Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

Easily finding my way into this novel. There’s a gorgeous speech about the horrors of legal execution that feels utterly relevant today.

It also unfolds like scenes from a screenplay.

It’s about Bolaño trying to write this novel. And the novel resisting.

Insufferable. But utterly compelling. Bolaño packs so much in a single page. Each sentence feels like a novel unto itself. Circular narratives. Dreamed scenarios with characters dreaming the author back. Surreal and yet true. Not a false moment. Dreams should be registered weapons.

What is it about Bolaño that seems so inscrutable and yet so alluring? It’s as if he’s creating a mystery he can’t resolve with the customary resources. So he relies on the mystery to make explain itself, which it unreliably does. Antwerp is a novel of terse numbered chapters about a page or two long, but they are so thoroughly compacted with viewpoints and nuance so baffling that one is not sure what this is.

Curious work. Funny, philosophical, personal. And dreamlike; a walk through the chambers of death, which to say the chambers of memory and desire.