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...Savage Detectives,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s greatest novel, is a kaleidoscopic fictional autobiography—a treatise on youth, love, literature and death—whose frame is the journal of the Mexican poet Juan García Madero. Madero is the disciple, devotee and faithful hanger-on of two older poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego throughout his fiction) and Ulises Lima, who follows the pair through the Sonora Desert in flight from a violent pimp and his henchmen. The intervening chapters of the novel?...
...nearly 900 pages, “2666” perfects the digressional style that Bolaño honed throughout his entire fiction career. Characters forget themselves in the middle of monologues that span pages; metaphors mutate from the fantastical to the grotesque; the narrator’s personality (in Bolaño’s notes, he says Arturo Belano is the narrator) and the seemingly irrelevant details that embellish individual plotlines emerge from nowhere and are cast off almost as quickly; “He said his name was Harry Magaña, or at least that?...
...criticism of Bolaño’s fiction is that he mystifies the time and place of his focus, that he covers over the reality of his stories with surrealistic affect, but “2666” abandons all traces of that affect for an unflinching, procedural language that bypasses poetic imagery or strips it to its disturbing core. The Part About the Crimes, the longest section of the novel and its most infamous, unfolds 300 pages of stark summary, illustrating the various cases of kidnapping and murder that took place in and around Santa Teresa between...
...Savage Detectives,” and even earlier in “Nazi Literature in the Americas”), “2666” plots the five circles of a sort of literary hell. Beginning with criticism, then academia, journalism, police detection, and finally fiction, the structure of the novel represents a cycle of inexplicable death and rebirth that’s as close to a theory of reality as we’re likely to get from the author. Archimboldi is born in Germany on the coast of the North Sea in 1920, and from the outset...
...homeless black teenager who was adopted by a white couple and, after many a challenge, became a star tackle at the University of Mississippi. (Today, Oher is an acclaimed rookie for the Baltimore Ravens.) A true story that sounds like it's the most improbable type of uplifting fiction, The Blind Side could have been one of the dozens of sports inspirationals that reach their core audiences, moisten many eyes and retire quickly to the DVD shelves. Yet it's obviously connecting on a grand scale and at a high intensity. So I decided to grab the tail of this...