New Year Stuff

As of today I’m officially back from the holidays and so posting should pick back up, especially with the 2666 group read kicking off next week.

2666 was mentioned on tons of Best-of lists at the end of the year and they aren’t really that interesting to read outside of the mentions. There are even some places where 2666 is mentioned in meta-discussing what did/didn’t make year end lists. It’s weird: I love lists, but these year-end things just seem like ads to me.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog has declared January “National Reading 2666 Month” (seems like “Reading” and “2666” should be transposed there, but whatevs). Somehow I doubt most people will be able to finish it in a month. BUT they should definitely send people over to bolano-l for the group read!

Another 2666 giveaway

Go here to enter to win a copy of 2666. Deadline is January 7.

old Salon article

New York Times by Jonathan Lethem

Boston Globe by Adam Mansbach

Boston Phoenix by Peter Keough

TIME by Lev Grossman

Newsweek by Malcolm Jones

The Buffalo News by Jeff Simon

The Oregonian by Richard Melo

Powells.com by Jeremy Garber

Rocky Mountain News by Lisa Bornstein

St. Petersburg Times by Vikas Turakhia

San Francisco Chronicle by Alexander Cuadros

Toronto Globe and Mail by J.S. Goldbach

Toronto Star by Derek Weiler

Mentions

New York Daily News

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In 2002,
Salon.com published a long article by Max Blumenthal on the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. Articles like these are great background for reading 2666.

Ilan Stavans

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about Bolano by noted Latin American Studies scholar Ilan Stavans, but unfortunately it is frozen behind their paywall. C’mon, Chron! Be a part of the conversation, don’t lock your content away. Even the New York Times got rid of Times Select. You’re no special snowflake!

If anyone has a Chronicle login, please let me know (matt@bolanobolano.com).

Meeting with Enrique Lihn

This week’s New Yorker features a new (or at least previously untranslated or unpublished) story.

Pretty much the whole story is a dream sequence–something we see a lot of in 2666.

You can hear some of the real Enrique Lihn’s poems on YouTube.

Powells Interviews Wimmer

Bolaño translator and surrogate publicity figure Natasha Wimmer was asked the same questions again, this time by Powells.com.

Jeremy: Do you initially query a publisher about translating a specific author, or an author’s work, or do publishing houses employ staff translators?

Wimmer: The way it happened for me was that I was working editorial at FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux], and FSG does a lot of books in translation. Because my background was in Spanish literature, I did a lot of work looking at sample translations and working with translated manuscripts.

At a certain point, a book came in, Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, and we were having a hard time finding someone to translate it. I thought, Maybe I’ll give it a try. That’s how I got started. I got in through the back door, and I was grateful to FSG for giving me the chance.

Link dump of the day

Awesome painting of Bolano: http://welcomefriendorfoe.blogspot.com/2008/12/roberto-bolao.html

A 2001 interview with Bolano: http://voidmanufacturing.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/roberto-bolano-interview/

Financial Times review: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c4c7cd2-c264-11dd-a350-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

Times (London) review: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5286494.ece

Chicago Tribune review:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-1206-2666-roberto-bolanodec06,0,3434505.story

Another Wimmer Interview

Despite its condescending opening (“It’s part of the rhythm of our self-absorbed American culture that we seem able to process only one foreign language writer at time. But when we do, we do it with a vengeance.”), this Fresh Air story about Bolano and 2666 extols his writing and adds to the acclaim of the novel.
This time at Flavorwire/Flavorpill:

FW: Who are your favorite authors, and who are your favorite authors to translate?

NW: A few recent favorites: Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness and Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder (try reading these back to back; two very different treatments of the same Central American tragedy). Also, in no particular order: V. S. Naipaul, Norman Rush, David Foster Wallace, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, George Saunders. Among others. I don’t really have a favorite author to translate: some styles come more naturally than others, but by the time I’ve worked through a book it’s so familiar that it’s hard for me to judge it objectively.

Fresh Air

Despite its condescending opening (“It’s part of the rhythm of our self-absorbed American culture that we seem able to process only one foreign language writer at time. But when we do, we do it with a vengeance.”), this Fresh Air story about Bolano and 2666 extols his writing and adds to the acclaim of the novel. (thx, marcel)

Open Letters Review

Maybe the best opening to a review of 2666 I’ve read so far is in Open Letters by Sam Sacks:

Imagine you’ve traveled to an art museum to see its most famous work. This piece de resistance is immense—it fills a room—but it’s quite unlike other paintings you’ve gone great distances to see. There’s nothing of the detailed majesty of the Sistine Chapel or the jumbled vivacity of El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz; it’s not entrancingly lovely like Monet’s Water Lillies and it doesn’t salute you with a harsh shout of anger the way that Picasso’s Guernica does. What you find is a dark room. Not only are the walls painted black, but the ceiling is as well, and so is the floor save for some dim lighting fixtures set into the ground. For the first extremely disconcerting moments you can make out nothing at all but the wide swathes of black paint. Gradually your eyes adjust and you realize that there are figures on the wall and ceiling, silhouettes of people drawn in thin tracery. Hundreds of these figures cover the walls. They outline men and women of all different shapes and sizes, differently dressed and coiffed, but each one seems to face you with an identical expression. When you look even closer you realize that this is because their eyes, what Leonardo da Vinci called the “windows of the soul,” are all blank.

You spend a few more minutes in the dark room of dead-eyed figures—you’ve gone to a lot of effort to see this work, after all, and it’s widely acclaimed as a masterpiece—but you soon feel oppressed and unhappy. When you make your way to the next gallery you are literally blinking from the brightness.

This is the best I can do to describe Roberto Bolano’s posthumously published magnum opus 2666, a vast, visionary, physically crippling book that is even harder to recommend than it is to read.

I don’t know that I believe him later when he says “I didn’t like reading 2666.” If not, I hope Open Letters paid him a fortune to suffer through it.




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