Mallarmé as Jesus
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More on Bolano’s Journalist
New Directions keeps pumping out the Bolanos (under duress, I believe), which means that if you are a devoted fan you’ve got your work cut out for you over the next couple years.
David Varno at Words Without Borders has a nice dual review of the most recent two: The Return (or much more colorfully in the original Spanish: Putas asesinas) and The Insufferable Gaucho.
Over the summer, two more translated collections appeared. The Return (June, New Directions), was put together from story collections that appeared during Bolaño’s lifetime, and The Insufferable Gaucho (August, New Directions) was first published posthumously. It contains longer stories, plus a lecture and an essay, and though it is slight, it is unlike anything that has appeared from Bolaño yet. There is a retelling of Borges’s “The South” and a story called “Police Rat,” which follows a sensitive sewer rat named Pepe the Cop, who fights evil and corruption. Much of Bolaño’s work makes reference to his favorite fiction writers and poets, but “The Insufferable Gaucho” goes further because it doesn’t merely summarize the Borges; Bolaño paints in an entirely new set of circumstances for Borges’s classic narrative of a doomed man who fantasizes a romantic and violent death.
Full review here.
I haven’t read either of these yet, although I probably will at some point. I think it’s possible to knock off the two of them plus Antwerp in a weekend (maybe a 3-day weekend).
The Bolano I’m currently most looking forward to is Entre parentesis (Between Parentheses), due out next spring. The essays I’ve read from there (or had read to me, as the case may be) have been quite good, both in the literary criticism and the personal essay genre. They’re also unlike anything I’ve read in Bolano’s fiction, which would seem to be a good thing since the Bolano fiction market is getting a little flooded.
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- More Bolano Up on New Directions’s website there is a list (scroll down) of the future Bolano titles they will be publishing. I haven’t seen this anywhere...
- 2666 The Literary Saloon and others report that there’s now an Amazon pub date for Bolaño’s opus, in English. I’m a little divided as to whether...
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This is splitting hairs, I know, but technically Putas Asesinas and The Return are different collections. When New Directions was putting together Last Evenings on Earth back in 2007, they took two Spanish collections, Llamadas Telefonicas (1997) and Putas Asesinas (2001), and selected the most autobiographical stories from each. The Return is just a collection of the remaining stories from those two books.
The original story collections in Spanish are ordered thusly, and each has an epigraph not included in the New Directions translations:
Llamadas Telefonicas (1997): “Sensini,” “Henri Simon Leprince,” “Enrique Martin,” “A Literary Adventure,” “Phone Calls,” “The Grub,” “Snow,” “Another Russian Tale,” “William Burns,” “Detectives,” “Cell Mates,” “Clara,” “Joanna Silvestri,” “Anne Moore’s Life.” The epigraph is from Chekhov: “¿Quién puede comprender mi terror mejor que usted?”
Putas Asesinas (2001): “Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva,” “Gomez Palacio,” “Last Evenings on Earth,” “Days of 1978,” “Vagabond in Belgium and France,” “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura,” “Murdering Whores,” “The Return,” “Buba,” “Dentist,” “Dance Card,” “Meeting With Enrique Lihn.” Here the epigraph is from Horace: “La demanda acabará en risas y tú te irás libre de cargos.”
Hope this is helpful, sorry if I’m giving old news here.
Alex, thanks for the breakdown. I read The Return, and while there is something in there for those who enjoy his work, I didn’t think it was nearly at the level of Last Evenings. Your post goes a ways toward explaining why.
I also have Gaucho on the TBR, looking forward to reading it once a little spare time offers itself.
With no disrespect to ND, I’m most excited for Los sinsabores del verdadero policía, which FSG is supposedly publishing next spring. An interview with Lorin Stein (http://www.notesfromtheunderground.co.uk/non-fiction/interview-lorin-stein-on-literature/) describes it thusly:
another major work by the Chilean author which rehashes many of the themes and characters of 2666. It explores Amalfitano’s life before his move to Mexico; it follows the adventures of a French author named JMG Arcimboldi; finally it approaches the Santa Teresa murders from the point of view of the killers
I’m guessing this might be the ‘sixth section of 2666′ that was found amongst Bolano’s manuscripts a while back…
I also look forward to ‘Tres,’ a poetry collection. Bolaño’s translators (Laura Healy & Erica Mena) said they contain the best of his prose poems. Bolaño himself esteemed this book highly. Healy’s translation is upcoming from New Directions.