Roberto Bolaño Recenters His Mythic World
Credit.David Plunkert
By Garth Risk Hallberg
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Emily Dickinson asked her sister, Vinnie, to burn her papers after she died. For Kafka, it was his friend Max Brod. Philip Larkin assigned the job to a professional, the distinguished editor and poet Anthony Thwaite. But no formal code of ethics covers the work of literary executors, whose general inclination â when in doubt, publish â often leaves us the richer. True, it may not enlarge our sense of Larkinâs poems to read him banging on about his ânon-acting bowelsâ (see: âLetters Home: 1937-1977â), but do we really want to live in a world where Dickinsonâs fascicles or Kafkaâs âCastleâ get consigned to the flames?
Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño review – more mysteries and enigmas Rob Doyle
The executors of the Roberto Bolaño archive have us right where they want us. Like pushers who know we’re hooked enough to keep buying product of diminishing quality, every couple of years they staple together something new from the notebooks, loose papers and computer files Bolaño left behind when he died in 2003 and tack it to the end of his oeuvre. It mightn’t be long before we’re presented with Bolaño: The Complete Shopping Lists or Gauchos at the Forgotten Library: Selected Email Drafts. Not that this scraping of the seemingly bottomless barrel is unwelcome. Like virtually everything the incomparable Chilean wrote, a newly excavated trio of unarguably minor novellas,