All as expected and described. Very happy
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A brilliant book, a compendium of made-up writer biographies, each of whom ended up falling for the seductions of the right wing.
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I bought both 2666 and THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES three years before I actually dared read them. The sheer size was terrifying. Finally - thank God - I summoned up the courage and took them on. When I finished 2666 I almost wept to think that would be no new Bolanos. Well here`s Bolano for Beginners. Everything Bolano apart from terrifying size : wit, melodrama, horror, history, brilliant characterisation, fake erudition, satire. Part Nabokov`s PALE FIRE, part Borges, part Spinrad`s IRON DREAM Iron Dream (Panther science fiction), part Michael Moorcock`s BYZANTIUM/JERUSALEM novels Byzantium Endures: Between the Wars Vol. 1, but wholly Bolano. Read this, it`ll take a couple of hours, get a taste of the genius, then get on to the hard stuff.
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At first glance, this book does not appear to be a novel. Instead, it looks like a collection of richly detailed obituaries and bibliographic notes. These could be real people - and that is Bolaño's point entirely. What we read here as fiction could well be representative of literature in an alternate world. While some of the characters depicted are outlandish, others are unsettlingly plausible. Those of us with limited knowledge of 20th century literature in the Americas could well accept fiction as truth, at least for a while. Fortunately, if you follow the biographical details of the authors carefully, it becomes clear that what could be fact is definitely fiction. While this is a relief, by that stage in the book the possibility of fact has emerged and I found myself wondering about the power of fiction and the role of literature in politics. The most unsettling of the entries is `The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman'. This is a far longer entry and refers as well to a character named Bolaño who is asked to identify Ramírez Hoffman, a Chilean poet who had been employed by Pinochet's death squads. Here, for a moment at least, the line between fact and fiction is blurred. By introducing himself as a character, Roberto Bolaño grounds this novel in a way which is a confronting reminder of a political reality. And so, neatly, the circle is closed. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was a Chilean poet and novelist. This is the first of his books I have read. It was first published in Spanish in 1996 and in English in 2008. I will be seeking out his other novels. Jennifer Cameron-Smith
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This is a strange one. I've not read Bolaño before: "2666" is on my stack of pending books, and I wondered about waiting till I'd read it before embarking on this one, but decided that it ought to be possible to review this purely on its own merits, and that if it was good it should stand up on its own. And having read this, I'm still not sure if it does... There is a problem with imaginary literature: the basic, unavoidable fact that it doesn't exist. Description of imagined works can be very frustrating: it can be hard for the author to prove to the reader why s/he should be interested in this, particularly in the absence of quotation, and if the author does do a good job selling the imagined work s/he risks infuriating the reader who is unable to go and read this fantastic-sounding volume. In this particular exercise in the genre, Bolaño avoids fabricating quotations and all we ever have is description from a distance: after a while, then, one can grow weary of being told about "caustic embittered prose" or "limpid stanzas" that one never sees. What keeps the book interesting is the relationship of these imagined works to their authors. Although Bolaño can't give us the works themselves, he can describe their authors - their backgrounds, their origins, their particular neuroses, and their relations with the rest of Latin American cultural life (although that in itself can be problematic: in the absence of footnotes or other editorial apparatus, the Anglophone reader does not know whether many of these supporting names are real or fictional). It's as a set of characters, then, that this book has its interest: people from varying backgrounds, all embedded in the social problems of twentieth-century Latin America, all in one way or another falling for the anti-democratic, authoritarian strain in that continent's public life. These imagined writers, then, can be seen as an oblique attempt by Bolaño to work out what went wrong in Latin America during these years. As such, an interesting exercise, populated by some intriguing characters: but with the weaknesses that, as mentioned above, we don't get to read the works themselves, and also only have a few pages with each character before moving on. The consensus here from those who've read more Bolaño is that one shouldn't start here, and I think I'd agree: I suspect I'm going to find this to be something of a footnote to his career, for completists only. Not bad, but not vital.
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It's great to see another Bolano in the Amazon Vine list. And also interesting to see people's reactions to it - favourable, unfavourable, bewildered. This isn't a novel in any sense - it's a fictional encyclopedia of imaginary far-Right South American writers. (Rather like Borges' 'Dictionary of Mythological Beasts' - but with more poisonous and banal subjects.) Some of the entries are hit and miss, but overall Bolano gets his targets. This is a work of satire - aimed at those who supported, through propaganda and 'literature', the Generals and the Facistas in Argentina, Chile, etc. It mocks the 'banality of evil', the paucity of philosophical ideas, the ludicrousness of those who purport anti-human, racist ideas. ('Mein Kampf', not mentioned here, for obvious reasons, is as fine as an example of this as can be found.) Worth reading in small sections, then its humour shines through.
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Mostra toda a criatividade explosiva e atraente do escritor e, como não há edicao em portugues, a única opcao é ler essa, uma boa tradução.
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When I approach a satirical work I follow a simple rubric: does it make me laugh. The honest belly laugh is, for me, the "scathe" in scathing satire. There is not a single chapter in Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in America" that failed to elicit howls of laughter sometimes accompanied by tears. Bolano presents the reader with a compendium of fictional biographies of non-existent writers. With each entry one gets the impression that he has taken Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" seriously. Each author is presented in an uncritical and dead-pan manner which forces the reader to ferret out the "evil" in the context of his/her "banal" biographical narrative. Not a single "author" in "Nazi Literature" approaches anything like genius. Even those who live rather colorful lives write in rather turgid prose and aimless fiction that produces a sort of stupor in their readership. This, I think is the key to understanding what Bolano is really up to. He may have had Goya's famous etching in mind:"El sueno de la razon produce monstruos" (the sleep of reason brings forth monsters).
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Another awesome Bolano novel. Original and compelling. Loved it.
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Roberto Bolano is a virtuoso of the strange, dark, and ominous. He's also funny as hell.
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Great read
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