Lady Chatterley’s Brother Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,  called “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.
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The Literary Saloon has a good response to literary agent Andrew Wylie’s odd NYT letter to the editor, in which he states that "Roberto never suffered any form of addiction to drugs, including heroin."
I’m one of the many who couldn’t care which drugs Bolano did, in addition to other real-life tidbits like how he liked his eggs cooked, whether he was a bad driver, and who cut his hair. But I do think this story is interesting for what it can tell us about the Bolano phenomenon and the odd way in which his reception has proceeded . . . 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
You might not have noticed it, but many Spanish-language bloggers are arguing that there’s been a certain word creeping into Anglo-American Bolano discourse: heroin. It’s left them baffled and somewhat bemused: why are these gringos all convinced Bolano was a junkie?
To my knowledge, the first Spanish-language blog to make this argument widely disseminated was Puente Aereo, which writes:
Iván Thays recogió la reseña, la comentó, la enlazó en su blog. Por otro lado, el administrador chileno de la bitácora Worms Inside, Antonio Díaz Oliva, hizo notar una cosa: Lethem se refería, en algún pasaje de . . . continue reading, and add your comments
n + 1 has a fairly good take on why Bolano matters for U.S. readers. As always, it’s nice to see writing on 2666 that actually has something to say; that is, that gets beyond the well-plowed territory that most reviews of 2666 I’ve read has stayed within.
The piece gets off to something of a weak start with some seemingly uninformed and sadly flip remarks about Latin American writers and politics:
In the ’90s, it didn’t matter to most American readers that Sebald had taken the hoariest tropes of German romanticism (the solitary wandering, the unnamable sorrow) . . . 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
You do know that Bolano has another book publishing this month, right?
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
The Literary Saloon informs me of the discovery of another Bolano manuscript, this of a novel titled The Third Reich:
The Third Reich is said to have been written in the early 1990s before Bolaño began to work on a computer. The Wylie agency was touting the book at Frankfurt as "a type-written, completed novel that is meticulously corrected by hand", according to Spain’s El Periodico.
Described as "a man’s descent into a nightmare", the book features a German wargames champion who travels to the Costa Brava to take on an American opponent. He is pursued by . . . 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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Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
More on Bolano’s Journalist
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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