Tres

Tres - Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Laura Healy

Tres is a collection of three poems by Bolaño, although two could just as easily be called prose fragments. Indeed the first 'poem' is called Prose from Autumn in Gerona and the third "section" is called A Stroll Through Literature, a title that might seem more at home in a middlebrow essay collection. The central poem is called The Neochileans and centers on a tour by a band of that name. It is a short book, despite it's 170 plus pages, as many pages contain just one short paragraph and the facing pages feature the original Spanish texts.

What is surprising (or not) is that the work fits seamlessly into Bolaño's oeuvre, and readers who have read a number of his works will find themselves again in that large reverberating echo chamber which all his books seem to exist in. Partly it is that the writer's life is stitched into his work and partly the language and the fascination with geometry. Bolaño often seems to see the relationships between characters and the effect they have on each other in terms of a geometric theorems, as if a formula could be derived of the forces pulling the characters together, or apart. The word features in the very first paragraph of Prose from Autumn in Gerona.
"A woman - I ought to say a stranger - who caresses you, teases you, is sweet with you and brings you to the edge of a precipice. There, the protagonist gasps or goes pale. As if he were inside a kaleidoscope and caught sight of the eye watching him. Colours arranging themselves in a geometry far from anything you're prepared to accept as okay. And so begins autumn, between the Oñar river and the hill of las Pederas."

Antwerp

Antwerp - Roberto Bolaño
"reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences"

I started jotting down notes towards a coherent post on Antwerp but it seemed easier more in keeping with the spirit of the novel to leave them as simply notes towards a blog post.

Antwerp is the first known novel written by Bolaño. It was written around 1980 but not published until just before his death. It is short and experimental, with atmosphere and effect more than plot and character the driving force. It is closer in spirit to poetry than prose and perhaps marks the major staging post between both poles of Bolaño's writing.

”The gun was only a word.”
Chekov, famously, said something about having to use a gun, if you introduce it. Bolaño seems to be saying that you don't.

The Savage Daughters

King Pelias just before being hacked apart and killed by his daughters.

Further thoughts on The Savage Detectives

Having completed the group read of The Savage Detectives and my earlier response to the book, reading other blogs from the readalong has led me to think further about it and to consider elements that were not mentioned in my earlier blog post.

One of the themes that I found in The Savage Detectives and which I don't recall seeing in any of the other posts was the relationship between fathers and daughters. I had meant to address this in my earlier post but (like a number of other intended expositions) it fell by the wayside.

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño

This reading of The Savage Detectives was for a group read hosted by Rise and Richard. This was my second time reading The Savage Detectives and it has been an interesting ride, finishing on Friday Night/Saturday Morning at 4.30 after reading the final 250 pages. I'm only managing to get to this post up now as it was even more incoherent last night than it is now. I hope it will contribute something to the discussion of the book.
(This also needs a SPOILER alert - I ramble all through the book in this post and may give away more than some people who have not read the book would wish to know,. )

When I last read it it was my first experience of Bolaño but now, having read a few, it was interesting to see how it interacted with his other books. In fact it started at times to feel like you could see the writer's mixing the elements in his alchemical lab, trying to get the formula right.

Poets, Geometry, Nazis, Students, Germans, Mexico, Barcelona, Giants, Books, Murder &c ...

"sharp instruments and lynched messiahs"

Kill yr Idols

I've taken a break from In Search of Lost Time in order to read The Savage Detectives for next weekends readalong. After reading the passage below, from The Savage Detectives, I'm now desperate to prove I'm not desperate by finishing In Search of Lost Time.
The following quote is from The Savage Detectives. The call to Kill Yr Idols is from Sonic Youth.

Resolutions 2012

Plans for 2012

Last year I managed to kickstart my reading by setting myself a target of reading 100 books for the year. I made 85 before I had to resort to the works of Roger Ackroyd in order to get over the line.

This year I have been trying to think of a slightly different set of resolutions but had only really decided on reading In Remembrance of Things Past by January 1st. That and a reread of The Savage Detectives for the group read hosted by Rise and Richard. I was intending to try and read the Proust in January but the pace I'm setting means that's not a possibility. Also I'll have to take a break to read The Savage Detectives after I finish the first volume - Swann's Way.

By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolaño

The titular night is the night during which the priest Father Sebastian Urrutia narrates his feverish memoirs; it is also the darkness that passed over Chile under Pinochet; it also refers to the nightime activities of the Chilean literati and other dark times.

Right from the start Fr Urrutia introduces one of the novels main themes. Urrita immediately follows his declaration of Chilean nationality by letting us know that "My ancestors on my fathers side came from the Basque country, or Euskadi, as it is now called. On my mother's side I hail from the gentle land of France." Throughout the book, he will refer to people of native Chilean descent as 'ugly', while he himself is "noble" looking, a hint that he may not be much of a Chilean.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Nazi Literature in the Americas - Roberto Bolano

An imaginary encyclopedia of literary losers who tend to fly in circles as they have only got right wings Nazi Literature in the Americas is both a humorous parlour game and a howl of disgust. Lying at its heart are the fascist regimes and disappearances that blighted South America over the course of Bolano's life. There is also a sense, which grows in it's absence, of the importance of literature, that evil needs it's apologists in order to flourish.

Although some of the entries in this sourcebook relate to each other, it is largely without plot and most entries are discrete. However, like in Nabokov's Pale Fire, we are invited to read between the lines to create the world that contains these people. There is no narrative line to follow through the book but the delight in the ever expanding detail of this parallel world. Were they to have existed, or exist now, many of these writers would not even have achieved obscurity.

Amulet

Amulet - Roberto Bolano

There is something rhapsodic about Bolano's writing, making what is static and ephemeral in the plot seem propulsive and concrete. The action is in the metaphor, in the vigour of the writing.

Amulet revisits the terrain of The Savage Detectives. It is, in fact, a reworking of part of the longer work with the emphasis changed. Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguyan living in Mexico city recounts events from her bohemian life among poets and academics, including the lightly disguised "Arturo Belano".

From the very start we are told that this book is a "horror story. A story of murder, deception and horror. But it won't appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won't seem like that. Although, in fact, it's the story of a terrible crime."

100+ books in 2011

As usual with New Year Resolutions (100+ books to be read this year) starting off the year is easy and I've managed to finish four novels so far this year. Whether I can keep up anything like this pace remains to be seen - I've certainly got the books stacked up and ready to go.

1. 2666 - Roberto Bolano
From visceral realism to eviscerated fables, with a title half 2001/ half Book of Revelations, with ruminations on the meaning of writing and the place of the writer in the modern, past and future days this is not a little book.
Joyce appears in the face of an Irish bellhop; the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, the savage edge of globalisation and the killing of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa in Mexico form part of the narrative.
As well as showing that he is prepared to try and wrestle meaning from our ever more haunted and haunting history Bolano shows himself as master of many styles and leaves us with a book that cannot be discounted from any serious consideration of the novel.
The five parts (Bolano thought they could be published seperately) include a rectangular affair in academia; a man falling apart in Mexico, far from home; a black reporter who gets thrown from his comfort zone into writing about boxing and thinking about serial killings; a police procedural about serial killings and a fable about a giant who wanders deep into the forests and emerges with blood on his hands and the hard won knowledge that will almost win him the Nobel Prize.