From left to right: Macario Matus, Roberto Bolaño (Arturo Belano), Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (Ulises Lima), Orlando Guillén (the Lame), Alcira soust Scaffo (aid descouture), Julián Gómez and Bruno Montand (Felipe Müller) House of the lake, Chapultepec, City of Mexico, 1975.

The Insufferable Gaucho

Fiction by Roberto Bolano in the New Yorker. Nope, not had a chance to read it yet.

In Austin, i finally picked up my copy of The Savage Detectives. (It's one of those books that i've been holding out for a first edition.) About halfway through.

By Night in Chile

Just a quick confession on how inattentive a reader i can be. In diving into Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile, i went thirty pages before i realized that the book is not divided into paragraphs of chapter.

30 pages... i'd like to believe this is because i was enthralled by Bolano's writing, but it's more likely that i'm just a space cadet. I'm kicking myself tonight, as i accidentally left it at Kat's place, and i want to read it more than the dozens of other books in progress, or the three that arrived in the mail today. All i can think about concerning books is Father Sebastian's quest with falconry, as it was on the verge of making a statement in that arc of thought. It's surprisingly different in tone than Last Evenings on Earth if only because it's not so transparently autobiographical.

don't mistake having an opinion for machismo

This Roberto Bolano review was making me wince for the first half. I've only read one of the two books, but the criticisms were getting to me. Oddly, some of the same criticism that were leveled against the new Borges biography are used on Bolano:

Exercised by the "who's-the-daddy?" bickering that is a lamentable aspect of Latin American literature, he was not short of acerbic opinions on his peers.

Is that really "lamentable"? Go ahead. Talk shit about Bolano. He might well deserve it, and even if he does not, it gives me a another angle to approach his work... but talking shit about him talking shit? Silly.

Look what that "politeness" has wrought in American politics, false bipartisan turds like Lieberman.

Being too thin-skinned about one's new idols is a terrible fault of mine. By the end of the review, i was relieved to read:

The most important test that Bolano triumphantly sails through as a writer is that he makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. His vision can be disturbing and dark but it is not cold: humour and compassion are never far away.

High praise, and exactly how i came away from Last Evenings on Earth. My copy of My Night in Chile came in yesterday, although it's low in the TBR stack, as i'll explain later.