“The style was strange, †it is said here, really about both of these literary lions. “The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere.†And: “In the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.†All fair except for the vanishing. Vanishing: the exact opposite of what “2666†will do.
Publishing Bolano’s Poetry
Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, talks about how they came to publish Bolano’s poetry:
Bolaño came to us by way of Fred Sasaki, our assistant editor. He was interested in Bolaño and he found out that they [book publisher New Directions] were going to do Bolaño’s poems. Nobody knows anything about Bolaño’s poems; they haven’t been translated into English before. So we asked to see the entire manuscript and just hastily read it and picked the poems we thought were the best and featured them. So that’s how that came about.
More 2666 reviews and coverage
A solid overview of the book from Zach Baron in the Village Voice. He then follows up the review with a post about a few great things that you probably won’t see in other reviews of 2666, including the fact that Bolaño’s funny.
New York Magazine pulls out the five most unskippable passages of 2666.
If you speak/read Spanish, this article asks why Americans are so crazy over Bolaño.
More on Bolaño and heroin addiction.
2666 hits stores
Roberto Bolaño’s masterpiece, 2666, was published in the U.S. just two days ago. This has to be the most hyped, most anticipated, most praised literary novel since The Corrections was published seven years ago. Some would say that The Corrections did not live up to the hype, but Infinite Jest did. And I believe 2666 will be respected, as Infinite Jest is, for many years to come. This site hopes to serve as a resource for all things Bolaño (and 2666).
