Also like 2666, this novel gradually develops the story of a chase. So what does Bolaño develop here? Like 2666, this book has five sections. This is not surprising: Woes, while hardly the weakest of Bolaño’s posthumously published works, most resembles a rough sketch of ideas that were fully realized in 2666.Indeed, Bolaño began Woes in the 1980s and continually revised it until just before his death. By 1995, in a letter to a friend, he was claiming that it exceeded “eight hundred thousand pages” and presented a “demented tangle that surely no one will understand.” The critic Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, writing in the preface to the Spanish edition, explains that “what mattered to its author wasn’t completing it but developing it.” Bolaño, however, left instructions for the publication of 2666-something he did not do for Woes. IN STRUCTURE AND style, Woes resembles Bolaño’s blockbuster 2666, which appeared in 2008. The continued publication and popular packaging of his incomplete work may actually be diluting his reputation as a writer of varied talents and fearless ambition.

It is unclear whether publishing Bolaño’s unfinished works as popular books, instead of, say, scholarly editions, adds anything to the Bolaño legacy. But now Bolaño’s prevalence risks another over-simplification: that he is the only Latin American writer of importance to emerge since the original “Boom.”Įven if you grant publishers and literary magazines-and who would not?-the right to pad their coffers by any means, it is worth asking if there are hidden costs in this Bolaño worship, not only for other Latin American writers, but for Bolaño himself. His work seemed a welcome break from magical realism, which-through the writings of Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and other members of the “Boom” generation-had dominated most North American conceptions of Latin American literature for several decades. When Bolaño’s breakthrough book, The Savage Detectives, was published in English in 2007, he was heralded as an emissary from the next generation of Latin American literature.

His publishers’ enthusiasm for his posthumous work is not difficult to understand: not since García Márquez has the American public fallen so hard and fast for a Latin American writer. His latest book, Woes of the True Policeman, is not even his first this year: last spring there appeared The Secret of Evil, a collection of nineteen largely unfinished stories. ALTHOUGH IT HAS been nearly a decade since Roberto Bolaño’s death, he has been publishing at an enviable clip.

Roberto bolano 2666 review