More Bolano coming to the U.K.

Picador has decided to basically publish everything Roberto Bolano wrote, including one we haven’t seen before: The Third Reich.

Baggaley bought The Third Reich, a novel completed by Bolano shortly before his death in 2003 and as yet unpublished in any language, from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. It will be published in 2011.

Between this and the New Yorker announcing David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and Nabokov’s The Original of Laura debacle, we are really in posthumous novel season.

2666 coincidences

I have a google alert set up for 2666 and most all of the links are Bolano-related, but now that publicity for the book is starting to wane a little bit, I’m seeing more mundane references. Sometimes they are phone numbers that end in -2666. Even the other day, I got a bill from a construction contractor for $2,666. Anyway, here are a couple of examples.

The Florida Lotto last night:

No tickets matched all six numbers in Wednesday’s Lotto drawing from the Florida Lottery. The numbers drawn were 20-28-29-39-43-49. The 51 tickets matching five numbers are worth $5,957.50 each, and the 2,666 tickets matching four numbers are worth $92.50 each. The estimated jackpot for Wednesday’s Lotto drawing is $8 million.

This one is a little more applicable to the novel. In a news story I saw a mention of House Resolution 2666, a bill related to gun control that was not adopted. The Library of Congress record for it is here. Congressman Bobby Rush introduced the bill in 2007 and named it after local hero Blair Holt.

According to police, Michael Pace boarded an eastbound 103rd Street CTA bus at 103rd and Halsted about 3:20 p.m. on May 10 and started shooting, striking two males and three females, all of whom were students at Julian. Kevin Jones is accused of giving Pace the gun, knowing he wanted to use it to try to kill someone he had argued with. Julian High School student Blair Holt used his body to shield and ultimately save a female friend.

The legislation has been re-introduced this term, but as HR 45 (which just doesn’t have the same ring to it).

Review at Prospect

The Prospect takes a literary look at the novel of the year:

Throughout 2666, literary devices are deployed, violently extended past their limits and discarded. At one point, the number of times different words appear in a conversation is precisely listed; later, an entire page is devoted to the names of human phobias; we also get two solid sides of sexist jokes. All these are just warm-ups, however: Bolano’s testing-to-destruction of literature’s possibilities reaches its apex in his descriptions of the murdered, violated bodies of over 100 women, one-by-one—an incandescent imaginary inquiry that shadows a similar plague of real killings in the Mexican border-town of Ciudad Juarez. In Bolano’s telling, the detail is at once coolly forensic yet never generic: to each there is a story, a circumstance, a particular human absence from the world. It is literature as a kind of after-image, alternately numbing and blinding but always insistent on one point—that no one can consider themselves safe from this violence, which crosses borders and categories as easily as it leaps between words and deeds.

Big Ups from Edmund White

From an interview with writer Edmund White:

What books are currently on your bedside table?

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. He is the most relentlessly fascinating author I’ve read in the past 10 years. Also Belly of Paris by Zola and a hundred books for a literary contest.

Wimmer interview/profile in CS Monitor

There is a long interview with and profile of Natasha Wimmer in the Christian Science Monitor.

In the spring of 2006, Natasha Wimmer left her job at a Manhattan trade publication and moved with her husband to Cuauhtemoc, a bustling neighborhood in the northwest of Mexico City. Their flat overlooked Calle Abraham Gonzalez, not far from a cafe called La Habana, and Ms. Wimmer spent many afternoons there, reading and chatting with Mexican friends.

At the time, she was working on the first English translation of “The Savage Detectives,” by the novelist Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003. Bolano was Chilean, but had drifted in and out of Mexico City throughout his life, first as an adolescent, then as a revolutionary and litterateur.

“He was a geographically obsessed writer, especially when it came to Mexico City. He always told you exactly where he was going —down to the street, the intersection, the building,” Wimmer remembers. “Cafe La Habana, for instance, was the basis for Cafe Quito,” an important set piece in “The Savage Detectives.” (The book, which traces the literary and political adventures of two ambitious poets, is partly autobiographical.)

“Being in the middle of that was very clarifying, and very useful,” Wimmer says. “I found I understood the cultural references better, and had a closer sense of the vibrancy of the place. And that’s what I wanted to capture. The book has such a quality of urgency and ease. So many other books I’d read felt willed, and this one didn’t. It seemed essential.”

These days, Wimmer lives on the third floor of a carefully restored brownstone in Harlem, far from the noise and traffic of Mexico City. On a snowy Saturday this month, while her husband watched their young daughter, Wimmer recounted the years—more than three in all—she’d spent translating “Detectives,” and then “2666,” Bolano’s 992-page posthumous masterpiece, released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last December.

Just imagine all the publicity Bolano would be getting were he alive. He would be a true literary superstar, contending for the Nobel, worldwide audience awaiting his next book, etc. Only the good die young.

Guardian Review

2666 is indeed Bolano’s master statement, not just on account of its length and quality but also because it is the fullest expression of his two abiding themes: the writing life and violence. Bolano’s interest in the former is easy to explain – he believed that a life dedicated to literature was the only one worth living. But his fascination with violence is more complex. One explanation can be found in his background. As someone who came of age during the era of South America’s dirty wars, it is understandable that he should side with the view he attributes to one of the characters in 2666, who sees history as a “simple whore… a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness”.

Full review here.

The many deaths of Roberto Bolaño

Long article by Michael Saler in the Times Online today.

Roberto Bolano once said that he would rather have been a detective than a writer — not a humdrum gumshoe but an avenging angel, “someone able to return alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts.” Like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was a disillusioned romantic with a passion for exposing evil and fortifying hope.

Not the greatest copyediting or proofreading, but hey, times are tight, right?

New Year Stuff

As of today I’m officially back from the holidays and so posting should pick back up, especially with the 2666 group read kicking off next week.

2666 was mentioned on tons of Best-of lists at the end of the year and they aren’t really that interesting to read outside of the mentions. There are even some places where 2666 is mentioned in meta-discussing what did/didn’t make year end lists. It’s weird: I love lists, but these year-end things just seem like ads to me.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog has declared January “National Reading 2666 Month” (seems like “Reading” and “2666” should be transposed there, but whatevs). Somehow I doubt most people will be able to finish it in a month. BUT they should definitely send people over to bolano-l for the group read!

Another 2666 giveaway

Go here to enter to win a copy of 2666. Deadline is January 7.

old Salon article

New York Times by Jonathan Lethem

Boston Globe by Adam Mansbach

Boston Phoenix by Peter Keough

TIME by Lev Grossman

Newsweek by Malcolm Jones

The Buffalo News by Jeff Simon

The Oregonian by Richard Melo

Powells.com by Jeremy Garber

Rocky Mountain News by Lisa Bornstein

St. Petersburg Times by Vikas Turakhia

San Francisco Chronicle by Alexander Cuadros

Toronto Globe and Mail by J.S. Goldbach

Toronto Star by Derek Weiler

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In 2002,
Salon.com published a long article by Max Blumenthal on the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. Articles like these are great background for reading 2666.




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