the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

In another winter you came to me. I was lost then.

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

With me, a single parent, left to fret. You came to

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

Eyes and tequila prose. And now you’re back.

It’s the middle of a midwinter night and you’re 

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

the third reich (w. bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

After an extended Bolaño hiatus, the blog returns to its most-read writer. In times of crisis turn to a sure bet. Unfortunately, Third Reich proves to be strictly minor Bolaño, a long shaggy dog story about a German war games champion who gets stuck in Catalonia when a holiday friend of his girlfriend mysteriously vanishes in a windsurfing accident. This brief synopsis instantly marks the novel out as being in prime Bolaño territory, even more so if it’s added there’s a scarred Latin American beachcomber who plays a prominent role in the narrative. However, the novel itself feels baggy, it’s wide Bolaño, rather than focussed Bolaño. It goes round the houses as it plays out its central device which is a board game reenactment of the second world war between the protagonist and the scarred beachcomber. The second world war took six years from start to finish, and if the novel isn’t quite that long, there are undoubtably moments when it feels as though it’s being played out in order to accommodate the twists and turns inherent in the device. The narrator also tends towards the cold intellectual Bolaño rather than the warm poetic one. One imagines the novel as an earlier work, and in this context it is of course fascinating to see how the writer evolved, how he chiselled his craft, to merge ideas with content with emotion. On the other hand, it might be that this was not an earlier work at all. In which case this kind of ad hoc observation should be labelled as trite and indicative of nothing. 

woes of the true policeman [bolaño]

According to the notes, Bolaño spent many years working on the Woes of the True Policeman, a novel which is clearly unfinished. How many writers have stuff lying around, which was in reality part of another project, a project which gradually took over. There might be novels that spring from nowhere, fully formed, but it seems more likely that every novel is the distillation of years of thought, notes, unfinished scraps. As a narrative, overall, Woes of the True Policeman is frustratingly incomplete: a host of parts which don’t add up and aren’t fully formed enough to stand on their own two feet.  There’s clearly a reason for this. An alternative title for the book might be Notes towards the Creation of 2666. Because this is a book which acts as an escort for another book which is now regarded as a masterpiece. The central character, Amalfitano,  is one of the protagonists of 2666. The book is steeped in the fictional history of the novelist Archimboldi, another key figure in 2666. The book touches on the issue of the femicides in a Mexican border town which also constitute a major element of 2666. 

It would appear that Woes of the True Policeman is made up of material which Bolaño chose, in the end, not to include in 2666. Or perhaps, if he hadn't been dying whilst he was completing that work, this would have been material which he would have found a way to have included had he had more time to work over the text. Certainly the section on Archimboldi, which includes synopses of his novels, accounts of his friendships and enemies, etcetera feels as though it might have slotted into 2666 fairly seamlessly. 

All of which is to say that the novel is of more interest to the Bolaño aficionado than it might be to the casual reader. The narrative has too many loose ends, the novel is too bitty. Having said all of that, the one thing which that any reader can take from this novel is the unadulterated pleasure of reading Bolaño's prose. There might have been greater stylists in twentieth century literature, but they will be few and far between. No-one picks up an idea and plays with it with quite such kittenish pleasure as Bolano, and that pleasure is something the reader basks in. For a partial, frustrating, unfinished novel, there’s still a hell of a lot to enjoy.

the return [bolaño]

Another volume from the posthumous pen of. What to make of this collection, ripped from two volumes published in Spanish, Putas Asesinas and Llamadas Telefonicas?

I have no idea when these stories were written within the timeframe of the Bolano oeuvre. My hazard-a-guess would be they come from towards the end, rather than the beginning. The author starts to show a fascination with more colourful “characters”. Porn stars, footballers, a Parisian playboy, fashion designers. It might be that these stories, which seem dependent to a certain extent on the exoticism of their characters’ professions, do not work as effectively as those which adopt either a more neutral protagonist, or, the classical Bolanian trope, either a writer or the writer’s alter-ego. Belano or Bolaño appears in several of the stories. When he does it reminds us of what a skill it is to construct a self-referential protagonist without this seeming whimsical or self-indulgent. All too often, this device will lead (pace Amis) to something clunky and unconvincing. But when Bolaño makes an appearance in one of his own stories the voice, the turn of phrase, feels completely authentic. Of course, it is a voice from beyond the grave, but it almost feels as though the text was indeed written from that vantage point, the high peaks of death. One of the stories, The Return, is told by a dead man, but oddly the dead man’s voice here is less compelling than the dead voice of the author. Even though this is also the author’s voice and even though in the moment of writing the author was not, we imagine, actually dead.

