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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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And I agree. From Mason’s NYTimes review:
“The Skating Rink,” the only new Bolaño appearing this year, won’t make the decision any easier: this short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. Originally published in Spanish in 1993 and the first of Bolaño’s novels to see print, “The Skating Rink” could seem, in thumbnail, little more than a modest whodunit. A crime, the brutal murder of a woman, is committed in the Spanish seaside town of Z. As the corpse-and-culprit genre dictates, the novel establishes the sequence of . . . continue reading, and add your comments
That would be my take on Roberto Bolano's new novel, The Skating Rink.
You can read my whole review right here. One quote:
The Skating Rink is detective fiction only in a very nominal sense, perhaps only insofar as it needs to be in order to subvert the genre’s conventions. The solution of the crime isn’t the thing in The Skating Rink, the novel doesn’t rationally tick off the competing explanations until only one remains. Logic and answers have nothing to do with it. Rather, The Skating Rink is concerned with the search, a search . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Via Blographia Literaria, see this cool Excel chart plotting out the mammoth second section of The Savage Detectives.
To my eyes, this is somewhat what TSD would look like if you were to create a schematic for a musical composition based on it. For instance, you can see Amadeo Salvatierra repeating again and again, perhaps a slightly comical, boisterous tuba theme. Over that would be layered the characters that occur less frequently, some coming and going very quickly, some lasting a little longer. It seems it would be something along the lines . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Matthew B. Reese has had Cesárea Tinajero's enigmatic "poem" Sion from The Savage Detectives engraved on a pen;
Reese explains the pen thus:
The enigmatic character, Cesárea Tinajero, is a poet who in her youth started an avant-garde poetry movement, and later completely vanishes. The protagonists spend a large part of the novel trying to find her. For me the engraving represents the power and magic of poetry, and to a larger extent, literature. (I should mention that the poem itself is little more than a visual joke.) . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Opening the PEN World Voices Festival, Salman Rushdie has declared that the example of Roberto Bolano proves that there are tons of great writers still unknown in English. So American publishers, get going:
El autor anglo-indio Salman Rushdie destacó hoy el reconocimiento en EU del fallecido escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño y animó al mercado editorial estadounidense a tomar nota e impulsar más traducciones al inglés de obras de éxito.
"El éxito tardío de Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) con 2666 es una muestra de lo poco que se traduce en Estados Unidos", dijo el célebre autor de Los versos . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Well, the Bolano posthumous publication brigade is getting started. Via Moleskine Literario I see that El Pais is reporting that Spanish powerhouse publisher Anagrama will be publishing El tercer Reich (The Third Reich) in January of 2010:
Tras siete meses de arduas negociaciones, Jorge Herralde, editor de Anagrama y que ha publicado en España a Bolaño, firmará la semana próxima el contrato de edición de la obra, que lanzará en enero de 2010. "Es anterior a sus dos grandes novelas", ubica Herralde, que dice casi aliviado no saber nada de las otras dos obras inéditas, como pidiendo . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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
Readers will remember that about a month ago there was a kerfuffle over whether or not Roberto Bolano used heroin. In case you haven’t heard enough on that already, the NYT has gone out and gathered what quotes could be found pertaining to Bolano’s drug use.
Of slightly greater interest, in the same article the NYT discusses the possibility that Bolano was not in Chile during the coup, a fact that is often cited in biographical sketches of him, and which is of more interest as regards his literature, since two of his major novels do in . . . 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
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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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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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