An abstracted and loose minor work that only glancingly addresses the author's favorite themes.
Two young writers attempt to crack Mexico City’s literary culture with whatever it takes, including earnest letters to science-fiction icons.
This brief, curious, posthumous novel by Bolaño (1953-2003; 2666, etc.), written circa 1984, can be read as a kind of rehearsal for his 2007 breakthrough, The Savage Detectives. Like that novel, this one features a pair of writers, Jan and Remo, who are determined to comprehend the literary culture they’re so passionate about. Jan, an alter ego for Bolaño himself, is more introverted, translating poems and writing fan letters to the likes of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and others. Remo, by contrast, engages with a writing workshop, though he seems to spend less time writing then he does pursuing relationships and investigating the curious explosion of literary magazines in the city from 32 titles to 661. Whether they resolve the mysteries of either literary production or women is beside the point, though; the novel is designed more as a series of set pieces from the pair’s lives than a clear narrative, which leaves room for plenty of riffs about writers hungry to make names for themselves. (“In London, teenagers play for a few months at being pop stars,” one scholar tells Remo. “Here, as you might expect, we seek out the cheapest and most pathetic drug or hobby: poetry, poetry magazines; that’s just the way it is.”) The main storyline is interspersed with dialogue from an interview with an unnamed award-winning writer, rambling on tomes about potato farming and science-fiction plots. It’s unclear if Bolaño didn’t finish this novel or deemed it unfit for publication, but either way it’s an unshaped apprentice work, hinting at his particular brilliance—emotional expansiveness, dry humor, passion for the intersection of words and life—but only sketching it out.
An abstracted and loose minor work that only glancingly addresses the author's favorite themes.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2285-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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