{"id":160,"date":"2012-05-24T05:16:09","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T05:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/?p=160"},"modified":"2012-05-24T05:16:09","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T05:16:09","slug":"bolanos-last-great-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2012\/05\/24\/bolanos-last-great-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"Bola\u00c3\u00b1o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Last, Great Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"570_Bolano1\"<\/a>R.B. Moreno<\/a> in The Millions:<\/p>\n

\n

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bola\u00c3\u00b1o<\/strong>, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker <\/em>began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Labyrinth<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which accompanied a curious photograph. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bola\u00c3\u00b1o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Gomez Palacio<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d his posthumous New Yorker <\/em>debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Gomez Palacio\u00e2\u20ac\u009d appeared caught critic Francine Prose<\/strong> in a waiting room: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was glad the doctor was running late,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she wrote later in reviewing<\/a> Last Evenings on Earth<\/a><\/em>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Francisco Goldman<\/strong>, who likened \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Great Bola\u00c3\u00b1o<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to Borges <\/strong>in a profile for The New York Review of Books,<\/em> dates the ex-Chilean\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives<\/a><\/em> won a coveted Venezuelan prize for the best Spanish-language novel. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bola\u00c3\u00b1o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writings,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reads Goldman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s summary of his subject\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections. (Bola\u00c3\u00b1o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666<\/a>,<\/em> a far-flung novel involving the murders of women in the Sonora desert, is thought<\/a> to have exacerbated his liver condition.) \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as if Bola\u00c3\u00b1o is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mauricio \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Eye\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Silva\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yet the story\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

<\/a>
<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a>\n<\/div>\n

via 3quarksdaily http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2012\/05\/bola%C3%B1os-last-great-secret.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R.B. Moreno in The Millions: Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bola\u00c3\u00b1o, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Labyrinth,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Bola\u00c3\u00b1o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Last, Great Secret”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1037,6],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-google-reader","tag-ifttt"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2skW4-2A","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}