Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Wyatt Mason reviews Roberto Bolañops The Skating Rink.

In the apparently inexhaustible post­humous career of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, a significant second act will soon be upon us, leaving some readers to clap excitedly while others throw up their hands in submission: the large number of books by Bolaño already available is soon to double. In addition to the eight that have swiftly and ably arrived in translation in the six years since his death in 2003 at age 50, four new books by Bolaño are scheduled to appear in 2010 (two novels, two story collections) with three others promised for 2011. What’s more, according to recent reports out of Spain, another two finished novels have been found among Bolaño’s papers, as well as a sixth, unknown part of his already abundant 900-page novel “2666.”

While such a mountain of new material is bound to make literary hearts flutter, a little red flag waves at its summit: when it comes to publishing the dead, the best isn’t often saved for last. Given the nearly uniform excellence of Bolaño’s writing to date, it seems unlikely that any of the looming titles could equal the exceptional “By Night in Chile” (translated in 2003), “The Savage Detectives” (2007) or last year’s “2666,” which already compete for consideration as Bolaño’s masterpiece. At the very least, readers yet to experience Bolaño’s writing — its narrative variety and verve, its linguistic resourcefulness, its unusual combination of gravity and playfulness, brutality and tenderness — increasingly face the very practical problem of having to divine which book on the widening shelf of Bolaños should be read first.

“The Skating Rink,” the only new Bolaño appearing this year, won’t make the decision any easier: this short, exquisite novel is another unlikely masterpiece, as sui generis as all his books so far. Originally published in Spanish in 1993 and the first of Bolaño’s novels to see print, “The Skating Rink” could seem, in thumbnail, little more than a modest whodunit. A crime, the brutal murder of a woman, is committed in the Spanish seaside town of Z. As the corpse-and-culprit genre dictates, the novel establishes the sequence of events that sets the crime in motion and follows the bloody trail until, in the final pages, the killer’s surprising identity is revealed.

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Latin American Literature

Manuel Mujica Láinez

Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910 - 1984), Argentine fiction writer and art critic



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Latin American Literature

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (1914 – 1984), Argentine writer



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Latin American Literature

Augusto Roa Bastos

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917 – 2005), Paraguayan novelist.



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Latin American Literature

Mario Bellatin: Beauty Salon

Mario Bellatín, Beauty Salon (City Lights)




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Latin American Literature

César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry

César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (University of California)




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Latin American Literature

Antero de Quental

Antero de Quental, Portuguese Poet (1814-1873) painted by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro.




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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet (Picador)




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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

David Flusfeder reviews Roberto Bolaño's Amulet.

The Chilean poet, novelist and provocateur Roberto Bolaño died in Spain in 2003. He was 50 years old and had already gathered a wide readership in the Spanish-speaking world. Death, though, can be a great career move. The response to the 2007 publication in the United States of his 1998 novel The Savage Detectives, followed by 2666, which was almost finished at the time of his death, has brought him into the international literary front rank. Both are large books, celebrations of poetry and a battered kind of urban heroism, written in Bolaño’s beguiling combination of concision and wordiness. But now, with the success of those, his smaller books are being translated into English for the first time.

Bolaño’s work is a roman-fleuve: characters and situations recur throughout his writings, and time is a watery element that the characters drift through. Amulet has its origin in a 10-page episode in The Savage Detectives. That novel was centred on two provocative young poets living in Mexico City in 1976: Ulises Lima and the author’s alter-ego, Arturo Bolaño. In one of the most striking episodes, a woman, Auxilio Lacoutre, “the mother of Mexican poetry” (and a “mother” is, in this context, a woman who sweeps and shops and listens and adores), is in a fourth-floor lavatory cubicle when the army occupies the campus of the Mexico City Universidad. She is stuck there for 12 days. In the original episode, the emphasis was on Auxilio’s physical predicament. She drank water from the tap, ate loo paper and lived in a state of fear and heightened memory.

In Amulet, the emphasis is on the remembering rather than the predicament. Auxilio suffers from the blessing of being able to “remember” the future as well as the past. There are feverish prophecies about literary destinies: “For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033… Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045… Louis-Ferdinand Céline shall enter Purgatory in the year 2094… Witold Gombrowicz shall enjoy great prestige in the environs of the Rio de la Plata around the year 2098… Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.”

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Latin American Literature

Junot Diáz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diáz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Trade)




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Latin American Literature

Jorge Volpi: Bolivar’s Insomnia

Jorge Volpi, introduced his essay “Bolivar’s insomnia” at the XXII International Book Fair in Bogota, where power will find controversial issues as “the evolution of democracy, leaders of the region, drug trafficking and local issues that transcend borders. ”

He made statements about his work related to Latin America:
“Latin America has disappeared for the world because it is not the place of dictatorships and guerrillas, except for the dramatic case of Colombia, nor of the fantastic stories portrayed in the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez.”

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño is an example of dead authors sucess. A new market trend?

Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano was highly acclaimed in Latin America, but his work wasn't published in English until 2003, the year he died. "The Savage Detectives" finally got him noticed here when it was published in English in 2007, and his final novel, the enigmatic 900-page "2666," earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year.

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Latin American Literature