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November 12, 2008

Comments

james kidd

The Savage Detectives was an amazing book, and from what I've heard 2666 is even better. Looking forward to next posts.

Juan Murillo

Lethem´s review of 2666 has raised all manners of hell in the spanish speaking blog world with its claim that Roberto Bolaño was a heroin addict, which he wasn´t. The claim appears to have spread via unchecked repetition between different reviewers in english speaking media as disparate as The New Yorker, The Guardian and Time.

Heads up so you don´t join the hall of shame. Also, i think this story about journalists not checking their facts before they review a book is a story in itself.

If you read spanish, the controversy is ongoing here:

http://puenteareo1.blogspot.com/2008/11/bolao-y-la-herona.html

http://oscarzeta.blogspot.com/2008/11/2666-lethem-bolao-herionnamo-ahora-que.html

http://notasmoleskine.blogspot.com/2008/11/bolao-heroinmano.html

James

Looking at those posts you provided, Juan, it's still not clear if knowledgeable people are actually refuting that Bolano used heroin at some point, or whether they're simply irritated that the assertion is being made so definitively without evidence.

Juan Murillo

At this point the theory for the origin of the assertion is a fiction piece Bolaño published in a Spanish paper where the narrator makes a confession of heroin use in first person. This is the link to the actual piece:

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundolibro/2000/08/17/anticuario/966450468.html

I think the reaction has been one more of surprise than irritation since Bolaño has become such an icon and his life has been reviewed so carefully in the past few years, such a juicy piece of info would not have passed unnoticed.

The jury is still out on this one, as you correctly point out, but i suspect it is a case of copy-paste journalism.

Kelvin Alejandro

I loved Savage Detectives until the middle. I stopped reading “Savage” when it became a shifting point of view novel. Hopefully I will finish reading 2666 and get to experience Roberto’s "genius" to its full and conclusive extent. As a Hispanic reader/writer I love the idea of a Latin writer so set against magic realism and who wishes to explore Latin America as a literary device that interlopes with a contemporary world, even if its futuristic one. 100 Years Of Solitude said it all in terms of the “Macondo” experience.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."