“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Friday, February 25, 2011

New Bolano Novel Published in Spanish...

I missed this (apparently it came out earlier this month), but Anagrama has published yet another "novel" found amongst Bolano's papers after his death. Entitled Los Sinsabores del Verdadero Policia (which, in my feeble Spanish, I'd render as something like The Sorrows of Honest Policemen) it's a 300-page book, that, according to what I can understand of the article I read about it (which you can read here, but it's in Spanish), includes such characters from 2666 as Amalfitano and Archimboldi. Apparently the book is part of the material Bolano was writing for 2666, but sits alongside the narrative rather than being part of it (much in the way that Amulet is part of the same story as The Savage Detectives, but still its own novel). Apparently it's very much a novel full of "echoes and self-plagiarism" from Bolano's earlier work, including moments that reference The Savage Detectives, Llamadas Telefonicas (Telephone Calls) and Distant Star. Anyway, I probably won't get to it in Spanish (I had to give up on El Tercer Reich last year--I'm just too slow reading in Spanish), but hopefully it will see an English translation soon enough.

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