quintusmarcus 's review for:

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño

5.0

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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.