Writing is by definition a self-indulgent process. The wife of a writer friend of mine once turned on him, telling him it was all masturbation. It’s a regular attack and, when the writer isn’t getting paid for their troubles, one that is not ungrounded. The writer plunges into the morass of their own mind, hoping to emerge with gems which, for some unknown reason, might be of interest to others. This is as much an urge as a skill, more an addiction than a virtue. What’s so beguiling about Bolaño is that the reader knows this is not a man who wrote for money  or even for fame. He wrote because he obeyed the compulsion to write, something that is detached from the industry of writing, an industry which includes the whole paraphernalia of criticism. That compulsion, shaped and honed through both practice and the act of reading, lead to the unlikely event of his books sitting in your hand, or your digital device. There might be thousands of Bolaños out there, unread, undiscovered, drowned under the weight of their unrecognised words. It is worth bearing in mind that, although his success is not entirely posthumous, it is largely so. Right up until the beginning of the end, this is someone who wrote into the void, unafraid, refusing to be silenced by the absence of an echo that might have marked the point which defined the writing’s raison d’etre.

The last story here is an account of a dream, a dream wherein he meets the poet Enrique Lihn. The story states that the dream took place in ’99. Lihn died in ’98. Lihn is therefore a ghost, although ghosts are allowed to roam free in our dreams, whilst real life ordains they remain on the other side of the crepuscular surface of ‘reality’. The story doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s just an account of a dream. It mentions the fate of another five authors who Lihn once nominated as the future voices of Chilean literature, once upon a time, all of whom have either died or seen their stars fade. What is the point of this story, this dream? It doesn’t possess the classical virtues of a well-rounded story. Yet it marks a completely satisfying conclusion to the collection of short stories. Because this is a ghost writing about a ghost. Who was also a writer. Literature, for all its masturbatory tendencies, is a death defyer. The writer, from the cocoon of his absence, maintains a presence. The universe of literature, just like the literature of dreams, resists the supposed laws of physics. The writers egotistical I triumphs. Bolaño, one feels in his writing, had a grasp of this, much as Homer or whoever else one wants to name did. Those writers who are not so much charging over the precipice of their society, as most do, for fame or fortune, but charging over the precipice of mortality. An altogether more audacious, Quixotian endeavour.

monsieur pain [roberto bolaño]

Bolaño's literary history means that he's going to spend a long time dying. Having written extensively for twenty years before he was first published, there's a substantial back catalogue to be worked through. The reason he had to wait so long for success was more to do with the fact he was a maverick than anything else, scrabbling around on the margins. All of which means that, in death, he's more prolific than most living writers. This book is one that helped to get him recognised, and is the subject of one of his more famous stories in Last Evenings on Earth. As such it almost as interesting for its role within the Bolaño myth as it is for its literary qualities.

Monsieur Pain is a slight if beguiling book, set in Paris before the second world war, when the eponymous hero, a mesmerist, is drafted in to consult on the case of a man who is dying, apparently, of hiccoughs. However, a rival party doesn't want the man, Snr Vallejo, cured, paying Monsieur Pain a sizeable bribe in order to get him not to take the case. That's about it with regard to the narrative. The pearls are to be found in the writer's love of arcane detail. He meets a pair of twins who design ghoulish scenes in fishtanks, (a kind of cross between Mr Hirst and the Chapman Brothers?); Pain is plagued by random characters who pursue him across Paris. His former best friend has become a fascist luminary in the Spanish Civil War. There is an air of Poeian menace (the book includes a quotation from Poe at the front).

