The 3 best books by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto bolaño it is one of the clearest examples of engagement with literature. And it is that when the tragedy of an irreversible disease loomed over him was when he most insisted on writing. His last decade (10 years of fighting his disease) was an absolute dedication to the letters.

Although the truth is that a guy like Bolaño did not have to demonstrate that level of vital commitment to literature. Founder of infrarealism, that kind of surrealism postponed and transferred to Hispanic letters, he wrote great poems, with novelistic incursions that were acquiring value as he opted for prose.

In my case, as I am not much into poetry, I will focus on his dedication to the novel.

3 recommended books by Roberto Bolaño

Wild detectives

A very special novel, with overtones of a thriller but with constant winks to the reader to offer different perspectives on the proposed plot. A book of wandering characters and diffuse lives around an excuse: Finding the writer Cesárea Tinajero. Infrarrealism transferred to the narrative.

Summary: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the wild detectives, go out to look for the traces of Cesárea Tinajero, the mysterious writer who disappeared in Mexico in the years immediately after the Revolution, and that search - the trip and its consequences - lasts twenty years, from 1976 to 1996, the canonical time of any wandering, branching through multiple characters and continents, in a novel where there is everything: Loves and deaths, murders and tourist escapes, asylums and universities, disappearances and apparitions.

Its settings are Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, France, Spain, Austria, Israel, Africa, always to the beat of savage detectives - "desperate" poets, occasional traffickers -, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the enigmatic protagonists of this book that can be read as a very refined thriller Wellesian, crossed by an iconoclastic and fierce humor.

Among the characters stands out a Spanish photographer on the last step of despair, a neo-Nazi borderlines, a retired Mexican bullfighter who lives in the desert, a French student who is a reader of Sade, a teenage prostitute in permanent flight, a Uruguayan hero in 68 in Latin America, a Galician lawyer wounded by poetry, a Mexican publisher persecuted by some hired gunmen.

Wild detectives

2666

A sophisticated but revealing novel about human thought, ideologies and variability. A dynamic plot so that the whole is agile in its undeniable intellectual background.

Summary: Four professors of literature, Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza and Norton, are united by their fascination for the work of Beno von Archimboldi, an enigmatic German writer whose prestige grows throughout the world.

Complicity becomes intellectual vaudeville and leads to a pilgrimage to Santa Teresa (a transcript of Ciudad Juárez), where there are those who say that Archimboldi has been seen. Once there, Pelletier and Espinoza learn that the city has been the scene of a long chain of crimes for years: bodies of women appear in the dumps with signs of having been raped and tortured.

It is the novel's first glimpse into its tumultuous flows, full of memorable characters whose stories, halfway between laughter and horror, span two continents and include a dizzying traveling through XNUMXth-century European history. 2666 confirms the verdict of Susan Sontag: “the most influential and admired novelist in the Spanish language of his generation. His death, at the age of fifty, is a great loss for literature »

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Cowboy grave

These three short novels are unpublished and their conjunction in this book is of great value in discovering Bolaño's inexhaustible creative capacity.

In addition, for those nostalgic for the great character Arturo Belano, he can also be found unraveling wrongdoings. Undoubtedly, a character who ended up marking the author and whose presence in so many of his works seems a necessity, a support for any of his plots to be brilliant thanks to his characterization.

And the well-known character served Bolaño as a kind of introduction to his own personality in many of his stories. His appearance in the work Estrella Distante, in the mid-90s marked an indissoluble partnership between the disparate fictions proposed by the author.

What we find in this volume, in terms of sustenance itself, is that ability to summarize a living plot with the most transcendent ideas: love, violence, historical aspects ... a sum virtuously combined to hook everyone who came close to their books.

The three short novels also provide the freshness of the brief, with the relief of having new adventures once the first one is over. Of course, the end always comes.

The good thing in that case is that you have already had time to enjoy three captivating stories that contribute their critical vision and their art in the recreation of any scene.

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5/5 - (8 votes)

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