Distant Star by Roberto Bolano
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Roberto Bolaño: Horror, Beauty, and the Infrareal
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: HORROR, BEAUTY, AND THE INFRAREAL by Adam Jonathan Burling Bredenberg English Literature and Fiction Writing, University of Pittsburgh, 2013 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of University of Pittsburgh Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH HONORS COLLEGE This thesis was presented by Adam Bredenberg It was defended on April 18, 2013 A.D. and approved by Jeff Aziz, Associate Professor of English Literature Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies Joshua Lund, Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies Committee Chair: Ronald Judy, Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies, Department of English ii Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.5) You are free: • to copy, distribute and transmit the work • to adapt the work • to make commercial use of the work Adam Bredenberg 2013 iii HORROR, BEAUTY, AND THE INFRAREAL Adam Bredenberg University of Pittsburgh, 2013 ABSTRACT Routines of ignorance and inaction perpetuate destructive systems. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE PART ABOUT THE DETECTIVE AND THE LABYRINTH 6 III. THE PART ABOUT THE PHYSICAL CENTER 21 IV. THE PART ABOUT POWER AND THE FEMALE 34 V. THE PART ABOUT NEW CHILEAN POETRY 41 VI. THE PART ABOUT THE BASEMENT 50 v PREFACE I wish to thank my loved ones, my sources of support, my friends, my colleagues, and my editors: R. A. Judy, Danial Mohammed Khan-Yousufzai, and Lauren Rygg. vi I. INTRODUCTION In 2666, Roberto Bolaño creates Santa Teresa, an industrial town on the Mexican- American border where women and girls are routinely raped, murdered, and left in the desert or in garbage dumps. -
TOURING DOSSIER2013 Centre De Cultura Contemporània De Barcelona 2013
DOSSIER ITINERANCIA Centre de CulturaEXHIBITION Contemporània de Barcelona TOURING DOSSIER2013 Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona 2013 Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 ArchivoA CCCB production Bolaño. with the participation 1977-2003 of the Casa del Lector and the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes CREDITS PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT CCCB Exhibitions Service CURATORS Juan Insua Valerie Miles SPACE DESIGN AND GRAPHIC DESIGN Ignasi Bonjoch — www.bonjoch.com Anna Catasús AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTIONS Juan Insua, Toni Curcó Maria Padró PHOTOGRAPHY WORK Adrià Goula INTERACTIVE DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING Currysauce.net — http://www.currymedia.net/ COORDINATION Liliana Antoniucci [email protected] TOURING Carlota Broggi [email protected] A CCCB production with the participation of the Casa del Lector and the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 2. EXHIBITION LAYOUT 2.1. THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSITY 2.2. INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE 2.3. THE VISITOR FROM THE FUTURE 3. TECHNICAL DETAILS 4. PARALLEL ACTIVITIES 5. CATALOGUE 1. INTRODUCTION Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 Curators: Valérie Miles, Juan Insua Dates: 5 March - 30 June 2013 Planned venues: NY, Berlin, Chile, Madrid The CCCB organised the Bolaño Archive exhibition as a tribute to the exceptional Chilean writer coinciding with the tenth anni- versary of his death in 2013, and with the sixth biennial edition of Kosmopolis, Amplified Literature Fest. Roberto Bolaño (Santiago de Chile 1953 – Barcelona 2003) is one of the most important writers of recent decades. His books have become an indisputable reference point for all lovers of literature. This exhibition aims to pay tribute to his work on the tenth an- niversary of his death, while also offering a first exploration of his personal archive. -
Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 By
The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Chair Professor Estelle Tarica Professor Tom McEnaney Summer 2018 The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ¬ 2018 Francisco Brito 1 Abstract The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Francine Masiello, Chair This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole. -
Yahoo Hot Zone
