AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
READ: November-December
THOUGHTS: Enjoyed this, though didn't think so at first. The first hundred pages were a bit meandering and felt more like an exercise or 'practice novel' (the manuscript for this dates back to '89, which is about 4 or so years before Bolaño published The Skating Rink, which I believe is his first published novel? I could be wrong.) The book was close to 300 pages, which for Bolaño's shorter works is a bit long; at times I felt like this could have definitely merited a shorter length, though maybe the slow pace does well for the book's overall atmosphere, tone, etc. It very slowly develops into the perennial Bolaño narrative: a story with somewhat innocuous origins delves into a kind unseeable and unverified looming terror -- for the last third of the book you slowly suspect that something terrible is going to happen and then things just sort of peter out in both an anticlimactic (which is never a bad word in Bolaño) and emotionally confusing/diffused way. I would say this book stands well among other Bolaño novels. I don't think there is a single thing he has written that I have disliked, though I think this book will probably end up lumped into a grouping of 'lesser works' in the Bolaño oeuvre. Still lots of fun and not a boring moment, despite its slow pace.
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