Distant Star by Roberto Bolano, 1996, translated 2004 by Chris Andrews

Born 1953 Santiago, Chile

Died 2003 Blanes, Spain

Nazi Literature in the Americas, 1996

Savage Detectives, 1998

2666, 2004

Roberto Bolano is a hugely influential writer.  His two most famous novels, Savage Detectives and 2666 might well, after the dust of a couple of decades settles, becomes standards on Hundred Greatest Novels of the 20th Century lists.

My first exposure to Bolano was Savage Detectives, focusing on a highly inbred group of young Mexico City poets.  Full of disturbing imagery and misogynistic sexual elements, it captured the chaos of a huge Mega City.  Then came 2666, I read it around ten years ago, one time, and much is in my mind as if I read it yesterday.  It is very much a novel of the reading Life cantered around a decade plus string of murders of hundreds of women in the border city 

of Juarez Mexico.  Many writers today have been heavily influenced by 2666.  Then I read a book, much shorter, I really loved, you cannot love 2666 or Savage Detectives, they are just to overwhelming, Nazi Literature in the Americas.  This is written as if it were an learned treatise on fascist writers in North and South America.  Maybe  it reads as if Voltaire after a very long Mescal driven Month in Juarez might have written this.

Distant Star is an expansion of a chapter in Nazi Literature of the Americas, “The Infamous Ramirez-Hoffman”.  Hoffman was an aviator who took the occasion of the 1973 

Coup d’ état to start his own version of The New Chilean Poetry Movement.  In this he combined verse, sky-writing, torture, photography, and murder to create art.  Later in the novel he joins the Chilean Airforce and flys a Messerschmitt over the Andes.  Our narrator, deeply obsessed with Ramirez-Hoffman, winds up in a prison camp for political undesirables.  Upon release he cannot escape his obsession.  Ramirez-Hoffman has become a cult 

celebrity  for his work in underground fascist publications.  

Distant Star is a very entertaining book.  It is really more the story of a poet obsessed with another poet than just the poet.

First you must read Nazi Literature in the Americas.  I actually recommend this as your initiation into Bolano.  Then read the big books.  Maybe Distant Star should come fourth

Mel u

"Clara" by Roberto Bolano (August 4, 2008, in The New Yorker, translated by Chris Andrews)

Roberto Bolano on The Reading Life


Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, born in Chile) is a very powerful greatly influential writer.  Shortly before I began The Reading Life in July, 2009 I read his two major, and large, novels, 2666 centering around murders in Mexico and The Savage Detectives focusing on young poets mostly from Mexico City.  Both these works were translated after his death from liver cancer.  I hope to one day read them through slowly and post upon my experiences.  Some books you post about the work, others you post about your experiences reading them.

Since beginning my blog I posted on two shorter novels.  By Night in Chile is a monologue by a priest during the worst political times in Chile.  I really liked Nazi Literature in the Americas, his delightful pseudo encyclopedia of extreme right wing writers.  I read this twice.  Occasionally The New Yorker will make available for public reading one of the several of the short stories they have published posthumously.  I have posted on a few of these, mostly as largely reading journal entries and to let my interested readers know of the availability of these works.

Death and decay hang over Bolano's work.  As "Clara" begins, the narrator tells us he fell in love with her when she was 18 and had a sexually exquisite body.  The narrator described her as kind of a confused, not terribly bright young woman, she pursues a series of interests.  She goes back to her home city, in Spain.  In a while the man goes to spend a month with her.  They have sex everyday and go to the movies.  Life requires he go back to his home town.  He invites her to move in with him but she declines.  They lose touch with each other as the years go by.   Both marry.  We learn of Clara's decline in appearance, gaining weight.  She against her real wishes to have a baby because her husband wants one.  Bolano takes us nearly twenty years into Clara's life.  The story ends with her
imminent death from cancer.

Bolano fans will enjoy this story for sure.



You can read the story here

Mel u

"The Insufferable Gaucho" by Roberto Bolano (October 7, 2007, in The New Yorker)

My Posts on Roberto Bolano

So far I have read four novels by Roberto Bolano and several short stories.  2666 and Savage Poets I read before I began my blog.  I have posted on his marvelous Nazi Literature in the Americas and By Night in Chile.   

"The Insufferable Goucho" shows just how tremendously talented Bolano was.  In just a few pages he transorms a distinguished very refined judge living in an elegant house in Buenas Aires into an old goucho barely recognizable to his old associates.  It also chronicles terrible post Peron fall in the Argentine economy.  

