"Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" by Roberto Bolano (from The New Yorker, April 10, 2010) -

The World of Marcel Proust Versus that of Roberto Bolano- my slightly twisted take

My Posts on Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolano ( Chile, 1953 to 2003) is one of my favorite writers.  I have read several of his novels and short stories.  To those new to Bolano, just take the plunge into 2666.

Marcel Proust wrote  about courtesans, dandies, sexual explorers, and those in love with the reading life.  Bolano wrote about whores, idolers, queers, and those in love with the reading life. Balzac would tell us the only real difference between the two groups is one has lots of money.  I think Zola would be at home in both groups.  

"Preconfiguration of Lalo Cura" is narrated by a young man.  It starts out being about the narrator's great love for his mother, just like In Search of Lost Time.  The mother in Proust is a woman of style, refinement and wealth, the one in Bolano's story is a hooker and an actress in porno movies.   The young men in a Proust are looking to marry wealthy heiresses while waiting to inherit great wealth.  Those in Bolano are looking for women they  can get no name, cheap, sex from while waiting to publish their terrible poems in journals with thirty or so readers. Everyone in both works are very into the reading life.  Both groups of people gossip a lot. People in both worlds are seen as what they read.  Try to guess which group of young men die violently.

Bolano's story is another of his  voyages  into the dark streets of Latin America.  It is a throughly entertaining story, lots of interesting things happen.  I enjoyed reading it a lot.

The story is online here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/04/19/prefiguration-of-lalo-cura

My great thanks to Max u for the gift of a New Yorker subscription allowed me to read this story.

Mel u

"Clara" by Roberto Bolano (August 4, 2008, in The New Yorker)

My main purpose in writing this post is to let my readers know of a very generous gesture by The New Yorker.  The New Yorker is for a couple of months opening up its vast archives of short stories for all to read.  I am not quite sure yet how this just announced feature will work but yesterday I checked it out and found stories by big name writers.  Among them was a story from 2008 by Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile).  Anytime I can read a Bolano work for free, I do.  I have previously read his two big works, several minor novels and short stories.

"Clara", it can be read in just a few minutes, is the story, told by an ex-lover of the life of Clara.  Here is the attention gathering opening paragraph:

"She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived, in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything began to fall apart."

Of course the story is one of heart break, dispair and loss.  We follow, through the occasional contacts and phone calls of the narrator, Clara go from beautiful young woman to much transformed forty five year old woman.  The story was translated by Chris Andrews. 

I am reading this as part of my participation in Spanish Literature Month.

http://caravanaderecuerdos.blogspot.com/2014/05/spanish-lit-month-2014.html

You can read "Clara" and lots more great short stories here

http://www.newyorker.com/collection/love-stories-from-the-archive

Don't wait too long to read this story as once summer is over it will go back to paid subscribers only archives

Mel u

A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano (2002, 128 pages, to be published in translation September, 2014)

Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile) has already joined the literary canon.  Of his work I have read 2666, Savage Detectives, A Night in Chile, Nazi Literature in the Americas and several of his short stories.  I recommend those new to Bolano take the plunge first into 2666 then proceed to Savage Detectives.  Both of these are long challenging works with lots of violence and sex and may be too harsh for some sensibilities but they are culturally very important.  When Bolano died in 2003 he left behind a lot of not yet translated into English works.  I was kindly given an advance review copy of Natasha Weimer's translation of one of his early works (2002) A Little Lumpen Novelita.

As this set in Rome work opens, a young woman and her brother are living marginally in a low end apartment.  She tells the story.  Their parents, they are in I guess early to middle twenties, were recently killed in a car crash and this hangs over them.  They both have jobs and they get by through pooling their money.  One day the brother brings home to men, they seem kind of like thugs, this is Bolano so they have read some poetry, they move in and the brother quits his job.  Now supporting the three men, she has intermittent sex with the visitors, she wonders if she will need to do prostituition.  She ends up periodically servicing and spending time with an ex movie director, now blind.  Her brother wants her to find where in his mansion the man keeps his safe.  We see her ambivalence about being paid for sex which spills over into company also, her sort of feelings for the man and her frustration over not finding the safe.  I don't want to tell to much of the close but she ends up turning on the two visitors and her sex client.