Monsieur Pain is neither a great book nor a terrible one. At times it feels like an exercise in style, at others it includes writing that is bona fide Bolaño. As ever, a little research brings intriguing results. Bolaño was always a fervent advocate of neglected Latin American poets. It turns out that Vallejo is not a fictional but a real figure, who died in Paris in 1938. One whose work is held up to be among the most eccentrically brilliant in the Spanish language. Vallejo's qualities don't really come through in the book: he is a man who cannot speak and is dying of hiccoughs. However, it might not be too spurious to suggest that Bolaño sees something of himself in the figure of the Peruvian, a Latin American poet dying in exile. Which would make Monsieur Pain something of a prophetic text, as though the writer sensed a tragic destiny underpinning his development, something that tallies with his instinct to auto-mythologise, blending fact and fiction, as though his life was a book he was constantly writing, fragments of which would be captured on paper and described as his novels.


Given this, the following lines from a Vallejo poem (Black Stone on top of a White Stone) would appear to have their part to play in the story and Bolaño's reasons for writing this book:


I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

antwerp [bolaño]

Last year, on my trip to South America, I read Bolaño. However, Antwerp is a very different kind of beast to 2666. The last was his final book, more or less, this was his first, written in 1980.

It's a dense, poetic tract, of little more than 70 pages. There's no more than hints of a narrative in a text made, like a Hanecke movie, from 56 fragments. If it's reminiscent of anyone, it might be Lautreamont, the prince of the depraved, whose great text makes little sense but still manages to sear itself on the reader's retina. It's perhaps another glimpse of the poet Bolaño claimed he wanted to be before he settled into become the novelist he truly was. The claim on the back of the book that Antwerp is "the only novel that doesn't embarrass me", seems disingenuous, and written from a position of strength. It is, as he mentions in his introduction, not the kind of book that gets published these days; the kind of book that in the late 19th century had a vast readership but in this day and age would have precious few. And those that do, would be aficionados. In a way its a book of the damned, one of those texts written by a writer with no ambitions, just the need to thread words together on a string of consciousness.

Nevertheless, I suspect that if you work it harder, if you read it carefully, repeatedly, looking for the links, not on a plane to Montevideo surrounded by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the connections it contains will gradually make themselves clearer; the artistry emerging in a fashion he later learnt to make more latent.

nazi literature in the americas [bolaño]

Nazi Literature is something of a conceit. The book consists of approximately thirty short biographies of fictional American writers with some kind of right wing affiliation. Also included is a list of publishing houses, secondary figures, and a complete bibliography. Some of the characters are monsters, but just as many are losers, or curious anomalies within their worlds. Some of the mockery is brutal and extremely funny; some of it is almost tender, in its portrayal of these slightly pathetic figures, and their lacklustre literary efforts. Indeed, the more unsuccessful the writer, the more Bolaño seems to sympathise with them. I once discovered an interview with him online where he was talking about how much he respected the writers that never get anywhere, who fade into obscurity, and it seems as though, in some bizarre way, the writers in this book are the alter-egos or step-siblings of the poets who populate the first part of The Savage Detectives. As though even if they are Nazi murderers, Bolaño finds it hard to speak ill of a fellow writer.

The writing is always crisp and liable to snap, crackle or pop with little jokes or surprises. It's neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but rather the articulation of a strange, parallel world to the one the writer knew. The final story, dealing with Carlos Hoffman who will reappear in Distant Star, is the one that knits the personal and the fictional together, as Bolaño himself claims to have witnessed the mystical sky-poetry of the freakish and terrifying Hoffman, part of the death squads which might, once upon a time, have claimed his life.

It's a little odd reading Bolaño now, a year and a half on from making his discovery. After 2666's publication, he has started to become known to a wider public; in my circle he's one of those writers who people know of but might never get round to reading. There are more of his books waiting to be translated, but Nazi Literature is the last of his currently translated works left for me to get teeth into. It's hard to put a finger on what he's actually done, but like all the writers one chooses to consider (or who insist upon one discovering them to be) great, Bolaño's works seem to have constructed some kind of universe of their own, a universe which might also be a benchmark for the one we inhabit, or might just be a benchmark for the possibilities of writing, or fiction, which might also be a benchmark for the possibilities of the universe, be it the one we inhabit or one of the ones we don't. Part of being a writer is to remake the world anew for the readers who read you, and convince those readers that your vision has something that gives it an import or a value which they cannot ignore. Perhaps there's a secret fascism involved in the very process of writing; the imposition of one person's will on a vast swathe of others. Certainly many of the writers listed in the Nazi Literature have an unhealthy charisma, and many become cult figures, revered by their readers (although others do perish in complete obscurity). Bolaño's politics never seem to be much of an issue, what with him having pitched in against Pinochet, and sided so ostentatiously with the Left (the key decision for anyone of his generation was which side were you on, and having met a few Chileans of his age, you can see that this decision may well have been one they were then stuck with forever); however Bolaño's fascination with the right (thinking in particular of the last part of 2666) may well have a subtle connection with his understanding of how writing itself works, how the will, or charisma, of a single soul can be transmuted to hold sway over so many. Including, in his case, myself, my own universe marginally reshaped, in some way, by my reading of the strange world of Mr B.

