The New Yorker has posted a new Bolaño story called “William Burns.”
It’s unclear (right now, to me) if this is part of some other draft of 2666 or just tangentially related, but it sure reads like an excerpt from a later section of the novel. Note that it is translated by Chris Andrews and not Natasha Wimmer.
William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me. According to Monge, the North American was a laid-back guy who never lost his cool, a description that seems to be at odds with the following account of the events. In Burns’s own words:
It was a dreary time in my life. I was going through a rough patch at work. I was supremely bored, though up till then I’d always been immune to boredom.
