Where to start with Bolaño
Read The Savage Detectives first — the warmer, funnier, more autobiographical novel — and 2666 stops being a fortress and becomes the next book.
You have heard 2666 called the great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century, you have looked at the eight hundred pages and the five sections and the unsolved murders and put it back down, and you want a door that lets you meet Bolaño as a writer before you meet him as a project.
Starting with 2666 and meeting the formal scale and the unsolved murders cold, and concluding Bolaño is a writer of difficulty for its own sake. Or reading him through the Latin American boom labels and missing that he wrote against that generation as much as out of it.
The reading path
- The Savage Detectives — Read it slowly. The first part — Garcia Madero's diary — is the warm-up; the long middle — interviews with people who knew the two poets — is the form; the third part returns to the diary. The novel is funny on purpose, and the comedy is the form of the love.
- 2666 — Five novels in one book, four hundred murdered women in northern Mexico, a German novelist who may not exist. Read it slowly, section by section, and accept that the centre will not resolve. The fourth section — The Part About the Crimes — is the book's argument that some things must be named and that naming will not be enough.
Why this order
Bolaño wrote two great long novels and many shorter ones, and the long novels are built out of the same material — many voices, no resolution, a generation's grief distributed across people who only half-knew each other — that the shorter ones rehearse. Meeting the warmer long novel first is the kindest door.
Held back, and why
- Distant Star — A short Bolaño novel about a fascist poet in Pinochet's Chile. Often the textbook gentlest entry. Not in this catalog yet.
- By Night In Chile — A hundred-page deathbed monologue by a Chilean priest and literary critic. Bolaño at his most concentrated. Not in this catalog yet.