2666 (bolaño)

At one point in my university career, I read Foucault’s The Order of Things. (Les Mots et Les Choses). I don’t think it was part of the syllabus, I’d just become sufficiently possessed by the Foucault bug that I decided it had to be read. At a subsequent tutorial I sat down and said to the professor, Joanna Hodge, that I’d finished it. She looked at me, and I looked at her. There was a sort of silence, a sort of hmmm-filled silence. Which contained, it seemed to me, the knowledge that there was no real place to begin to discuss The Order of Things, a work so vast in its erudition, imagination and theoretical potential that it seemed to defy the initial stages of overview and reflection. The words to achieve this lay not within our grasp.

I’d like to think that we didn’t talk about the book at all, recognising the futility of any attempt, but I can’t remember the rest of the tutorial. I’d also like to think that when sentient beings sit down at their university tutorials to discuss 2666, a similar hmmm-shaped silence will pervade the preliminaries. Because this book is a monster. Una bestia, as they might say here. Fortunately I’ve had plenty of time to wrestle with the monster, because it demands time and effort of its readers.

Shortly before leaving England, Mr Blue called me and told me to switch the radio on. Someone was talking about the book. I switched it on too late, but was informed that the man on the radio had opined this was not a book to read on a plane. So I read it on the plane. And on the beach. And whenever I could find any down time between London and South America. I entered the strange land of Bolañismo, and lived to tell the tale, lugging the book around like a failsafe.

The first challenge of this book is that, unlike The Savage Detectives, it’s 5 books in one. None of which, save perhaps the last, have a traditional beginning or end. Which might make them all middle, but I’m not sure that’s right. The 5 books – sub-headed as The Parts About The Critics; Amalfitano; Fate; The Crimes and Archimboldi are connected by threads which are geographical and thematic. All are partially set in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa; four of them feature the auto-didact German author Archimboldi. In all of them the smell of murder and sexual violence is never very far away; in the part about The Crimes it’s pervasive.

The part about The Crimes is the book’s anchor in so far as it secures Santa Teresa as the mooring point for the book’s diverse stories, but also in so far as its relentless description of brutal murder after brutal murder weighs the book down. It is true: this part is not airport fare. Rarely has reading felt like such an oppressive process. Bolaño traces, over the course of almost a decade, a procession of murders of women in the city. His account is based on the real-life sequence of murders which took place there. (About which there are now two films, one featuring J-Lo). Whether what the reader reads is an account of the real murders or not is another point of disconcertion. Did the writer really research every crime? Knowing where the bodies were found and how each woman was allegedly killed? And if not, how could he make it up? The elision between truth and fiction is disturbing. Furthermore, it feels as though the writer is in some way punishing his readers. Because the natural (humane) inclination of the reader is to expect some kind of resolution to the brutality, some assertion of hope, but none is forthcoming; the murders seem more a condition of life, like weather, than an aberration. This is how the world is, and the reader needs to accept it, or cast the book aside.

There are a great deal of literary references in the book, as always with Bolaño. Some of which I got, many of which I missed. The name De Sade does crop up, and at one point a Mexican general asserts that the fullest flowering of pornography occurred slightly before the time of The French Revolution. There is something Sadistic about the Part About the Crimes (with more than a hint of 120 Days Of Sodom). Furthermore it’s interesting where it’s located within the book. The opening three sections have already engendered a sense of fear for any female who goes out in Santa Teresa – a fear which the text plays on with the re-introduction of Amalfitano’s daughter in the part about Fate. So the extended description of the murders is not written to scare the reader, or invoke pity for the victims, which has already been done – rather it might be said to be there as an instrument the author uses in order to bludgeon the reader to death.

