Between Parentheses
Roberto Bolano
New Directions, 2011
on order
from the NYT:
Books of The Times
Freewheeling Essays, to Be Consumed With a Cocktail
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: June 7, 2011
The odd jobs and left-handed journalism that fill “Between Parentheses” — the superb title is one that Bolaño selected for one of his Chilean newspaper columns — matter because of the way his novels loom over the past half-century of Latin American fiction. He’s the most controversial and commanding figure to have emerged since Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa began issuing mature work in the early 1960s.
Bolaño died in 2003, from liver failure, at 50. A spectral sense of unfulfilled promise and martyrdom, of being slightly too good for this planet, hovers around his posthumous reputation. In this regard he is something akin to Latin America’s David Foster Wallace. (Both were cerebral, unshaven, uneasy in big cities and under bright lights.) Bolaño’s masterpiece, the novel “2666,” first published in English in 2008, was never quite completed. It, like his career, will be forever pinned with an asterisk.
The excellent thing about “Between Parentheses” is how thoroughly it dispels any incense or stale reverence in the air. It’s a loud, greasy, unkempt thing. Reading it is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Señor Bolaño. It’s like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he’s consumed a platter of Pisco sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.
“Between Parentheses,” which has been adroitly translated by Natasha Wimmer, covers a lot of acreage. There are crunchy bits of autobiography, political laments, disquisitions on food and soccer and women and exile and keeping airplanes afloat with your mind. But books were what mattered most to him, and this one is stuffed with his unruly opinions about world literature, from Twain, Borges and Melville through Philip K. Dick, Walter Mosley and Cormac McCarthy...."continued
Bolaño died in 2003, from liver failure, at 50. A spectral sense of unfulfilled promise and martyrdom, of being slightly too good for this planet, hovers around his posthumous reputation. In this regard he is something akin to Latin America’s David Foster Wallace. (Both were cerebral, unshaven, uneasy in big cities and under bright lights.) Bolaño’s masterpiece, the novel “2666,” first published in English in 2008, was never quite completed. It, like his career, will be forever pinned with an asterisk.
The excellent thing about “Between Parentheses” is how thoroughly it dispels any incense or stale reverence in the air. It’s a loud, greasy, unkempt thing. Reading it is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Señor Bolaño. It’s like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he’s consumed a platter of Pisco sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.
“Between Parentheses,” which has been adroitly translated by Natasha Wimmer, covers a lot of acreage. There are crunchy bits of autobiography, political laments, disquisitions on food and soccer and women and exile and keeping airplanes afloat with your mind. But books were what mattered most to him, and this one is stuffed with his unruly opinions about world literature, from Twain, Borges and Melville through Philip K. Dick, Walter Mosley and Cormac McCarthy...."continued