Mel u

"Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" by Roberto Bolano (from The New Yorker, April 10, 2010) -

The World of Marcel Proust Versus that of Roberto Bolano- my slightly twisted take

My Posts on Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolano ( Chile, 1953 to 2003) is one of my favorite writers.  I have read several of his novels and short stories.  To those new to Bolano, just take the plunge into 2666.

Marcel Proust wrote  about courtesans, dandies, sexual explorers, and those in love with the reading life.  Bolano wrote about whores, idolers, queers, and those in love with the reading life. Balzac would tell us the only real difference between the two groups is one has lots of money.  I think Zola would be at home in both groups.  

"Preconfiguration of Lalo Cura" is narrated by a young man.  It starts out being about the narrator's great love for his mother, just like In Search of Lost Time.  The mother in Proust is a woman of style, refinement and wealth, the one in Bolano's story is a hooker and an actress in porno movies.   The young men in a Proust are looking to marry wealthy heiresses while waiting to inherit great wealth.  Those in Bolano are looking for women they  can get no name, cheap, sex from while waiting to publish their terrible poems in journals with thirty or so readers. Everyone in both works are very into the reading life.  Both groups of people gossip a lot. People in both worlds are seen as what they read.  Try to guess which group of young men die violently.

Bolano's story is another of his  voyages  into the dark streets of Latin America.  It is a throughly entertaining story, lots of interesting things happen.  I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The story is online here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/04/19/prefiguration-of-lalo-cura

My great thanks to Max u for the gift of a New Yorker subscription allowed me to read this story.

Mel u

"Clara" by Roberto Bolano (August 4, 2008, in The New Yorker)

My main purpose in writing this post is to let my readers know of a very generous gesture by The New Yorker.  The New Yorker is for a couple of months opening up its vast archives of short stories for all to read.  I am not quite sure yet how this just announced feature will work but yesterday I checked it out and found stories by big name writers.  Among them was a story from 2008 by Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile).  Anytime I can read a Bolano work for free, I do.  I have previously read his two big works, several minor novels and short stories.

"Clara", it can be read in just a few minutes, is the story, told by an ex-lover of the life of Clara.  Here is the attention gathering opening paragraph:

"She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived, in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything began to fall apart."

Of course the story is one of heart break, dispair and loss.  We follow, through the occasional contacts and phone calls of the narrator, Clara go from beautiful young woman to much transformed forty five year old woman.  The story was translated by Chris Andrews. 

I am reading this as part of my participation in Spanish Literature Month.

http://caravanaderecuerdos.blogspot.com/2014/05/spanish-lit-month-2014.html

You can read "Clara" and lots more great short stories here

http://www.newyorker.com/collection/love-stories-from-the-archive

Don't wait too long to read this story as once summer is over it will go back to paid subscribers only archives

Mel u

A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano (2002, 128 pages, to be published in translation September, 2014)

Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile) has already joined the literary canon.  Of his work I have read 2666, Savage Detectives, A Night in Chile, Nazi Literature in the Americas and several of his short stories.  I recommend those new to Bolano take the plunge first into 2666 then proceed to Savage Detectives.  Both of these are long challenging works with lots of violence and sex and may be too harsh for some sensibilities but they are culturally very important.  When Bolano died in 2003 he left behind a lot of not yet translated into English works.  I was kindly given an advance review copy of Natasha Weimer's translation of one of his early works (2002) A Little Lumpen Novelita.

As this set in Rome work opens, a young woman and her brother are living marginally in a low end apartment.  She tells the story.  Their parents, they are in I guess early to middle twenties, were recently killed in a car crash and this hangs over them.  They both have jobs and they get by through pooling their money.  One day the brother brings home to men, they seem kind of like thugs, this is Bolano so they have read some poetry, they move in and the brother quits his job.  Now supporting the three men, she has intermittent sex with the visitors, she wonders if she will need to do prostituition.  She ends up periodically servicing and spending time with an ex movie director, now blind.  Her brother wants her to find where in his mansion the man keeps his safe.  We see her ambivalence about being paid for sex which spills over into company also, her sort of feelings for the man and her frustration over not finding the safe.  I don't want to tell to much of the close but she ends up turning on the two visitors and her sex client.

I would say read this after you have read the main works and Nazi Literature in the Americas. Unless you want to read all his fiction, you could survive without spending $14.95 for this.  To me that is too much for a 128 page book.

