lost paws:

I have long harbored a secret belief that the Latin American Authors of the past 50 years, or so, are superior to the American ones (with a few notable exceptions). After finishing Roberto Bolaño’s story collection Last Evenings on Earth last summer, which I picked up after reading a review in BookForum titled “Dead Calm” (I mention this only because that phrase has stuck with me in all my subsequent readings of Bolaño), I began to develop a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the aforementioned author. I can’t say that I was blown away by Last Evenings -- only about half of the stories survive a second reading. But something touched me about them, something like the foreboding Mexican/Chilean/Spanish sky that is always on Bolaño’s horizon -- these stories were inhabited by a sublime. To clarify, I’m thinking of a particular variety of the sublime, a unit isolated by Anne Carson in her essay “Monica Vitti and the Sublime”, a unit that consists of punching someone in the face via a particular reading of Longinus or, if you will, the last scene in La Notte, in which, legend has it, Antonioni punched Monica Vitti in the face in order to draw the sublime out of her. Or as Bolaño would end that particular parable: ...and then the fight begins.

In the fall of 2006 I moved to NYC for an internship at FSG. I was sitting in their lobby waiting for my grand tour, flipping through their spring catalogue when I happened upon a two page spread for The Savage Detective, the first of Bolaño’s long novels to be translated to English. Tears of joy were quickly manufactured. As soon as the advanced reader’s copies came in a few weeks later, I grabbed the first one I could get my dirty little paws on, devoured it in a matter of days, then like a mother bird feeding her young, regurgitated it and devoured it again. Needless to say, it did not disappoint. Soon afterward I spoke with translation’s editor LS about my impressions of the book and we discussed how reading Savage Detectives transported you in a way that few books could, that your life became mediocre and meaningless in comparison to Bolaño’s. I would add that it isn’t just that it transports you, which plenty of books do, but it makes you long for the lives you never led and the friends you never had. I will not hesitate to add that if you can’t feel Bolaño, like some reviewers who have bemoaned his repetition of themes and the messiness of his prose, I believe that your soul lacks a certain human quality that is necessary to fully illuminate the darkness of Bolaño’s prose. Part of Bolaño’s brilliance is his capacity for failure, his comedic sense of the failure of self. James Wood (who wrote the NY Times review for Savage Detectives), who I respect despite certain conservative critical tendencies, wrote about the plight of self in his book The Irresponsible Self : On Laughter in the Novel. According to Wood, the idea of the novel is to capture that essential element of self through the use of character, and this effect, so Wood, is often achieved through the use of humor. Specifically, he differentiates a fundamentally religious comedic sense in which humor is meant to teach a lesson to a sublime sense of humor through which an intangible sense of sadness is reached. No wonder he gave Bolaño such a glowing review.

When I finished the canon of Bolaño’s novels available in English translation, it occurred to me that I had developed an oft-articulated complex endemic to the landscape of literature: I had a new favorite author. This term should rarely be applied, but in my cosmology, I now have a new deity that ranks with (okay, ranks a bit below), those heavyweights like Kafka, Pynchon, Borges, and Roussel. This is my tribute to our love (not mutual), a sort of progressive essay in parts: part biography, part criticism, part literary travelogue. More to come...