Review by New York Times Review
IT'S sometime in the early 1970s, and a blond, lanky, 17-year-old poet named Jan Schrella is writing a fan letter to one of his literary heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin, describing his living situation. "I was born in Chile, but now I live on a rooftop in Mexico City, with views of incredible sunrises," he tells her. "There are a number of rooms on the roof, but only five are inhabited." Coldwater shower stalls and outhouses form a ramshackle central corridor on the rooftop, bordered by flowering planters that lend a "cheerful tropical air." Anyone who has seen Alfonso Cuarón's nostalgiadrenched film "Roma," named for a Mexico City neighborhood north of Jan's and set in the same era, can picture the scene. But this is not a movie, it is a book, "The Spirit of Science Fiction," written by the Chilean author Roberto Bolafto around 1984, when he was 31, but not published until 2016 in Spanish; and now in English, in Natasha Wimmer's superb translation. With words alone, Bolafto summons a visual world, creating in this book, as in his others, what Mario Vargas Llosa has called "images and fantasies for posterity." Jan sleeps in the nude on a bare mattress on the yellow and brown brick floor of his rooftop room, which he shares with a fellow writer named Remo Moran and where, he tells Le Guin, he writes "letters and drafts of something that one of these days might become a science fiction novel." Jan and Remo's friends drop by at all hours: the charismatic Torrente sisters, Angélica - a prizewinning poet at 17 - and Lola, her "powerful shadow" older sister; and the literary roustabout José Arco. José Arco rides his motorcycle to Jan and Remo's "at 3 or 4 in the morning, waking us up with a long cry, like a wolf." By day, while Jan reads, Remo and José Arco ride around town on the motorcycle, Remo perched on the "precarious" rear seat, investigating the sudden proliferation of literary magazines in Mexico City - from 32 to 661 in one year. They track down a publisher who dismisses the phenomenon; the magazines are "photocopied sheets, mimeographed sheets, even handwritten sheets," he scoffs, as ephemeral as a "distant jet trail" (a concept Bolafto would revisit in his 1996 novel "Distant Star"). Bolafto's admirers will find in these themes and players a satisfying proleptic glimpse of his picaresque masterpiece, 1998's "The Savage Detectives" - a circuitous hunt for vestiges of an underground "visceral realist" literary movement and its muse, the poet Cesárea Tinajero, which starts in Mexico City and detours to the Sonora Desert, Paris, San Diego, Barcelona and elsewhere. Angélica and Lola Torrente prefigure Angélica and Maria Font, José Arco anticipates Ulises Lima and a toothless Tiresian poetess named Estrellita gives a foretaste of Tinajero; but these characters, archetypes for Bolafto, are integrated here into a narrower time frame. At the Torrentes' house, Remo falls in love with a girl named Laura, and a chapter about their visits to Mexico City's bathhouses, which appeared out of context in Bolafto's posthumous poetry collection, "The Unknown University," forms a natural coda here, ft can be reckless to draw connections between an author's life and his work, but this book invites such comparisons. Late in the novel, when Jan writes a letter to another sci-fi hero, he signs it with the pseudonym "Roberto Bolafto." The reader thrills at this revelation, one of many "coded messages" in this playfully difficult, gem-choked puzzle of a book, and the most nakedly exposed. "The Spirit of Science Fiction" serves as a key to Bolafto's later work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions. From 1968, when he was 15, to 1977, when he moved to Europe, Bolafto lived mostly in Mexico City, where he read incessantly, caroused, fell in love, wrote poetry and scathing reviews, lurked in cafes, and founded a vigorous yet vague literary movement called "infrarrealismo." The "infrarealists," young rebel poets, artists and writers like himself, liked to stage provocations - for instance, disrupting a reading by the Mexican giant of letters Octavio Paz by shouting "Paz is an idiot!" In Mexico City in the '70s, Bolafto's Sancho Panza - the model for José Arco and Ulises Lima - was the poet provocateur Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Decades later, this fraternity re-emerged in "The Savage Detectives" as "visceral realists." But they got their first outing, without a name, in "The Spiritof Science Fiction." The mayhem and energy of their embrace of the poetic life - intellectual (and hormonal) passion wedded to judgmental idealism, clinched by a sense of the absurd - vibrates on the page. By now, Bolafto's international reputation is secure, but he only started publishing novels in the 1990s, late in his short life. He came to the attention of most English readers in 2003, the year he died of liver failure in Barcelona, when his exquisite allegorical fiction "By Night in Chile" was translated into English by Chris Andrews. By the time that book appeared in English, the "myth" of Bolafto, as Vargas Llosa calls it (appreciatively, not derisively), had already spread throughout the Spanishreading world; now it crossed over. "By Night in Chile" is narrated by a Jesuit priest, critic and failed poet named Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who gutlessly lends his learning to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. A dissolute literato named Farewell justifies Urrutia's sellout by telling him the tale of an Austro-Hungarian shoemaker who wasted his life attempting to erect a mountaintop monument to every single hero of the past, present and future. It's a metaphor for literature, one that Farewell rejects. "What's the use," he asks Urrutia. "What use are books, they're shadows, nothing but shadows." But to Bolafto, a shadow was never nothing. His books are peopled with shadows that have as much, or more, vitality as living beings. The posthumous release of "The Spirit of Science Fiction" in Spain, 13 years after Bolafto's death, provoked controversy among the author's loyalists, but there is no disloyalty in bringing this work to light. It is not unripe juvenilia; it is a hardy forerunner that stands on its own. In it, Bolafto enfolds the adventures of Jan, Remo and José Arco - along with Jan's sci-fi letters and digressions - into a rich and wry second narrative, packed with enigmatic, funny