![]() In fact, Bolaño’s slap-in-yer-face criticism suggests he would toss any crown away out of comradely principle, an act of brotherhood with Latin America’s marginalized writers, the politically silenced and creatively stifled. For me, Bolaño comes off best in the concentrated doses offered by his superb short stories and novellas, especially the collection Last Evenings on Earth and By Night in Chile. ![]() Before the pro-Bolaño mail floods in, let me add that I use the latter term in a speculative rather than a derogatory sense-I have not read the gargantuan novel 2666, which his celebrators claim is a masterpiece, but the intermittently adolescent longueurs of The Savage Detectives convince me that the literary coronation has been rushed, at least regarding his novels. This compelling collection of non-fiction, made up of short book reviews or commentaries penned for newspaper columns, along with award-acceptance speeches as well as personal and travel pieces, simultaneously inflates and deflates the Bolaño bubble. ![]() Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.īetween Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003 by Roberto Bolaño. This is adversarial criticism, its eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic - the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. ![]()
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