Mel u

"Mexican Manifesto" by Roberto Bolano published April 22, 2013 in The New Yorker

Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile)  is a great writer, a chronicler of the dark side of life and love in the closing years of the last century.  Toward the end of his life, knowing he was dying of liver cancer, he, it is reported, began to write at a frantic pace to leave money for his family.  Ten years after his passing new translations are still coming out.  I do not know the compositional history of "Mexican Manifesto' but I am grateful to The New Yorker for making it available for all to read for free.  

Readers of his major novels will recognize his style in this story about a man's near obsessive interest in exploring the bath houses of Mexico City in the company of a female friend and occasional sex partner, Laura.  Bath Houses in Mexico City serve several functions.  One is the purely utilitarian one of providing a place to bath for those who do not have facilities at home.  This is, I guess, how they started.  In most big cities they have evolved to places for sex with no name strangers, orgies, drug dealing and other fun activities.  They are often primarily frequented by Gay men.  Some say the aids epidemic in America started in the bath houses of San Francisco.  

As the narrator gets more and more in exploring the very large number of bath houses in Mexico City with Laura, he enters deeper into a homoerotic miasma.  There is a very harsh scene where he and Laura pay for two young men to put on a sex show involving mutual masturbation for them.

As the story opens, in his first bath house, there  is a mural of the Aztec emperor Montezuma.  He is in a pool of water up to his neck.  There are other men and women in the pool.  Montezuma is troubled, it seems, but the others are not.  Later the narrator will begin to ponder deeper into the meaning of this mural.

Bolano is about exploring hidden worlds, admitting we love things we are taught are wrong, about seeing a very dark angel on our shoulder, about death as the ultimate aphrodisiac.  Remember Montezuma ruled over a death cult.  

I have since I began blogging read and posted on Nazi Literature in the Americas, By Night in Chile, and another short story.  Preblogging, I read 2666 and Savage Detectives.  All these works I classify as very important reads.  

You can read "Mexican Manifesto" here

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2013/04/22/130422fi_fiction_bolano?currentPage=all

Amulet by Roberto Bolano (1999, translated by Chris Andrews, 2006)

Amulet is the forth  novel by Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile) I have read.  Prior to starting my blog I read 2666, Savage Detectives, and By Night In Chile.  Since starting my blog in July 2009 I read his wonderful Nazi Literature in the Americas and several of his short stories.  Bolano is a tremendously influential writer.    

Amulet is the first person narrative of a woman from Uruguay who lives in Mexico City.   She refers to herself as the "mother of Mexican poetry" due to her heavy involvement on several levels with many young Mexican poets.   As portrayed in the monologue of the narrator, the lives of the poets  fit the stereotypes of chaos and turmoil.   The narrator nurtures the poets, sleeps with some of them and revels in the street life of Mexico City.   Many of the poets are very young, in their late teens to early twenties.  There are lots of Latin American literary references that go over my head and no doubt there is a great mixture of the real with the created.  Bolano was great at making up whole literatures that might have been.  The woman perceptions range from deluded to deeply insightful.   

There is great depth in this work and many ways to ponder the monologue of the narrator.   In reading Bolano I would say first read Savage Detectives then dive into the massive 2666.  I believe at least 2666 will become a classic.  In time I hope to read much more of his work.

Please share your experience with Bolano with us.

Mel u

                                                                              

Roberto Bolano Two Short Stories-Project 196 Chile

"Cell Mates"
"Snow"

Project 196

Chile

Country 18 of 196

Roberto Bolano

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago 
8. Ukraine
9. Cameroon
10. Botswana
11. Sudan
12. Dominica 
13. Israel
14. Syria
15. Ethiopia
16. Zimbabwe
17. Peru
18. Chile

It was not hard to pick a writer to represent Chile for Project 196, my attempt to read and post on a short story from all of the 196 countries in the world.    The only choice is Roberto Bolano, thrust on the center stage of the literary world when his novels Savage Detectives and 666 were translated into English.

Bolano (1953 to 2003-Chile) was an incredibly creative and prolific writer who died of liver cancer at 50.   His books are not for the overly squeamish and neither are these two short stories.  Before I began my blog I read and loved Savage Detectives and his magnum opus, 666.   I have posted on his wonderfully Nazi Literature in the Americas, a hilarious satire of the literary world.   

These two stories are from a 2012 collection of Bolano's short stories, The Return, translated by Chris Andrews.  (I think these stories were probably published else where prior to this collection but I do not know their publication history.)

