Rich Clesham

fuckyeahrobertobolano:

The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers …

New Bolaño!

The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers …

New Bolaño!

2 weeks ago 3 notes

Roberto Bolaño - The Consummate Exile

By its very nature, the life of an exile — and Bolaño may be remembered as the consummate exile — is fraught with jarring shifts that play havoc with memory. What’s interesting is that he embraced his sense of displacement as if it were the ultimate source of strength. He seemed less interested in his (and his characters’) past, in verifiable dates and events aired out for analysis, than he was in the experiential portfolio derived from mental and physical peregrination.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Mikel Dunham - The Apocalyptic Tradition (Los Angeles Review of Books)

(Source: lareviewofbooks.org)

4 months ago 3 notes

[O]n the right side I spot a parochial native of Santiago de Chile, a government or bank official, clerk or bureaucrat, a good man who has never left Chile, his little hat says as much, startled as he walks through Hyde Park with a stern look on his face (though his sternness is of the most helpless variety), as if he were thinking abstruse thoughts. On the left side of the picture a girl, possibly a nanny, pushes a baby carriage that isn’t seen: only the handle appears in the frame. This girl is English: her eyes gaze at the carriage that I can’t see and the child who I can’t see, but by the expression on her face it’s clear that she’s elsewhere, a much warmer place, the tropic of geometric forms, the tropic of geometric exiles. The photograph doesn’t end with these two figures, who actually only frame it and thereby give it a twist: between the Luciferian nanny and the parochial Chilean from Santiago, but further in the distance, a couple stroll arm in arm toward the photographer and foreground, which thus becomes a promise of the future, as if the fate of that ideal (and eminently British) couple were the peripatetic Chilean and the baby we can’t see and the baby’s questionable caretaker. But even here the photograph doesn’t end (because this photograph and maybe all photographs have a beginning and an end, though as a general rule we never know for sure what they are), or the staging of the scene doesn’t end: in the background there are three tiny silhouettes, this time in the exact center of the lens, three silhouettes poised at the point where the placid Hyde Park path merges with the horizon, silhouettes that may either be approaching Larrain’s camera or moving away from it, probably approaching, three silhouettes that are like three black holes or like three tiny scratches in the fateful serenity (and clarity) of this photograph.

Roberto Bolaño, describing Sergio Larrain’s photo in Between Parentheses

[O]n the right side I spot a parochial native of Santiago de Chile, a government or bank official, clerk or bureaucrat, a good man who has never left Chile, his little hat says as much, startled as he walks through Hyde Park with a stern look on his face (though his sternness is of the most helpless variety), as if he were thinking abstruse thoughts. On the left side of the picture a girl, possibly a nanny, pushes a baby carriage that isn’t seen: only the handle appears in the frame. This girl is English: her eyes gaze at the carriage that I can’t see and the child who I can’t see, but by the expression on her face it’s clear that she’s elsewhere, a much warmer place, the tropic of geometric forms, the tropic of geometric exiles. The photograph doesn’t end with these two figures, who actually only frame it and thereby give it a twist: between the Luciferian nanny and the parochial Chilean from Santiago, but further in the distance, a couple stroll arm in arm toward the photographer and foreground, which thus becomes a promise of the future, as if the fate of that ideal (and eminently British) couple were the peripatetic Chilean and the baby we can’t see and the baby’s questionable caretaker. But even here the photograph doesn’t end (because this photograph and maybe all photographs have a beginning and an end, though as a general rule we never know for sure what they are), or the staging of the scene doesn’t end: in the background there are three tiny silhouettes, this time in the exact center of the lens, three silhouettes poised at the point where the placid Hyde Park path merges with the horizon, silhouettes that may either be approaching Larrain’s camera or moving away from it, probably approaching, three silhouettes that are like three black holes or like three tiny scratches in the fateful serenity (and clarity) of this photograph.

Roberto Bolaño, describing Sergio Larrain’s photo in Between Parentheses

4 months ago 2 notes

The Beat Generation

Allen Ginsberg came to Rosset’s party, with his digusting black straggly beard, a white T-shirt beneath a dark, double-breasted suit, and tennis shoes. With him there was a whole crowd of beatniks who were even more bearded and filthy. They have all moved from San Francisco to New York, including Kerouac, who did not come tonight, however.