+++

On which note, and because I both have the time and the book (it seems to me) demands that the time is taken, I shall pause, and head off to rehearse in the low-rise, Latino backstreets of Jacinto Vera, a kind of amiable mirror image to the hellish vision of Santa Teresa. And later attempt to talk a little about the other side of the book, the untethered strands which float away from the Mexican shipwreck, occupying warmer, Baltic, climes.

+++

As ever, Bolaño writes about writers. Besides Santa Teresa, the book is also constructed around a mysterious, reclusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi. The opening part, about The Critics, describes the quest of three academics who specialise in Archimboldi’s work to locate the writer, a quest which also takes them to Santa Teresa. Quite what the links are between Archimboldi and Santa Teresa is a question which will no doubt preoccupy academics studying Bolaño, who will find themselves heading to Mexico looking for the answers, and sometimes it feels as though the whole book has been written to manufacture this conceit. Bolaño writes brilliantly about writing, a subject closer to his heart, perhaps, than any other. His literary range is gigantic, his tread traversing peaks that many readers will never have heard of. There’s a kind of parlour game to be played, trying to spot the references, many of them contemporary. Is there a hint of McCarthy in Fate’s crossing of the border? There certainly appears to be suggestions of Pynchon in the book’s vast internationalism, but perhaps the connection merely goes with the territory. The similarities between Alan Pauls’ perverse, deranged British artist and the one who stalks the pages of the opening part about The Critics seems too co-incidental not to be some kind of homage, and on page 60 there is an indubitable reference to Rodrigo Fresan and his novel Kensington Gardens. This is not to mention the contributions of Goethe; Bely; Doblin; Shakespeare and the host of other writers who participate in one way or another. It’s no surprise that perhaps the most idyllic, least threatening, scene in the whole book takes place in a contented publishing house, where the employees happily swap notes about writers through the ages. As though the world of literature in some ways acts an antidote to the savagery of humanity.

The depiction of Archimboldi himself, so presaged by the book’s preceding six hundred pages, reflects Bolaño’s tenderness towards the literary. The foreboding giant doesn’t really live up to psychotic expectations. Here there’s an indication of the other side of the book’s tender nature; which is to create a space for the inarticulate, or the losers. Flawed character after flawed character is allocated their idiosyncrasies (none more so than the paranoid eccentric Amalfitano) and these are treated with great respect. Whilst Bolaño is a writer capable of articulating great menace, and literary caprice, he is also something of a patron saint of lost causes, the ones whose stories are seemingly lost to the world, recovered at the last.

En tonces… as they say down here. These are the last words of Bolaño, apparently, the great tome which was completed, or nearly completed, shortly before his death. Already the book would appear to be being canonised, in a manner which probably wouldn’t entirely displease him. He knew his worth, mas o menos. What does 2666 reveal in the end? Allowing that generalities are only assertions founded on stories which contain other stories which contain still more stories and so on. It tells us that great books don’t have to be neat and tidy. In fact, it probably helps if they’re not. Bolaño wrote two of them, and his second is fractured, like a broken body. Literature is not a precise science. It’s some kind of search, for some kind of something. Not for nothing is the detective novel his chosen model in both the Savage Detectives and 2666, where the reader is the detective, trying to assemble the clues both to solve the terrible crimes, but also to unlock the maverick authorial message. Literature is an offshoot of the world of literature, and though it is not essential to be aware of that, it might help. Culture, no matter how remotely, serves a purpose. The world, the one we know as humans, is a world composed of stories.

last evenings on earth [bolaño]

I had not been able to read a book since I read the last book. Too many reasons why, none of them as bad as they might once have been. Besides which, reading is a habit, and once something displaces that habit, the hardest part is getting it back.

Bolaño's collection of short stories had lain on a corner of my swampy desk since May. I had begun to read Sensini, the opening story, several times, only to abandon it. Knowing that I would be flying into Gerona, and then visiting Barcelona, both of which are places that feature in that story, I summoned up some reading strength and opened the book on the plane.