allusion. This interleaved narrative takes the form of an interview between a young, cynical literary prizewinner and a wide-eyed female journalist, who plays Remo to the writer's Jan, allowing him to unspool the Borgesian plot of his book - which concerns the caretaker of a Potato Academy in southern Chile who makes endless didactic radio broadcasts on potato cultivation, not knowing if anyone hears them. It is a gesture as futile, and as glorious in its futility, as building a monument to all the world's heroes in Mitteleuropa, or printing magazines no one will read. As the journalist clamors for information, the author is distracted by the rowdy literati around them. "Who would've thought renowned intellectuals ... could make such a racket?" he asks her; and later, "Do you really think this is normal?" "It's true," she says. "The celebrating gets out of hand. That's the way it always is." Back in Mexico City, José has persuaded Remo to buy a motorcycle of his own. Together they traverse the shadow streets of Bolafto's memory at dawn: "The geometric landscape of the neighborhoods, even the colors, had a provisional look, filigreed and full of energy, and if you sharpened your gaze and a certain latent madness you could feel sadness in the form of flying sparks," Remo thinks. "Not a melancholy sadness, but a devastating, paradoxical sadness that cried out for life, radiant life, wherever it might be." Bolafto's friends and peers often asked him why he never returned to live in the city that formed him and fed his imagination. One of these, the writer Juan Villoro, gave a reason in a 2010 documentary, "Roberto Bolafto: El Ultimo Maldito." Bolafto did not want to return, he suggested, because "he did not want to alter the phantasmagoric Mexico that he had marvelously constructed in his literature." But there was another reason, which this early fictional tribute proves: He did not need to return because he had taken Mexico City with him. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Two aspiring Latin American writers wander the literary landscape of Mexico City in pursuit of adventure and artistic recognition. Sound familiar? Written in 1984 but unpublished until now, after being unearthed from Bolaño's posthumous archive, this is a spiritual precursor to his breakthrough novel, The Savage Detectives (2007). Jan Schrella and Remo Morán serve as prototypes for the later characters Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and this tale includes nods to other figures who surface in Bolaño's later work, like vagabond poet Estrellita and the Unknown University, the namesake for the title of Bolaño's final poetry collection. With a story line so thin it only narrowly constitutes a plot, Bolaño relies on the quirks and capers of his characters to propel the novel forward, like Remo's purchase of a motorcycle nicknamed Aztec Princess, or Jan's compulsion to create functionally astounding furniture from the used books in their apartment. Less a finished product itself than a blueprint for Bolaño's subsequent work, this title is recommended for devout fans of the author who can't get enough of his expansive oeuvre.--Diego Báez Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This striking, meandering novel from BolaA±o (2666), written toward the beginning of his career, follows the coming-of-age of two young writers in Mexico City. Aspiring writers Jan and Remo get an apartment together. Jan spends his days holed up in the apartment, reading books and penning letters to sci-fi authors he admires, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Fritz Leiber. Jan's solitude is contrasted by Remo's social jaunts around the city: he joins a poetry workshop, falls in love with a young woman named Laura, and rides a motorcycle. Remo's involvement in the city's literary scene exposes the reader to a number of digressive stories (one particularly memorable aside features Georges Perec unwittingly defusing a duel between poets Isidore Isou and AndrAc Vernier in Paris). Meanwhile, the reader also sees Jan's searching letters, scattered throughout: "Oh, Ursula, it's actually a relief to send out messages and have all the time in the world," he writes. Though more a collection of scenes and impressions and thinner than his other novels, this is an intriguing and dreamy portrait of two writers taking different paths in their pursuit of their love of literature, hoping to discover their voices. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two young writers attempt to crack Mexico City's literary culture with whatever it takes, including earnest letters to science-fiction icons.This brief, curious, posthumous novel by Bolao (1953-2003; 2666, etc.), written circa 1984, can be read as a kind of rehearsal for his 2007 breakthrough, The Savage Detectives. Like that novel, this one features a pair of writers, Jan and Remo, who are determined to comprehend the literary culture they're so passionate about. Jan, an alter ego for Bolao himself, is more introverted, translating poems and writing fan letters to the likes of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and others. Remo, by contrast, engages with a writing workshop, though he seems to spend less time writing then he does pursuing relationships and investigating the curious explosion of literary magazines in the city from 32 titles to 661. Whether they resolve the mysteries of either literary production or women is beside the point, though; the novel is designed more as a series of set pieces from the pair's lives than a clear narrative, which leaves room for plenty of riffs about writers hungry to make names for themselves. ("In London, teenagers play for a few months at being pop stars," one scholar tells Remo. "Here, as you might expect, we seek out the cheapest and most pathetic drug or hobby: poetry, poetry magazines; that's just the way it is.") The main storyline is interspersed with dialogue from an interview with an unnamed award-winning writer, rambling on tomes about potato farming and science-fiction plots. It's unclear if Bolao didn't finish this novel or deemed it unfit for publication, but either way it's an unshaped apprentice work, hinting at his particular brillianceemotional expansiveness, dry humor, passion for the intersection of words and lifebut only sketching it out.An abstracted and loose minor work that only glancingly addresses the author's favorite themes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
