The Barbarian Writers are mentioned again in The Woes of the True Policeman, and I found this essay that mentions Distant Star, complete with, according to Reddit, a portrait of Raoul Delorme too obscene to post.

It’s been 23 years since Bolaño sadly passed away and so many books have been published (some not even pictured here). In Latin America, the consensus tends to be that we need to ‘hate’ on Carolina Lopez (the widow in charge of the archives) because she’s been ‘publishing a lot of bad books that shouldn’t have been made public’.

What do we think about these works over here? Obviously the publishers are out there to make money and the name Roberto Bolaño still sells books. Personally, when a new books gets announced, I don’t expect another 2666 type of masterwork, I just enjoy whatever we get and go on with life. Don’t think it’s a disrespect to his memory but I do agree we’re reaching the point of diminishing returns which is why the latest book out of the archive is a compilation of his interviews. Anyway, I’m rambling…which one do you prefer?

It is definitely incomplete (WIP) but helps me round out my knowledge of all his references

In "The Part about Amalfitano", the character Lola is obsessed with a poet who lives in a mental institution. This poet was based on the infamous Spanish poet Leopoldo María Panero.

Check out this incredible essay from the Believer Magazine (October 2015 issue) by Aaron Shulman (who I believe is currently writing a biography of Bolaño), about Leopoldo and the cult documentary about the family of Leopoldo Panero- El desencanto.

To give an idea of the real-life cult appeal of Leopoldo María’s poetry, it’s useful to cite Bolaño again. In his last interview, when asked if he was ever scared of his fans, Bolaño replied: “I’ve been afraid of the fans of Leopoldo María Panero, who in my opinion, by the way, is one of the three best living poets in Spain. In Pamplona, during a series of readings organized by Jesús Ferrero, Panero was the last on the program, and as the day of his reading approached, the city (or the neighborhood where our hotel was) filled up with freaks who seemed to have just escaped from a mental asylum, which incidentally is the best audience any poet can hope for. The problem is that some of them didn’t look only like madmen. They looked like killers, and Ferrero and I were afraid that at some point someone would get up and say: I shot Leopoldo María Panero, and then plug four bullets into ­Panero’s head—and then with one each for Ferrero and me for good measure.”

¿Han tenido ocasión de leer esta nueva biografía de Roberto Bolaño? Yo empecé recién y, al menos en su estructura, me parece interesante.

¿Qué otros libros dedicados a la vida del autor recomendarían ustedes?

Just for fun, with some LLM help, I drafted translations of the latin phrases dropped by Xosé Lendoiro in Chapter 20. I might go back and get all the attributions.

I found a decent book shop whilst visiting Madrid and instantly spotted these. I grew up bilingual and its been a while since I got to use my Spanish properly. For those that have read the English and the Spanish language editions, or those that maybe struggle with one language more than the other, how much harder is it, and how different does the prose and general writing/flow come across in the intended language?

Update: I'm not that far in, as I was 3/4 of the way through The Crossing when I purchased it, so took a quick break to read around 20 pages of 2666. The flow is much better in Spanish which seems to be the main difference, and there is definitely more of a rhythm to it than the translation. Aside from the occasional noun that has escaped me as time has passed, the first 20 pages or so have been relatively straightforward.

I’m early in my Bolaño journey: started last month with By Night in Chile and it blew my mind, now on Distant Star.

Came across this Substack from an author researching and writing a Bolaño biography, he’s in Mexico meeting some of the real women who inspired characters in The Savage Detectives.

https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronshulman/p/bolanos-mexico-city-50-years-later

Sharing as it feels like some of you Bolaño-it-alls might enjoy

As the summer holiday reached its midpoint, and I found myself at my deepest point in the hammock of idleness, I finally embarked on the project of reading 2666.

What surprised me most wasn’t its scale but its momentum. At over a thousand pages I expected something dense and exhausting, but instead it feels almost compulsive. Bolaño just keeps telling stories, then stories inside stories, and somehow it’s incredibly difficult to stop reading even when you have no idea where any of it is going.

One thing I kept wrestling with was the temptation to interpret everything. Is this symbolic? Does that scene mean something? Eventually I felt the novel itself was resisting those questions. It almost seems to ask: why should everything point to a hidden meaning? Why must every recurring image become a metaphor? I found 2666 much more rewarding once I stopped trying to decode it and simply accepted the uncertainty. I think one must approach it as a post modern work defying modern literary conventions.