It's hot at this time of year in Barcelona. So hot I was thinking on the first day, before the others arrived, that I really couldn't see the point in visiting cities anymore. Certainly not at this time of year. I walked, exhausted, battered by modern plane travel and a week's insomnia, down the Ramblas, then along the port, trying to find somewhere to stop. I stumbled past an African market and the restaurant where once I ate lobster with H. Our trips to Barcelona never seemed to work as well as they should have done. I say 'trips' but there were only two. The second H was ill. I remember her lying on the bench in Parc Guel, as I walked on up, watching the old folk on their Sunday constitutional. We didn't realise it then but the reason our trips to Barcelona didn't go as well as they should was because we were actually participants in an unwritten Bolaño story (he was dead so didn't have time to write it), loaded with his tropes of Latin American exile; unstable poets and their unstable relationships; the action rarely in the here and now, usually just around the corner. As it was then, for us, though we only intimated it at the time, we didn't actually know it. (How could we as neither of us had even heard of the writer then, let alone read him.)

Anyway, I wasn't thinking all this. I wasn't thinking much of anything, except, it's hot, and I'm not sure I want to visit cities anymore. Then I found a bit of shade, just a step, on a wide bit of space, behind the restaurant complex where I ate lobster and so on, and there were people walking past and cycling past and all I could think of doing was opening and then reading the Bolaño. It was a story about an American woman who ended up getting to know the narrator in Gerona. I didn't like the story all that much - I don't like Bolaño's stories, they ramble and they go nowhere, and just when you think they're getting somewhere they stop, and it's a trick and he knows it and we know it and it's really detective fiction (to which he alludes) decorated by obscure poets, post-modern non-referentialism; a train of thought wrapped round his little finger. And of course it's not true because I do like Bolaño, but whether I like him or not didn't seem to be the issue, the issue was that the only thing I wanted to do at that moment in that city at that point in the thing which is my life was sit there and read his story, his rambling, pointless stories.

Which is what I did. Then, when I finished it, I got up and I mooched on to the next stop, and wrote a note about 'poeticism' which was, of course, conditioned by the reading I had just done and the circumstances I found myself in.

The last story I had to read, or one of them, was Days of 1978. I read it in the queue for the Ryanair flight last night on the way out of Gerona airport. It's a bit of a treck from Gerona to Barcelona but I was glad I did it, if only to look out at the hills and the land where some of these stories are set. I got to the airport, it was evening, and stood for an hour in the queue. As I got to the front, the party in front of me, a stag party, suddenly quadrupled in size, as those who'd been drinking in the bar came to join the ones who'd been standing in line. It's the sort of thing which, after you've been queuing for an hour already, on too little sleep, can really get to you. Luckily I'd been reading the short story as I waited. It's about a Chilean exile from '73 who's tried to commit suicide, whom the narrator doesn't like. But they all meet at a party and the narrator, displacing the action as always, finds himself recounting the narrative of a Russian film, which makes the would-be suicidee weep, but not the narrator, of course, because Bolaño's narrators are like detectives, they recount, they observe, and if they weep they will only do it on their own. Anyway, part of Bolaño's power is that sometimes, everything just clicks, and a line releases all the displaced emotion, (it might be something you least expect, like the son crossing his father's path on the way down to the ocean in Last Evenings, or Leprince's rejection, or whichever moment you happen to stumble over), and I have a feeling that the moment when the would-be-Chilean suicidee starts to cry after hearing the narrator's description of the film, might have been such a moment, had I not been standing in the queue for an hour at Gerona airport. All that sadness locked up in that image, all the bits and pieces of life and the life we lead that go into the making of that fictional moment... I am grateful to the stag party of three hundred who queue-jumped me at Gerona airport. I am sure that under different circumstances it, his rambling story, would have had me weeping like a newborn.

distant star [w. bolaño]

If your themes are poetry; fascism and Chile it's hard to imagine coming up with a better conceit to wed the three than a sky writing poet from Pinochet's airforce. Carlos Wieder is as evil and complex an anti-hero as they come. His charisma shines through in spite of Bolaño's antipathy to his position. He comes across as an enigmatic genius. It is only when what he writes in the sky is revealed that the banality and lack of originality underpinning his mystique is revealed.

