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April 03, 2008
Arriving 658 Years Ahead of Schedule...
But seriously, folks: 2666 offers a bright spot at the end of what some observers believe will be a wrist-slittingly bad year for hardcover fiction sales. Not incidentally, it belies a number of pieties: that there's no market for work in translation, that literary fiction is a tough sell... The New Directions and FSG publicity departments have been canny custodians of the Bolaño franchise, and the result has been an unmixed good: the introduction of an important Spanish-language writer to an American readership hungry for good books. I've had mixed reactions to some of Bolaño's shorter works, translated by Chris Andrews (I'm currently working my way through Nazi Literature in the Americas), but Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was easily the best new novel I read last year.
2666, which I'm surmising relates to The Savage Detectives somewhat in the way The Silmarillion relates to The Hobbit, was mentioned on our "Most Anticipated Books" list for 2008. There had recently been some speculation that it would appear again as a most anticipated book for 2009. It's impressive that, amid what appears to have been lots of pressure to produce, Ms. Wimmer managed to deliver a manuscript in time for this year's winter holidays. There's something a little unnerving about the idea of translating under the gun, but in this case, Ms. Wimmer's process may have mirrored Bolaño's own; the author had to race to finish his magnum opus before liver failure took his life when he was fifty.
Bonus links:
- Natasha Wimmer interviewed at The Quarterly Conversation
- Francisco Goldman surveys the Bolaño canon
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:36 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
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dglen @ April 03, 2008 11:30 AMI just reached for the Silmarillion thing, hoping to imply a "related, but not sequential"-type relationship between the two books. Toward the end of The Savage Detectives, Caesarea Tinajero, a poet fallen into obscurity, alludes to some dark events surrounding prostitutes near the U.S.-Mexican border, and the number 2666 comes up. I'm gathering from The Quarterly Conversation's "Bolano geometry" diagram that those events take up much of 2666, but I don't know if Caesarea herself appears, and I very much doubt that Arturo, Ulises, and Juan Garcia Madero - my beloved Savage Detectives - appear in 2666, as Bilbo B. does in The Lord of the Rings. Anyone out there have more information on the continuity between the two books (or lack thereof)?
Great blog (only discovered recently, alas) and a nice post. I don't know if this has been mentioned on "The Millions" already, but Spanish-speaking fans of "2666" should check out Mexican journalist Sergio González Rodríguez' "Huesos en el desierto" (Anagrama, 2002)--a fine piece of reporting that was a big nonfiction influence on Bolaño's novel. I read it in between "The Savage Detectives" and my first few hundred pages of "2666" so far, and it made for a nice compliment to the latter.
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