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grasonpoling's review against another edition
5.0
Bolaño’s list of who’s worth reading (alternatively, who’s “plumbing the depths”).
Found myself relishing these bite-sized reviews and wily speeches centered around his approach to writing and engaging other writers.
Found myself relishing these bite-sized reviews and wily speeches centered around his approach to writing and engaging other writers.
jdscott50's review against another edition
5.0
I originally came across this book from an article in The New York Review of Books. It provided one of his essays about exile. It starts off with:
“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement.
All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.”
I have been pining for this book ever since.
One of the many things I love about reading Bolano is where he takes a story. If he is given enough time with a vague topic, he can reveal a part of his soul. There is something in this collected non-fiction that comes forward more than his collection of short stories. Here he reveals many of his secrets, the rich stories of his own life, and the works that inspired him that were weaved in to the fictions of By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives, 2666 and others. The pieces are taken from book prefaces, speeches, and mostly from his column Between Parentheses that ran after his success with The Savage Detectives.
I loved his perspective on literature, writers, and readers. When you read his fiction, especially 2666, it’s a swirl of ideas. That’s part of the fun of reading his fiction, this swirl of a million ideas passing through with no time to catch or contemplate unless you read slowly and carefully, but not too slow as to miss the rhythm. It’s much easier to find the source of many of these ideas in his non-fiction works. I think my favorite section was his column Between Parentheses. There are so many short punches and insights that you have to stop after each one and re-read it. There is also a long list of authors to find in which he recommends which can keep one busy for quite some time (many of which are translated, but some are not). It was fantastic and my best Christmas gift from my wife!
“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement.
All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.”
I have been pining for this book ever since.
One of the many things I love about reading Bolano is where he takes a story. If he is given enough time with a vague topic, he can reveal a part of his soul. There is something in this collected non-fiction that comes forward more than his collection of short stories. Here he reveals many of his secrets, the rich stories of his own life, and the works that inspired him that were weaved in to the fictions of By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives, 2666 and others. The pieces are taken from book prefaces, speeches, and mostly from his column Between Parentheses that ran after his success with The Savage Detectives.
I loved his perspective on literature, writers, and readers. When you read his fiction, especially 2666, it’s a swirl of ideas. That’s part of the fun of reading his fiction, this swirl of a million ideas passing through with no time to catch or contemplate unless you read slowly and carefully, but not too slow as to miss the rhythm. It’s much easier to find the source of many of these ideas in his non-fiction works. I think my favorite section was his column Between Parentheses. There are so many short punches and insights that you have to stop after each one and re-read it. There is also a long list of authors to find in which he recommends which can keep one busy for quite some time (many of which are translated, but some are not). It was fantastic and my best Christmas gift from my wife!
piccoline's review against another edition
5.0
What a marvelous collection. RB’s wit and irreverence is on full display, but also his generosity and sharp readerly eye. Even the interview at the end, where the Playboy interviewer keeps trying to pull him into more lazy irreverence, he manages humor and self-deprecation while also channeling a real current of, hm, what we might call self-elegy? That the last piece is an interview and that yet it also feels both elegiac and hopeful? Strange alchemy.
readbyrodkelly's review
4.0
Bolaño and I have quite the love affair going, yes. But this collection meanders at times, and I could've done without many of these pieces for their dullness. The glory of this collection is Bolaño's praise of a wide range of authors and books, many of which I would never have been interested in without his glowing endorsements. I shall certainly follow where he leads, but otherwise, this collected work of journalism doesn't have quite the impact of his inimitable fictional output...and I'm okay with that.
quintusmarcus's review
5.0
Reading Bolaño, the English-speaker has to be overwhelmed by the vast ocean of Latin American literature that is virtually invisible in the United States. But, as Bolaño points out, that's hardly a problem unique to North Amerrica: "which brings us to a problem even worse than being forgotten: the provincialism of the book market, which corrals and locks away Spanish-language literature, which, simply put, means that Chilean authors are only of interest in Chile, Mexican authors in Mexico, and Colombians in Colombia, as if each Latin American country spoke a different language or as if the aesthetic taste of each Latin American reader were determined first and foremost by national — that is, provincial — imperatives, which wasn’t the case in the 1960s, for example, when the Boom exploded, or in the 1950s or 1940s, despite poor distribution." Bolaño's text could easily be used as an introduction to modern Spanish literature. He's incredibly widely read, and he covers a lot of authors in these mostly throw-away pieces he wrote for Spanish papers. Bolaño's enthusiasm is infectious--of the many books he mentions, I added to my reading list practically all of them that I could find in English translation (which was unfortunaely not many). So typical, his exhortation to read, as in this commentary:
"Thus it was that The Temple of Iconoclasts came into my hands, during a cold, wet winter, and I still remember the enormous pleasure it brought me, and the consolation, too, at a time when almost everything was full of sadness. Wilcock’s book restored happiness to me, as is only the case with those masterpieces of literature that are also masterpieces of black humor, like Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Of course, Wilcock’s book tiptoed out of bookstores. Today, seventeen years later, it has just been reprinted. If you want to have a good time, if you want to cure what ails you, buy it, steal it, borrow it, but most importantly, read it."
These essays are an endless pleasure to read: always invigorating, clever, opinionated, and sharp. Impossible to take everything in one reading: without question a book that will reward repeated readings.
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