel by Roberto Bolaño to be translated into English. In the last year, since reading Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I’ve found myself increasingly hungry for his prose—so far, I’ve read most of Bolaño’s work that has been, as Nabokov would say, “Englished.” For an American reader, this means working through the elegant volumes released by New Directions: the novels By Night in Chile, Amulet, and Distant Star, and the short story […]