Where to start with Bolaño
The Savage Detectives begins among young poets, jokes, hunger, and movement; 2666 can wait until you trust the voice.
2666's scale and violence have made Bolaño look like a solemn project, while the warmer and more comic writer remains unfamiliar.
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.
Books in order
- 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.
Further reading
- 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.