RaveThe RumpusThe novel is sprawling and fractured and Bolaño has a tremendous talent for creating authentic voice in his characters ... It feels unedited like Kerouacian stream of consciousness and then, at times, concise, poetic and crafted ... To complicate this categorization even further, his realism has a meta-fictional aspect: he is, after all, writing in a new-realist style about the attempt of two poets (who he makes very little effort to cover up as being modeled after himself and his friend) to form a new-realist literary movement. Artifice, may you be layeth’d bare ... At its heart, Bolaño’s work is a beautiful mediation on how we process the past—how we choose (if we do indeed choose) what stories to tell ourselves about our lives and, from these stories, forge some sort of self ... The beauty of Bolaño’s work is not in its style or purported innovation in relation to his predecessors... but in the way it tells us stories about the world that feel true and real, and make us think about living.