1 Sovereignty, Secrecy, and the Question of Magic in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star Cory Stockwell Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey “I would much rather have been a homicide detective than a writer. That’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of.” – Roberto Bolaño (2011, 369) That sovereignty possesses a mystical quality, one that at times borders on the occult, is something on which many theorists have commented. We could think here of the way Schmitt positions the sovereign as simultaneously inside and outside of the political order, and of his claim that “[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (2006, 36); we could also mention the sustained engagement with magic in the work of the most important theorist working in Schmitt’s wake, Giorgio Agamben.1 We could also think of the way Derrida, drawing upon Benjamin, refers to the “mystical foundation of authority”;2 or of Hardt and Negri, who, in seeking to chart the “new global form of sovereignty” (2000, xii) that they call Empire, refer, in the preface to the book of this name, to Marx’s invitation, in Capital, to “descend into the hidden abode of production” (xvii) – the place at which, according to Marx, we will finally witness “the secret of profit making.” Indeed, haven’t many of the most important thinkers of modern political philosophy, from de la Boétie through Rousseau and beyond, sought to interrogate an element of politics that it would be no exaggeration to label a mystery: why the many acquiesce to the power of the few? Few recent theorists, however, have gone so far as to use the term “magic” to refer to the workings of sovereignty. -
'2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - Nytimes.Com
Book Review - '2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - NYTimes.com November 9, 2008 The Departed By JONATHAN LETHEM Skip to next paragraph 2666 By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer By 898 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cloth and paper, $30 In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with? Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case. -
Monstrosity and Social Violence: Challenges to Our Perception of Evil in Roberto Bolaño’S Estrella Distante
6 Monstrosity and Social Violence: Challenges to Our Perception of Evil in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella Distante Carlos Vargas-Salgado This my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature’s bottomless cesspools.* Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star In Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella Distante (1996) (Distant Star), a group of Chilean university students is infiltrated by a murderer shortly before Pinochet’s coup. The murderer is also a poet (or at least he pretends to be so), who goes by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. Following the September 1973 putsch by Pinochet, there were disappearances, mostly of leftist students, as well as many poets. Among the victims in Distant Star: the Garmendia twins, two young women who were seduced by the murderer, who becomes famous right after the putsch under the name Carlos Wieder. The poet/murderer is almost perfect in his evilness and seems unassailable. He invents new forms of poetry, writing in Writing Monsters: Essays on Iberian and Latin American Cultures Hispanic Issues On Line 15 (2014) VARGAS-SALGADO ♦ 100 delusional Latin lines. He also organizes events with photographs of actual executions for the benefit of a distracted bourgeoisie and with the approval of the dreaded DINA (the intelligence office and secret police in Pinochet’s regime). Are we talking here about a monster, in a canonical sense of the term? Is Roberto Bolaño resorting to the old temptation of demonizing the assassins and political criminals by bestowing all archetypal characteristics of evil on a single character? Bolaño seems to discuss the conditions under which the image of a monster is built (mainly through the reconstruction of memories), and to attribute to him the status of evil incarnate. -
The Universe of Roberto Bolaño
By Night in Chile: the Universe of Roberto Bolaño Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean poet who turned to fiction writing at the end of his life. He fled Chile for Mexico and Spain when Pinochet took power, and he died of liver failure in 2003. Taken together, the novels and short stories he wrote in the last ten years of his life are one of the great achievements of modern literature, and his major work, 2666, is surely the best novel of our young century. The themes of his work – exile, violence, poetry, fascism, youth, crime – connect all of his books into a single, sprawling text. My collection contains every book by Bolaño that has been translated into English, plus the short biography and interview collection by journalist Mónica Maristain. The highlight of the collection is the pair of editions of 2666. The first book I read by Bolaño was The Savage Detectives, a novel about poets and courage. I bought it on a whim after reading a positive review. Reading The Savage Detectives was so exhilarating that immediately upon putting it down, I drove to the nearest bookstore and bought every other Bolaño book they had on the shelf. My experience reading The Savage Detectives was surpassed only by reading the novel 2666, which I read next. Before even finishing 2666, I’d bought a copy for all my friends and convinced them to read it too. Why is it such a compelling book? 2666 manages to be a Latin American, American, German, and Russian novel all at once. -