Arrabal’s Adventure

The beatniks naturally fraternize with Arrabal, wo is also bearded (his Parisian under-the-chin beard and their unkempt beatnik beards), and invite him to their to listen to his poetry readings. Ginsberg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I got back to the hotel, I found Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him. This Teddy Boy who had come to America to scandalize others is totally terrified at his first encounter with the American avant-garde and suddenly is revealed as the poor Spanish boy who up until a few years ago was still studying to become a priest.

He says that at home the beatniks are very clean, they have a beautiful house complete with fridge and television, and they live a quiet bourgeois ménage and dress up in dirty clothes only to go out.

From the frequently hilarious, occasionally questionable American Diary 1959-1960 by Italo Calvino published in Hermit in Paris.

4 months ago 3 notes

Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.

– Labyrinth - Roberto Bolaño available at The New Yorker here.

4 months ago

He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer.

–

The Book Bench: In the Labyrinth: A User’s Guide to Bolaño : The New Yorker

Totally wanna beat this dude upppp! Intellectually and with my fists!

(via aliciakennedy)

It gets worse:

“The Third Reich” should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit “Antwerp,” “Monsieur Pain,” “The Romantic Dogs,” “Between Parentheses,” and “The Skating Rink.”

Oh and of course:

Avoid “2666” for as long as possible, and for heaven’s sake, don’t start with it. The book is a desert of negative space across which the panting reader will search in vain for the traditional pleasures of the novel: form, character, coherence, meaning.

The latter bit did actually make me laugh out loud - it’s a good line, just one that emphatically doesn’t apply to Bolaño.

(via aliciakennedy)

4 months ago 4 notes

The first trailer for Dear Esther (the re-release) has gone online and it’s rather exciting. The original game is a free mod for the Source engine, but the whole game has now been rather beautifully remade, additional scenes have been added and new dialogue inserted. Dear Esther treads a thin line between computer game and novel - it’s irrelevant as to which it really is - it is a wonderful story, and told quite brilliantly. I encourage everyone to give it a go.

EDIT: I’ve possibly not done enough to sell this. Dear Esther really is a work of art, the voice acting and writing are superb, and the whole tale is presented to you as you explore a mysterious island at your own speed. Exploration leads to further contemplation from the ever present narrator. This is a narrative told carefully and slowly, it requires you to think as much as it does to ‘play’. Whatever medium one decides it belongs to, it is magnificent.

4 months ago 8 notes

9. A Monkey (Antwerp)

To name is to praise, said the girl (eighteen, a poet, long hair). The hour of the ambulance parked in the alley. The medic stubbed out his cigarette on his shoe, then lumbered forward like a bear. I wish those miserable people in the windows would turn out the lights and go to sleep. Who was the first human being to look out a window?

Finally got round to buying Antwerp - it lasted about an hour and a half. The thought that there are only a handful of books by Bolaño left to be published, and for me to read, is a terrifying proposition.

4 months ago 7 notes

And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library.

–

- from Ian McEwan’s “Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend” in the NYT

(via Hal Espen)

Also this:

Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton.

Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, Christopher’s head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line.

Do click here and read it all for yourself.

(via davidquigg)

5 months ago 3 notes

Calvino on the importance of the frame in literature

Both in art and literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls - and somehow stands for - everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.

5 months ago 23 notes

…more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy…

–

This is from the jacket copy of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Mirror in the Well, put out by Dalkey. You can use it, though, to describe LITERALLY ANYTHING. (via mcnallyjackson)

This has probably made my day.

6 months ago 96 notes

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

For yeas we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and mission assigned to us by fate.

Many never got to know. Cristo Bedoya, who went on to become a surgeon of renown, never managed to explain to himself why he gave in to the impulse to spend two hours at his grandparent’s house until bishop came instead of going to rest at his parent’s, who had been waiting for him since dawn to warn him. But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and still didn’t do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honour are sacred monopolies with access only for those part of the drama. “Honour is love”, I heard my mother say.

