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The Literary Saloon informs me that they've discovered two new Bolano manuscripts–and a sixth section to the already massive 2666:
Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police Officer, reported La Vanguardia.
The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666.
So, everyone . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Based on Amazon purchases made through links on this website, the following are the "picks" of Conversational Reading’s readers for 2008:
#1
By a large margin, The Invention of Morel was the most popular purchase among readers of this blog. Obviously, my sincere praise of this book helped move it along, but I’m convinced that not nearly as many copies would have been purchased if this wasn’t a great book, and if Borges wasn’t Bioy’s literary collaborator. A great read, and if you haven’t had a chance to yet, definitely pick it up.
#2
Not really a surprise, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(On December 4, 2008, Natasha Wimmer and Francisco Goldman discussed Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 at Idlewild Books in Manhattan. Quarterly Conversation contributing editor Scott Bryan Wilson and Chris Dikenwere there. Words Without Borders also has a write-up of the talk.)
It’s a testament to the rapidly ballooning legacy of Roberto Bolaño that more than a hundred people turned out to hear Francisco Goldman, a Trinity University English professor who has written extensively about Bolaño, and Natasha Wimmer, the translator of The Savage Detectives and 2666*, discuss the writer’s sad, happy life and . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Sam Sacks has one of the better reviews of 2666 that I’ve read. This is a nice observation:
An indescribable amount of things happen to an innumerable cast of characters in 2666—its nearly 900 pages are almost never static. But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Although it’s somewhat buried, Macmillan has a page of useful annotations to 2666 made by its English-language translator, Natasha Wimmer. For instance:
p.45: “And speaking of the Greeks, it would be fair to say that Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses”: In an essay on Bolaño titled “La batalla futura,” the Mexican novelist and critic Juan Villoro (see note to p. 257) suggests that the characters of 2666 can be seen as “individuals removed from the vacillations of the inner life who, like Greek . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Quarterly Conversation contributor Levi Stahl has published a review of 2666, and it’s a pretty good one.
2666 is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes. There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book’s title, a date that is referred to in passing in The Savage Detectives as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong—”The University of Santa . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Couple more review for 2666. First, there’s Jonathan Lethem’s review in the NYTBR (reprinted in the International Herald tribune). This pretty much sums it up:
Well, hold on to your hats.
After Kirsch’s love letter, I’m beginning to get a little disappointed in the coverage, as these reviews seem altogether too credulous. There are plenty of sky-high, arcing statements about redefining the form of the long novel, etc., etc., but I’m seeing little critical engagement beyond a few generalized insights that sound quite similar from review to review. Perhaps these reviewers believe that they can back up . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Adam Kirsch in Slate has the first review I’ve seen for 2666. I imagine this kind of opening will become pretty standard fare in the 2666 coverage:
By this standard, there is no doubt that Roberto Bolaño is a great writer. 2666, the enormous novel he had almost completed when he died at 50 in 2003, has the confident strangeness of a masterpiece: In almost every particular, it fails, or refuses, to conform to our expectations of what a novel should be. For one thing, though it is being published as a single work (in a Bible-sized . . . continue reading, and add your comments
If you know one thing about 2666, it’s probably that the plot circles around the murders of hundreds of women that have occurred in Ciudad Juarez on the U.S./Mexico border. Bolano’s novel isn’t the only recent art to consider the meaning of these grotesque events and the (post-)urban environment that seems to be a part of their cause.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s another new novel exploring this issue. There’s also a new art exhibit in New York City considering it.
Most visitors stumble upon the unmarked gallery, where a small framed note on the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
After breezing through the first hundred pages of 2666, I had the feeling that I’d finish the book in a week. I read By Night in Chile in a single sitting, Amulet in two, and Distant Star in perhaps three at most, so by extrapolating out, a week seemed perfectly reasonable.
2666 turned out to be a much slower read than I anticipated.
I think, probably, if it was like a 1,000-page version of By Night in Chile, I would have read the book in a week; but I’m not even sure what I just . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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On Joining Oulipo by Accident
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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