What stayed with me most, though, was how often the novel builds toward anticlimax. The critics’ search. The detectives following endless dead ends. The boxing match that receives pages of buildup only to end in a couple of sentences. Again and again, people dedicate themselves to projects that dissolve into nothing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this might reflect Bolaño’s own suspended existence while waiting for a transplant. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the novel seems haunted by lives placed on hold.

The central theme, for me, was evil. Not just the spectacular evil of the murders, fascism, or war, but the mundane kind. Two critics beating a taxi driver for reasons they barely understand. A mother visiting her imprisoned son. Ordinary people slowly adapting to horror until it becomes part of the landscape. I don’t think Bolaño is trying to explain evil so much as show how frighteningly ordinary it can become, and how easily societies, and individuals, learn to live beside it.

Ironically, I found Part IV less shocking than hypnotic. The repetition almost anesthetized me. At first I wondered why Bolaño would narrate case after case in such a relentless fashion, but eventually I began to think that numbness was the point. By the end, I wasn’t just reading about a society desensitized to violence. I had started to experience a version of that desensitization myself.

The scene I keep returning to isn’t one of the murders. It’s Ingeborg walking into the mountains at night, overwhelmed by the stars and the realization that all the light surrounding her comes from the dead past. It’s one of the most beautiful passages I’ve read in years, and it somehow belongs perfectly in a novel otherwise saturated with brutality. Another standout is Amalfitano and the geometry book, hanged to dry to see how well it handles reality. That is just genius.

I’m curious whether anyone else noticed the pattern of anticlimax throughout the novel. I don’t see it discussed nearly as often as Part IV, but by the end it felt like one of the book’s defining rhythms.

Dediqué la primavera, y el verano, a Bolaño. Lei muchos de sus libros y podría simplemente continuar haciéndolo. Reeler Bolaño. Hacía mucho que no me emocionaba tanto la literatura.

Ahora que mi curiosidad se ha disparado quiero entregarme a otro autor para salir de este posible Bolaño ad infinitum. De forma algo repentina apareció en mis manos el primer volumen de En Busca del Tiempo Perdido. ¿Qué piensan? Sigo algo indeciso.

Razones a favor? Razones en contra?

Un abrazo

Currently re-reading the Savage Detectives and was really struck by the two chapters prominently featuring this character, firstly the one narrated by him in Tel-Aviv, followed by one narrated by Daniel Grossman, who visits him in Oaxaca a number of years later.

He seems to have some kind of deep attachment to Ulises and his idiosyncrasies, despite the fact that Ulises is obviously in love with his girlfriend. This attachment/obsession ultimately results into a kind of psychosis where he berates Daniel for failing to understanding him and his behaviour before crashing his car. Just wondered what others thought about this character, his relation to Ulises and his overall place in the story?

Hey all,

I'll be visiting CDMX in October and was wondering if anyone had some tips for Bolaño-related spots to visit, be it places he frequented or places he wrote about. So far, the Cafe La Habana is the only one on my list.

Also open to suggestions for places related to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortárzar or Juan Rulfo if anyone happens to know some; they are some of my favourite authors as well.

Cheers

Claudia crying after Ulises left Tel Aviv was my favorite part of the book, I don't know why. It was mentioned that she put on a Cat Stevens song she particularly liked. I keep wondering what the track might be. Any headcanons?

Kind of embarrasing, because I know some of you are going to respond that reading in silence is better, and I would agree in principle. But I get a kind of enjoyment when I can pair music with books because it pushes my imagination into places that compliment both the music and the words in unexpected ways. Its a thin I enjoy doing.

The thing is, I've struggled with this when it comes with Bolaño. I have no idea what to compliment his books with. I like this as a challenge, but I'm curious as to what music would you pair his novels with. Maybe its better than what I've come up with.

Any genre works. Any decade works. Any country works.

Thanks and hope all of you have a good evening.

Anyone know where to view the play adaptation of 2666? I tried going to the website for the Goodman Theater, but either the link isn't working, or I don't have access.

Thoughts on the cover?

Hola,

Estoy casi seguro que está en Los Detectives Salvajes pero no logro encontrarla. Podría ser de la sección final en la que García Madero, Lima y Belano manejan juntos por el desierto.

