He loves (like Borges) to invent elaborate bibliographies for fictional authors, which occasionally creates the sensation that you’re reading a card catalogue instead of a novel. He seems personally offended by the artifice of narrative closure although he’s addicted to detective plots, he employs them almost purely as philosophical exercises, often abandoning them halfway through. He has an apparently life-threatening allergy to cuteness, fictional convention, and reader-enabling shortcuts.

His novelistic skill-set seems designed to repel consumers. This is funny because Bolaño’s fiction-dreamy novellas in which air-force pilots skywrite opaque poetry and priests tutor despots in Marxism-is perhaps the least commercially viable body of literature ever written for the alleged purpose of making money. (Who can forget the time he impregnated a dragon using nothing but the power of his neglected avant-gardism?) My favorite episode of his biographical legend is the part where, at the age of nearly 40, having spent his wild-haired youth as an experimental poet obscurely chasing revolutions (political and aesthetic) all over Latin America, he finally decided it was time to hang up his spurs (or whatever revolutionaries had worn in the seventies) and try, with the air of a man resigning himself to becoming a vacuum salesman, to earn a stable living by writing fiction. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.Since his death in 2003, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño has become one of the more colorful gods in the pantheon of international literary myth. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. “Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño