MetaFilter posts tagged with RobertoBolano

Bolaño and the Ghosts of Ciuduad Juárez

Kattullus — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:31:58 -0800

Alone Among the Ghosts is an essay from The Nation by Marcela Valdez about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. She interviews journalist Sergio González Rodríguez, who has written extensively about the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez which is the black hole Bolaño's novel orbits around. The journalist was Bolaño's correspondent and main source of information about the femicides. The best English language article about the epidemic of violence in Ciudad Juárez I have read is Max Blumenthal's 2002 Salon article. The website No Angel Came is a good resource for more info on the subject, including a continually updated section with links to articles about the killings. The site's most arresting section is the list of every woman killed in Ciudad Juárez from 1993 to 2006. The epidemic of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez continues.

Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño

Kattullus — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:47:21 -0800

7 short stories by Roberto Bolaño Gómez Palacio, The Insufferable Gaucho, Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey, Phone Calls, Dance Card. From Nazi Literature in the Americas: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, Luz Mendiluce Thompson & Ernesto Pérez Masón and The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys. If you know the fiction of Roberto Bolaño you know what you're in for. If you don't, any of these stories is a good place to start, though the first three are perhaps the most natural starting points. One more story in audio form: A Literary Adventure [Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast] Poems: Self Portrait at Twenty Years and My Life in the Tubes of Survival. Interviews with his two main English language translators Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. Biographical Essay on Bolaño by Wimmer. [pdf] Carmen Boullosa, a friend and contemporary of Bolaño's, describes the literary scene the young Bolaño participated in during the 70's. Paul Berman explains how Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives fits into the literary history of Latin America. [Bolaño previously on MetaFilter]

The Great Bolano

vacapinta — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:27:42 -0800

"At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died [in 2003], he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation." (NYer)
And since then, Roberto Bolaño's reputation has been growing (NYRB:"The Great Bolano"). A man who dismissed magical realism as "shit" is more the heir of Cortazar and Borges (his two idols) than Garcia Marquez or Vargas Lllosa yet he is also something entirely new. Bolano was also the founder of infrarealism, a movement whose manifesto proclaims "A new lyricism springing up in Latin America, nourishing itself in ways that continue to amaze us.... Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breath and heat. Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions."
Why has the English speaking world not heard of Bolaño? His great novel, The Savage Detectives, a sprawling work about youth and poetry and chaos (with no less than 52 narrators across several continents) has only this year been translated.