La frase es algo así como “Ese cabrón ya se leyó a todo Baudelaire, todo Rimbaud y Lautréamont. Además ya se recetó todo Valéry, los surrealistas y los simbolistas” etc.

¿Alguien se acuerda? Gracias!

The typewriter close to the bottom center of the cover has “Epilogue For Monsters” written on its sheet of paper.

Holding a physical copy of the book, it’s easy to see that there’s some microscopic text and not simply a black line, but I had no chance of seeing what it said without using my phone’s camera. Just thought this was a little cool!!

Just finished part one of the savage detectives, loving it so far but something I’ve noticed in Bolaño’s work is that nearly every time there’s a sex scene, they fuck for hours or days at a time and both parties have multiple orgasms numbering sometimes over a dozen, with the woman often having more orgasms than the man. Maybe this is a self report but I never hear about this kind of thing outside of like jokes I’ve heard about lesbians so like what’s the deal with this? Is it just a stylistic quirk? Bolaño’s fetish? Bolaño’s reality? Maybe something about the stereotype about Latin Americans being passionate lovers but I feel like I remember European characters having similar escapades in 2666. I just feel like it means something but I have no idea what.

Obviously 2666 is regarded as a masterpiece, but I wonder if there are any articles that talk about the novel and also talk about the challenges to the "femicide" framing of things. See the below:

https://www.texasobserver.org/qa-molly-molloy-story-juarez-femicides-myth/

Molly Molloy: Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.

...

MM: Mexican statistics are notoriously difficult to get and unreliable. That said, statistics do exist—and they can be very useful, especially when you can track them over time. And there are other sources. From the late 1980s until her death in 2009, Esther Chavez Cano, one of the most eloquent voices on women’s rights and human rights in Juárez, wrote hundreds of columns in Juárez newspapers to draw attention to the lack of social services in the city and especially to the ravages of domestic violence that primarily affected women and children. She became a spokesperson and a resource for families of victims, and she began to keep meticulous records of the crimes against women.

Of the roughly 400 cases documented in Esther Chavez’ files from 1990 to 2005, about three-quarters of the cases were domestic violence, and the cases were essentially resolved. That is, the killer was known as an acquaintance or domestic partner or other relative of the victim. Only about 100 were completely unsolved cases. These are the cases that have received (and continue to receive) most of the media, artistic and academic attention. The only real statistical study on the topic, done in 2008, found that the proportion of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez was lower than Houston’s.

What’s more, until 2008, when the violence associated with organized crime escalated and the Mexican military was deployed, Juárez was not exceedingly violent—at least not compared to other places around the globe that have similar kinds of social pressures. Before 2007, as far as I know, there was never a year with more than 300 murders, and that ends up being a murder rate of somewhere between 25 to 30 per 100,000 people. That’s a relatively high rate, but it’s not as high as some of the rates you see in U.S. cities like Detroit and New Orleans, where the murder rate can be upwards of 60 per 100,000.

When you look at the 427 murders—that’s the figure usually quoted for the number of women killed between 1993 and 2007—those are all of the female murder victims. Those are not categorized by the type of crime. If a woman is shot in a robbery, it goes into that number and is categorized [by some] as a femicide, even though there would be nothing to indicate in that crime that she was killed because she was a woman. There was a famous case in 2004 that Mexican reporter Sandra Rodríguez wrote about in her book La Fábrica del Crimen of these young boys who murdered their family—mother, father and sister. The mother and sister are counted as femicides, even though that wasn’t a gender-specific crime.

...

MM: I have a problem with this extreme focus on the women victims. I think every single one of the victims matter. The fact that a crime or homicide victim is a woman, or a child, or a man—it makes a different story. But in human terms, no one victim should be more highly valued than another.

If 300 people are killed and 30 of them are women, but the women’s murders are the ones that get all of the attention, I find that to be absolutely mistaken and wrong. There are so many other victims and people are killed for many different reasons. Not every woman victim is killed for some sexual reason, or simply because she’s a woman. Sometimes people say to me, well, the women are innocent, the men that are killed are narcos and criminals. That’s such an oversimplification, and it is a statement made with absolutely no evidence. It is a criminalization of the great majority of all of the homicide victims. This is what has happened especially since the number of murders exploded in Juárez in 2008. And it is false.

It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people.