The Irrelevant Mystery, the Involuntary Detective, the Melting Clue: Notes On
THE IRRELEVANT MYSTERY, THE INVOLUNTARY DETECTIVE, THE MELTING CLUE: NOTES ON LA PISTA DE HIELO, A NEOPOLICIAL BY ROBERTO BOLAÑO EL MISTERIO IRRELEVANTE, EL DETECTIVE INVOLUNTARIO, LA PISTA DE HIELO: ALGUNAS NOTAS EN TORNO A UN NEOPOLICIAL DE ROBERTO BOLAÑO Julia González-Calderón University of California Los Angeles – CA, Estados Unidos Abstract Th is article analyzes La pista de hielo (Th e Skating Rink, 1993), the third novel by Roberto Bolaño, as an exponent of the Ibero-American neopolicial, focusing on how two of the main dramatic elements of the detective tale, the enigma and the detective fi gure, are decentralized through a series of narrative mechanisms that eventually dismantle traditional genre conventions. Furthermore, we will link La pista de hielo and its narrative key elements with the rest of the novelistic of the Chilean author, as well as with the main exponents of the neopolicial, such as Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leonardo Padura or Ramón Díaz Eterovic. Keywords: Bolaño, Latin American fi ction, detective fi ction, neopolicial. Resumo Resumen Este artigo analisa o terceiro romance Este trabajo analiza la tercera novela de Roberto Bolaño, La pista de hielo de Roberto Bolaño, La pista de hielo (1993), desde uma leitura do texto (1993), desde una lectura del texto como como exponente do neopolicial exponente del neopolicial iberoamericano iberoamericano tal como o caracteriza tal y como lo ha venido caracterizando la a crítica e focalizando-se em como dois crítica y estudia cómo dos de los elementos dos componentes dramáticos da narração dramáticos centrales de la narración policial clássica, o enigma e o detetive, são policial clásica, el enigma y el detective, deslocados por meio de um conjunto de son desplazados mediante una serie de mecanismos narrativos que desarticulam mecanismos narrativos que desarticulan as convenções tradicionais do género. -
Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 by Marcela Valdes
Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 By Marcela Valdes This article appeared in the December 8, 2008 edition of The Nation. Carla Rippey The Gardens of Ciudad Juárez, 2006 Marcela Valdes: Roberto Bolaño's last novel, 2666, is his most profound exploration of art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state. Shortly before he died of liver failure in July 2003, Roberto Bolaño remarked that he would have preferred to be a detective rather than a writer. Bolaño was 50 years old at the time, and by then he was widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist since Gabriel García Márquez. But when Mexican Playboy interviewed him, Bolaño was unequivocal. "I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer," he told the magazine. "Of that I'm absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts." Detective stories, and provocative remarks, were always passions of Bolaño's--he once declared James Ellroy among the best living writers in English--but his interest in gumshoe tales went beyond matters of plot and style. In their essence, detective stories are investigations into the motives and mechanics of violence, and Bolaño--who moved to Mexico the year of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and was imprisoned during the 1973 military coup in his native Chile--was also obsessed with such matters. The great subject of his oeuvre is the relationship between art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state. -
La Figura Del Poeta-Detective Y El Lector Como Parte Activa En La Lectura De Los Detectives Salvajes De Roberto Bolaño