6 months ago 2 notes

CITIES & THE DEAD: 4

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roogs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people’s bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.

From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, “It’s down below there,” and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

7 months ago 4 notes

Remember, too, that in literature you always lose, but the difference, the enormous difference, lies in losing while standing tall, with eyes open, not kneeling in a corner praying to Jude the Apostle with chattering teeth.

– Roberto Bolaño from Between Parentheses (trans. by Natasha Wimmer)

(Source: fuckyeahrobertobolano, via nthword)

7 months ago 181 notes

In Evil Hour

The only door on the square that was open was that of the church. César Montero looked up and saw the sky, heavy and low, two feet above his head. He crossed himself and spurred the mule, making it whirl about several times on its hind legs until the animal got a grip on the soapy soil. That was when he saw the piece of paper stuck to the door of his house.

He read it without dismounting. The water had dissolved the colours, but the text, written with a brush in rough printed letters, could still be made out. César Montero brought the mule over to the wall, pulled off the paper, and tore it to bits.

With a slap of the reins he pressed the mule into a short trot, good for many hours. He left the square through a narrow and twisted street with adobe-walled houses whose doors turned out the dregs of sleep when they were opened. He caught the smell of coffee. Only when he left the last houses of the town behind did he turn the mule around and, with the same short and regular trot, return to the square and stop in front of Pastor’s house. There he dismounted, took off the shotgun, and tied the mile to the prop, performing each action in the precise time needed.

The door was unbolted, blocked at the bottom by a giant sea shell. César Montero went into the small shadowy living room. He heard a sharp note and then an expectant silence. He passed by four chairs arranged around a small table with a woolen cloth and a vase with artificial flowers. Finally he stopped in front of the courtyard door, threw back the hood of his raincoat, released the safety catch of the shotgun by feel, and with a calm, almost friendly voice, called:

“Pastor.”

Pastor appeared in the frame of the door, screwing off the mouthpiece of the clarinet. He was a thin, straight lad with an incipient line of moustache trimmed with scissors. When he saw César Montero with his heels planted on the earthen floor and the shotgun at waist level pointed at him, Pastor opened his mouth. But he didn’t say anything. He turned pale and smiled. César Montero, first firmed his heels against the ground, then the butt, with his elbow, against his hip; then he clenched his teeth and, at the same time, the trigger. The house shook with the explosion, but César Montero didn’t know whether it was before or after the commotion that from the other side of the door he saw Pastor dragging himself with the undulation of a worm along a furrow of bloody feathers.

From the first chapter of the mysterious In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.

8 months ago 1 note

Roberto Bolaño - The Consummate Exile

By its very nature, the life of an exile — and Bolaño may be remembered as the consummate exile — is fraught with jarring shifts that play havoc with memory. What’s interesting is that he embraced his sense of displacement as if it were the ultimate source of strength. He seemed less interested in his (and his characters’) past, in verifiable dates and events aired out for analysis, than he was in the experiential portfolio derived from mental and physical peregrination.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Mikel Dunham - The Apocalyptic Tradition (Los Angeles Review of Books)

(Source: lareviewofbooks.org)

The Beat Generation

Arrabal’s Adventure

From the frequently hilarious, occasionally questionable American Diary 1959-1960 by Italo Calvino published in Hermit in Paris.

9. A Monkey (Antwerp)

Calvino on the importance of the frame in literature

Both in art and literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls - and somehow stands for - everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

CITIES & THE DEAD: 4

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

In Evil Hour

“Pastor.”

From the first chapter of the mysterious In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.

Roberto Bolaño - The Consummate Exile

The Beat Generation

9. A Monkey (Antwerp)

Calvino on the importance of the frame in literature

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

CITIES & THE DEAD: 4

In Evil Hour

Roberto Bolaño - The Consummate Exile

The Beat Generation

9. A Monkey (Antwerp)

Calvino on the importance of the frame in literature

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

CITIES & THE DEAD: 4

In Evil Hour

Rich Clesham

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