Bolaño's text is brief, corrosive, shines itself like the heavens above a cold Chilean night. Each page contains little gems that sparkle: the alt-German etymology of Wieder's name; or the performance art of Wieder's catastrophic 'exhibition'. As ever in Bolaño's work there's the pleasure taken from the pleasure taken by the author as he concocts his tales. Distant Star uses the format of The Savage Detectives - a detective story where two friends hunt down a lost poet. The blending of discursive fable, sharp characterisation and detective novel is as effective as ever, spun around the image of the fascist poet, lost in his isolation.

Distant Star is a minor masterpiece. It is the fourth novel of Bolaño's I've read this year, and I still await the translation of 2066. The slimmer volumes feel like prose poems. A narrator wends thoughts around his or her theme. The novels exist as much for their digressions as their narrative. The introduction claims this text is amplified from a short story in a previous volume, Nazi Literature in America, and, as with all Bolaño's smaller works, it feels as though this too could be amplified into something more extravagant. If it were not for The Savage Detectives and (I assume) 2066, the feeling might have persisted that Bolaño was almost as much of a dilettante as some of his anti-heroes: a great talent that never quite flowered. As it is, the longer novels did get written, and Distant Star shines as a highly enjoyable crystallisation of Bolaño's talent - a talent as transparent as Wieder's sky-writing, but coupled with depth and durability and a humanity the book's anti-hero so palpably lacks.

This text would be the best introduction to the writer's work I have so far read.

by night in chile [w. roberto bolaño]

A priest begins to speak. His tone of voice is far from confident. His words seems circular, they roll round on themselves. He claims to be dying, and speaking in order to validate himself in the face of criticisms from a never-named 'wizened youth'. As the words pour out in a stream of unparagraphed sentences, anecdotes take shape - of a meeting with Neruda; of teaching Pinochet about Marxism; of a trip to Europe where every church has its own falcon for killing pigeons. The stories bleed into one another. The priest rambles. He doesn't really make his points. He talks for 130 pages, then he runs out of breath.

This is the third Bolaño novel I've read this year, following The Savage Detectives and Amulet. I've also garnered some kind of a handle on the Bolaño myth, which is destined to grow. Not as a result of his shorter works, but the great sweep and narrative verve of The Savage Detectives, and perhaps 2666, though that has yet to be published in English.

The story goes that around the age of 40, Bolaño decided he was going to make a living from writing novels. He submitted his work for prizes, re-submitting the same peice many times, winning many times. If this is the case, and even if it isn't, the pattern of his work seems apparent. Around the two larger novels he generated several shorter ones, written in short bursts. Amulet takes a character from Detectives, the self-proclaimed Uruguayan mother of Mexican poetry, and spins a yarn from her extract in the larger novel. By Night in Chile introduces the paranoid priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, and gives him a platform to validate or damn himself, depending on your political perspective.

By Night in Chile allows Bolaño to deal with various shibboleths of his native land. In additions to Neruda and Pinochet's appearance, as book features the wife of a CIA torturer and representatives of Opus Dei. Bolaño's descriptions of the priest's Marxism lessons for the Chilean junta is an understated, savage critique. Sebastian lists the classes he gives one by one, along with the generals' attendance levels and their intellectual responses. Without in any way highlighting his role in the story, Bolaño sticks the knife into Pinochet, damning him through the priest's mouth. Bolaño spent almost all of his adult life in exile. This is politically charged writing, but the skill of it is that it's done in a way so melifluous and underhand that for a while you barely register that the pen is indeed proving to be mightier than the sword.

There's something of Bernhard in the priest's long monologue. Laced with wit and humour, it is also, significantly, poetic. Bolaño apparently resented having to make his living writing novels, never having been acclaimed for his poetry. The way in which stories come in and out of focus, governed by the implacable rhythm of Urratia's mental cogitations, gives it the feel of an extended piece of narrative verse. Perhaps By Night in Chile connects to Bolaño's longer work in much the same way that a poem, created in an abridged period of time, connects to the lengthy process of a long novel. It is a text that could be re-read and mined for the nuggets that nestle in the garrulous priest's prose.