All of these stories have a "Bolano" like feel to them readers of his big novels will spot.  They are about a young man, rootless, very into the reading life, often fixated on  obscure poets who he may know personally, with a history of troubled relationships with his family and with women.  The male lead often is into a marginal world where men are  petty gangsters, drug addicts and women are whores (this is a much used Bolano word so I use it here) or might as well be.    A character in a Bolano novel might  step over the body of a woman who was just raped, while passing judgment on her body and then quote  Rilke.  His work is full of literary references, one of the reasons lots of bookish people, like me, enjoy his work.   He has spawned many imitators who try to out shock Bolano readers.   I will post briefly on these two stories, both of which I enjoyed. (They are at least R rated.)

"Snow" is set mostly in Moscow.  It is the story of a young man whose father was a communist in Chile, at times a very dangerous thing to be.    His father moved to Moscow and took the the young man, maybe mid-teens to Moscow with him.   It took him a while to adjust but within two years he spoke decent Russian and he and found a way to make his own money.   It was now the time after the fall of the Soviet Union and he gets in with petty mafia types.   His employer is involved in promoting athletes, Olympic types, mostly women and he likes to have sex with them.  He has our narrator set up dates with him.  He tells him to bring him one particular woman.  As the man gets to know her he likes her but the woman knows it is best to go ahead and have sex with his boss.   Russia is depicted as a very amoral society in which the only ties are to friends and money takes precedence over them in most cases.  The characters are well developed and I found it very interesting to see the events in the life of our hero.  The story is full of poets and  lots of really fun literary references.

"Cell Mates" is very much a Bolano story with very educated characters living a life style of thugs, criminals and street people.   There are very few people with long term happy marriages, well adjusted children or decent jobs in the work of Bolano.  The lead character has sexual issues.  If he has sex with someone twice in a row in the same position he is impotent.  His romantic interest eats only mashed potatoes.    She keeps a 20 Kilo bag of mashed potato flakes next to her refrigerator.  There are poets, communists, students and the usual cast in this story.  There are some interesting plot action in the story revolving around love triangles (or maybe pentagrams.)

Chile has a population of 16 million.  It has a long history of totalitarian governments.

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (1996, 227 pages)

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (translated 2008 by Chris Andrews) is the forth novel by Bolano (1953 to 2003-Chile) I have read.    I first read his Savage Detectives, then 2066, and most recently By Night in Chile.      To me the English translations of his work is among the very few really important literary developments of the first decade of the 21st  century.  (I read these three books prior to the starting of my blog in July 2009.  I have posted on two of his short stories that were published in The New Yorker.)


Nazi Literature in the Americas is a collection of biographies of purely imaginary literary figures.   All of the authors were sympathizers with various forms of fascism, including the Nazis.   The authors nearly all are quite dysfunctional.   They  go from those born into extreme wealth in the Argentine to those from the slums of the big Latin American cities down to members of prison gangs in the USA.   


The style is kind of "dead pan" with Bolano giving us a series of outrageous biographies each one crazier than the one before it.   There is also an hilarious section at the end of the book describing various periodicals in which the authors works were published.   These imaginary publications range from the legendary The Fourth Reich in Argentina, The Charismatic Church of California Christians,  and a publication of the Aryan Brotherhood, The Fabulous Adventures of the White Nation.


I loved this book.   I thought some of the biographies were just too funny and flat out brilliant (but I grew up reading Mad Magazine and loved Borat so my tastes expand outside the bounds of normal "adult good taste".)    This book kind of reminded me of Spike Lee's wonderful movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America in which he presents an account of what the USA would have been like had the south won the civil war and slavery  never outlawed.   I can imagine Voltaire thinking it was a work of genius and I can see Samuel Johnson finding it a waste of talent.

I can see how some might get a bit bored by the book and see it as a joke that goes on too long.   I also think there are probably a lot of topical references to Latin American writers that I probably missed but I think that does not really matter too much.

If you were offended by the  scene in the Mel Brooks move (1968) The Producers during which "Spring Time for Hitler" was preformed, you might not like this book.  

There are a number of excellent blog posts on Nazi Literature in the Americas.   Here are links to three of them

Ready When You are C.B.

Parrish Lantern

Winstondad's Blog

On in lieu of a field guide you will find a lot of valuable and insightful material on Bolano

There is also a group reading of Savage Detectives that is set to begin in January. I really urge anyone interested in Bolano to join with us for this event.

Mel u