I would say read this after you have read the main works and Nazi Literature in the Americas. Unless you want to read all his fiction, you could survive without spending $14.95 for this.  To me that is too much for a 128 page book.

Mel u

"Nazi Girl" by Alvaro Bisama (2010, 12 pages, translated by Lucas Lyndes)

 "Nazi Girl" by Alvaro Bisama,(1975, Valparaiso, Chile) author of Dead Stars, is a throughly intriguing story set in post Pinochet Chile about a woman whose parents idolized Adolph Hitler.   Of course any author from Chile who writes dark stories and especially one who focuses on Nazis and the terrible impact of the cruel dictatorial rule of Pinochet, is going to make readers think of Roberto Bolano.  Bisama, I think, accepts this and has in a way added a missing dimension from the work of Bolano. The corpus of Bolano is replete with women eager to allow themselves to be abused, sexually and otherwise, women who accept their transformation into fetish objects.  Some do it for money, some because of things in their past.  Each person is unique, each is just part of a pattern.   "Nazi Girl" helps us to understand why an intelligent educated woman came to let herself be used as a sex toy by a much older man who was a torturer for Pinochet.  (Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1981, estimates of torture victims is around 30,000 with 3000 executed.)

"Nazi Girl" is told in the first person by a thirty something woman who tries to explain how being raised by Hitler loving parents has brought her to an incredibly, near life destroying, humiliating moment of national fame in Chile.  In high school she was fat and had few friends. In college, to the infinite delight of her parents, who had supported Pinochet because he had an Aryan appearance, she decided to major in German.  German was the only college major, per the narrator, that was not full of communists.  She wrote what was seen as pro-Nazi words on the bath room walls.  Once out of college she got a teaching job and did some translating.  Her sexual experience was limited, she still saw herself as fat. I don't want to tell to much of the really interesting and intriguing plot of the story.  She does fall in love with the 64 year old principal of her school and things end up going terribly wrong for her.   

I liked "Nazi Girl" a lot.

This story can be read, in an elegant translation by Lucas Lyndes.

It is included in an anthology of contemporary cutting edge Latin American literature, The Portable Museum, Vol 1.  

It is published by a very exciting new house, Ox and Pigeon Publishing.  Based in Peru, they focus on transactions of the best innovative  Spanish language literature into English. For more information I suggest you visit their very interesting home page.

http://oxandpigeon.com/

I also suggest anyone interested in the future of Latin American literature read Lyndes's article on the role of the E-book in transcending national borders.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/07/how-ebooks-can-bridge-borders-in-latin-america/

There is a very good interview, in Spanish and English with Alvaro Bisama here.  

http://nuevasreferencias.blogspot.com/

I hope to shortly post on his award winning novel Dead Stars, soon.

.,

"Mexican Manifesto" by Roberto Bolano published April 22, 2013 in The New Yorker

Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile)  is a great writer, a chronicler of the dark side of life and love in the closing years of the last century.  Toward the end of his life, knowing he was dying of liver cancer, he, it is reported, began to write at a frantic pace to leave money for his family.  Ten years after his passing new translations are still coming out.  I do not know the compositional history of "Mexican Manifesto' but I am grateful to The New Yorker for making it available for all to read for free.  

Readers of his major novels will recognize his style in this story about a man's near obsessive interest in exploring the bath houses of Mexico City in the company of a female friend and occasional sex partner, Laura.  Bath Houses in Mexico City serve several functions.  One is the purely utilitarian one of providing a place to bath for those who do not have facilities at home.  This is, I guess, how they started.  In most big cities they have evolved to places for sex with no name strangers, orgies, drug dealing and other fun activities.  They are often primarily frequented by Gay men.  Some say the aids epidemic in America started in the bath houses of San Francisco.  

