Antwerp

eveline

Sep 01, 2025

I tend to think that over time my mind has become too sluggish for experimental literature. And yet, I found myself getting into this most disjointed, hallucinatory and desolate of Bolaño’s books. Reading it feels like a bit like stumbling around the 27 year old writer’s unconscious, a fog in which images/figures/motifs (inter alia, policemen, girls named and unnamed, empty stairwells, off season campgrounds, deadpan sex, repeated phrases, Roberto Bolaño) move into and out of focus, a fog in which one can sense his later works beginning to take shape. Also, this really tickled me:

Dear Lisa, once I talked to you on the phone for more than an hour without realizing that you had hung up. I was at a public phone on Calle Bucareli, at the Reloj Chino corner. Now I’m in a bar on the Catalan coast, my throat hurts, and I’m close to broke. The Italian girl said she was going back to Milan to work, even if it made her sick. I don’t know whether she was quoting Pavese or she really didn’t feel like going back.