La figura del poeta-detective y el lector como parte activa en la lectura de Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolaño The role of the poet-detective and the reader as an active part in the reading of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives CARMEN ROMERO CLAUDIO Universidad de Cádiz [email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2813-9579 RAÚL RUBIO MILLARES IES Casas Viejas (Benalup, Cádiz) [email protected] Recibido: 16.08.2020. Aceptado: 06.12.2020. Cómo citar: Romero Claudio, Carmen (2020). “La figura del poeta-detective y el lector como parte activa en la lectura de Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolaño”, TRIM, 19: 89-98. Este artículo está sujeto a una licencia “Creative Commons Reconocimiento-No Comercial” (CC-BY-NC). DOI: https://doi.org/10.24197/trim.19.2020.89-98 Resumen: Si hay un escritor que ha marcado a toda una generación en lengua castellana en las últimas décadas es sin duda Roberto Bolaño. Chileno que vivió en México y murió en España, la obra de este autor es capaz de entusiasmar e hipnotizar con un estilo propio del que es difícil alejarse. Como analizaremos en el presente artículo, la utilización de la figura del poeta-detective, encarnada principalmente en su alter ego Arturo Belano, fue un recurso muy utilizado por el autor para lograrlo, de tal forma que hoy, casi veinte años después de su muerte, sus lectores sigamos ejerciendo de detectives a través de su obra. Palabras clave: Roberto Bolaño; Autoficción; Metaficción; literatura contemporánea; Lector activo. Abstract: If there is one writer who has marked an entire generation in the Spanish language in recent decades, it is undoubtedly Roberto Bolaño. -
Senior Honors Thesis
Finding Historical Truth: How Literature Interrupts National Narratives and Exposes Delusional Thinking By Camille Roth Honors Thesis Appalachian State University Submitted to the Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts May, 2021 Approved by: Christopher Meade, Ph.D. Thesis Director Germán Campos-Muñoz, Ph.D. Second Reader Alexander Pitofsky, Ph.D. Third Reader In the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, By Jorge Luis Borges, the main character is introduced to an old encyclopedia edition that contains an almost limitless amount of information about a different world and planet named Tlön. This encyclopedia includes fantastical details of the geography, language, and culture of Uqbar and Tlön, revealing major differences between the Earth that we know and Tlön. As the narrator learns more about this world, he discovers that it is a complete fiction that was invented by someone in the seventeenth century. After the contents of the encyclopedia become public knowledge and widely available to everyone, people begin to forget the difference between Earth and Tlön. Despite the fact that the culture, languages, and practices in the encyclopedia were a complete fabrication, the history of Tlön gradually invades and mixes with the history and culture of Earth until both Tlön’s and Earth’s history are essentially the same. This short story is a powerful example about the dangers of capitalism and globalism, idealist philosophy, and the depth to which humans can be entranced by ridiculous beliefs. It reveals not only how history can be constructed but also how the present is manipulated to conform to a certain narrative. -
“Bolaño and the Canon.” Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Department Of
“Bolaño and the Canon.” Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Department of Spanish & Portuguese Emory University Atlanta, Georgia 30322 Roberto Bolaño’s biography and literary career can be summarized in a few words: he was born in Santiago in 1953, left his native Chile with his family in 1968, led a group of marginal poets in the Mexico City of the mid-1970s, moved to the Catalan region of Spain later that decade – where he took up writing novels and stories--, published The Savage Detectives in 1998 (for which he won the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes in consecutive years), and died in 2003 of a liver condition shortly after being consecrated as the most important writer of his generation and a year before the publication of his monumental work 2666. He was a writer who labored in relative obscurity for over two decades before making his mark in the literary world, writing poems and authoring some hard to classify novels set in Barcelona, Girona, Paris, and Blanes but featuring Latin American characters.1 Canonization in the Hispanic world was followed by canonization in the English-speaking world, where the Bolaño boom was, however, conditioned by the repackaging of his figure for a U.S. audience. (See Pollack).2 Whereas Bolaño’s stature abroad depended to some extent on a new set of cultural stereotypes, in Latin America and Spain his standing among fellow writers and readers was grounded on Bolaño’s ability to recast the avant-garde tradition and the legacy of the Boom in a fresh narrative language that is simultaneously visionary and colloquial.