MixedThe Guardian\"Melancholy and despair are offset by comedy, wonderfully present in scenes from a poetry workshop: one of Bolaño’s microcosms of choice, and the ideal space for intellectual strutting and sparring. An intriguing cast, mostly vagabond in spirit, enters and exits the novel like spectres, part of the picaresque multitudes that populate his oeuvre ... Everything feels fleeting and precarious, and it’s this sense of the fugitive, the restless characters and their obsessions, that both buoys the narrative and ultimately lets it down. Too many roads lead nowhere; this brand of absurdity is itself a theme in Bolaño’s work, yet here the various aborted journeys don’t feed into a larger project ... Every now and then, little islands of visibility appear within the fog, clear-eyed glimpses into the books to come.\