As the narrator gets more and more in exploring the very large number of bath houses in Mexico City with Laura, he enters deeper into a homoerotic miasma.  There is a very harsh scene where he and Laura pay for two young men to put on a sex show involving mutual masturbation for them.

As the story opens, in his first bath house, there  is a mural of the Aztec emperor Montezuma.  He is in a pool of water up to his neck.  There are other men and women in the pool.  Montezuma is troubled, it seems, but the others are not.  Later the narrator will begin to ponder deeper into the meaning of this mural.

Bolano is about exploring hidden worlds, admitting we love things we are taught are wrong, about seeing a very dark angel on our shoulder, about death as the ultimate aphrodisiac.  Remember Montezuma ruled over a death cult.  

I have since I began blogging read and posted on Nazi Literature in the Americas, By Night in Chile, and another short story.  Preblogging, I read 2666 and Savage Detectives.  All these works I classify as very important reads.  

You can read "Mexican Manifesto" here

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2013/04/22/130422fi_fiction_bolano?currentPage=all

Amulet by Roberto Bolano (1999, translated by Chris Andrews, 2006)

Amulet is the forth  novel by Roberto Bolano (1953 to 2003, Chile) I have read.  Prior to starting my blog I read 2666, Savage Detectives, and By Night In Chile.  Since starting my blog in July 2009 I read his wonderful Nazi Literature in the Americas and several of his short stories.  Bolano is a tremendously influential writer.    

Amulet is the first person narrative of a woman from Uruguay who lives in Mexico City.   She refers to herself as the "mother of Mexican poetry" due to her heavy involvement on several levels with many young Mexican poets.   As portrayed in the monologue of the narrator, the lives of the poets  fit the stereotypes of chaos and turmoil.   The narrator nurtures the poets, sleeps with some of them and revels in the street life of Mexico City.   Many of the poets are very young, in their late teens to early twenties.  There are lots of Latin American literary references that go over my head and no doubt there is a great mixture of the real with the created.  Bolano was great at making up whole literatures that might have been.  The woman perceptions range from deluded to deeply insightful.   

There is great depth in this work and many ways to ponder the monologue of the narrator.   In reading Bolano I would say first read Savage Detectives then dive into the massive 2666.  I believe at least 2666 will become a classic.  In time I hope to read much more of his work.

Please share your experience with Bolano with us.

Mel u

                                                                              

Roberto Bolano Two Short Stories-Project 196 Chile

"Cell Mates"
"Snow"

Project 196

Chile

Country 18 of 196

Roberto Bolano

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobago 
8. Ukraine
9. Cameroon
10. Botswana
11. Sudan
12. Dominica 
13. Israel
14. Syria
15. Ethiopia
16. Zimbabwe
17. Peru
18. Chile

It was not hard to pick a writer to represent Chile for Project 196, my attempt to read and post on a short story from all of the 196 countries in the world.    The only choice is Roberto Bolano, thrust on the center stage of the literary world when his novels Savage Detectives and 666 were translated into English.

Bolano (1953 to 2003-Chile) was an incredibly creative and prolific writer who died of liver cancer at 50.   His books are not for the overly squeamish and neither are these two short stories.  Before I began my blog I read and loved Savage Detectives and his magnum opus, 666.   I have posted on his wonderfully Nazi Literature in the Americas, a hilarious satire of the literary world.   

These two stories are from a 2012 collection of Bolano's short stories, The Return, translated by Chris Andrews.  (I think these stories were probably published else where prior to this collection but I do not know their publication history.)

All of these stories have a "Bolano" like feel to them readers of his big novels will spot.  They are about a young man, rootless, very into the reading life, often fixated on  obscure poets who he may know personally, with a history of troubled relationships with his family and with women.  The male lead often is into a marginal world where men are  petty gangsters, drug addicts and women are whores (this is a much used Bolano word so I use it here) or might as well be.    A character in a Bolano novel might  step over the body of a woman who was just raped, while passing judgment on her body and then quote  Rilke.  His work is full of literary references, one of the reasons lots of bookish people, like me, enjoy his work.   He has spawned many imitators who try to out shock Bolano readers.   I will post briefly on these two stories, both of which I enjoyed. (They are at least R rated.)

