More like a Cemetery
Michael Wood: The Part about Bolaño, 26 February 2009
Nazi Literature in the Americas
by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews.
New Directions, 227 pp., £17.95, May 2008,978 0 8112 1705 7 Show More
by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews.
New Directions, 227 pp., £17.95, May 2008,
2666
by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Picador, 898 pp., £20, January 2009,978 0 330 44742 3 Show More
by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Picador, 898 pp., £20, January 2009,
“... Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes ... ”