"Snow" is set mostly in Moscow.  It is the story of a young man whose father was a communist in Chile, at times a very dangerous thing to be.    His father moved to Moscow and took the the young man, maybe mid-teens to Moscow with him.   It took him a while to adjust but within two years he spoke decent Russian and he and found a way to make his own money.   It was now the time after the fall of the Soviet Union and he gets in with petty mafia types.   His employer is involved in promoting athletes, Olympic types, mostly women and he likes to have sex with them.  He has our narrator set up dates with him.  He tells him to bring him one particular woman.  As the man gets to know her he likes her but the woman knows it is best to go ahead and have sex with his boss.   Russia is depicted as a very amoral society in which the only ties are to friends and money takes precedence over them in most cases.  The characters are well developed and I found it very interesting to see the events in the life of our hero.  The story is full of poets and  lots of really fun literary references.

"Cell Mates" is very much a Bolano story with very educated characters living a life style of thugs, criminals and street people.   There are very few people with long term happy marriages, well adjusted children or decent jobs in the work of Bolano.  The lead character has sexual issues.  If he has sex with someone twice in a row in the same position he is impotent.  His romantic interest eats only mashed potatoes.    She keeps a 20 Kilo bag of mashed potato flakes next to her refrigerator.  There are poets, communists, students and the usual cast in this story.  There are some interesting plot action in the story revolving around love triangles (or maybe pentagrams.)

Chile has a population of 16 million.  It has a long history of totalitarian governments.

"Two Words" by Isabel Allende

"Two Words" by Isabel Allende (1989, 7 pages)

My middle daughter, Valerie, gave me a copy of The Penquin Book of International Women's Stories edited by Kate Figes for Christmas.  I was, of course, very happy to get it.  Yesterday I was looking through the book to see what countries for Project 196 might be found in the collection.  In the table of contents they have the country of the author next to their name and I saw "Isabel Allende-Peru" so I read the story and I am very glad I did.  She was born in Peru (1942) to parents from Chile who were serving as diplomats in Peru.  Her parents returned to Chile shortly after her birth and she has always been involved in writing about Chile (one of her cousins was elected President) and on her webpage it is clear she thinks of herself as Chilean. She has been an American citizen since 1993 and has lived in California since 1987.  Given this I decided not to count her as my writer from Peru for Project 196, in which I am posting on a short story from all 196 countries in the world.     That being said, Isabel Allende is a writer of tremendous popularity, with over 57 Million books sold, translations into 30 languages and numerous awards and honorary degrees.  You can learn more about her work and very interesting life on her webpage.

"Two Words" is one of her better know short stories.  It was in fact required reading at La Salle College, one of Manila's most prestigious universities last term in Junior English.  The story very much has the feel of Latin American magic realism.  The central female character is a woman who grew up as an orphan with no one to help her.   She learns the power of words and how to read, a very big thing in a largely illiterate society.  She makes her living by writing letters for people, with every letter she gives people two secret words to help protect them.  She rapidly develops her fame as a woman with a great ability to use words, to caste a spell with them.   The place she lives is rugged, nearly in a state of anarchy with  bands of bandits disguised as political groups roaming the countryside and terrorizing people at will.  One day the woman is kidnapped and brought to the command post of "The Colonel".  He has heard of her power with words and he wants her to write a speech for him, one he can give throughout the country to get himself elected president.   Where ever he goes people are mesmerized by the speech.  It also appears the woman has cast a spell on the colonel that made him fall in love with her. His second in command wants to kill her as a witch but the colonel will not have it.  I will leave the rest of the very intriguing story untold.

"Two Words" is a very interesting story and it is not hard to see from reading it why she has sold such a huge number of books.  I will hopefully be reading more of her work in 2013 and beyond.

Please share your experience with Isabel Allende with us