Whats your opinion of Bolaño?

Whats your opinion of Bolaño?

Picked up a book of his 2 years ago. Read it off and on between other stuff. I feel like if you're neither a young poet in Mexico City or at the very least fluent then a bit is lost on you

One of my favorites. I know he is not technically dazzling or diversified as others, but his world is one I love to visit. It feels like magical realism with emphasis on the realism and less of the namby pamby fantastic aspects.

I love him. I've read about 70% of his work and still long for more. There's a sense of melancholy and mordant humour with him that resonates with me, and I'm not even South American/Mexican

I don't know how people can enjoy him. By Night in Chile is his only good book (I haven't read 2666 tough).

I've read 2666 and it was OK

Just finished the part about Amalfitano. I'm walking on air.

Absolute Madman

Who is this guy? It looks like my father.

Mariachi Pynchon

The first time I read TSD I thought it was "Ok", didnt like it THAT much. Later I read 2666 and really enjoyed it. The book slowly creeps on you. Then I've read some of the interviews from TSD and enjoyed them much more. He was a really talented writer. His trick is starting with very dry and straight forward prose and then developing it in his "infrarealism" style. There is where you can tell he is really a poet LARPing as a novelist
Wish he was alive desu
Heh
Pynchon is much more nerdy and autistic, I don't really get this meme

I agree that Pynchon is way more technical, but he has moments that remind me of Bolaño or the other way around I should say. Really floaty heartfelt passages that come out of nowehere, maximalist, humanist but with negative and dark undertones.

you can tell he's good by his rounded glasses.

Mariachi Pynchon is a purposely retarded meme derived from /mu/ deriding Mars Volta as Mariachi Slipknot. Feels warm and nostalgic to see it still around, desu.

I know
That meme was a killer the first two days

Savage Detectives is one of my favourite books. It's honestly a great work of art, and a good introduction to Bolano. He's always so humane with his characters, even while he's playing with the language and form. I read 2666 as well, and it just changed my taste in books. I honestly feel more connected to his work than I do any other great writers' works of the past because of his ability to reserve realism for his characters while putting them within an strange and absurd world. I'd like to read his other books, maybe get some recommendations on authors that write like him that are in the English speaking world.

Pynchon

>mariachi slipknot

holy shit that is good.

>this thread

Am I being memed right now, or is Veeky Forums being serious?

BOLAÑO MORE LIKE BALOGNA

El chavo is superior to Chespirito, that shit was hacky as fuck.

Last Evenings on Earth is great. Makes me want to go to Mexico, desu. He makes it sound so comfy.

>I feel like if you're neither a young poet in Mexico City
I don't know, do you have to be a whaler to enjoy Moby Dick?
Why is the setting so important? I've seen before some disregarding TSD for being about young mexican poets. The story is pretty universal.

I was reading Yeats in a cafe and a SA man introduced his 18 year old daughter to me and said
"You like YEATS?! YES? great this is my daughter she is 18 very cute YES? you like her? Studying YEATS? THAT'S GREAT"
Then dropped me his business card.

Basically everything bolano writes about SA is very true.

He's a good author in general, sometimes drags a bit in longer novels but always worth it imo

I read the two big ones and they were both awesome. Recently read Nazi Literature in the Americas, an amusing Borges-style exercise.

>For example, he wrote a poem in which Leni Riefenstahl makes love with Ernst Jünger. A hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman. Bones and dead tissue bumping and grinding. God in heaven, said Rory in his big malodorous library, Old Ernst is riding her hard, showing no mercy, and the German whore is crying out for more, more, more. A good poem: the eyes of the elderly pair light up with an enviable brightness; they suck at each other so hard their old jaws creak, while they glance sidelong at the reader, hinting at the lesson. A lesson clear as water. It is time to put an end to democracy.

Read Distant Star, it's an expansion of one of the authors in Nazi Literature. The one in the collection is better, more concise, but still worth reading the short novel version.

I've never said this here before because of the cult; but Pynchon writes cartoons for self-satisfied wannabe scribes that couldn't understand a human emotion if they tried, and they do try, though their subjects are probably their friends, and they may not have controlled for the X and Y variables of within the test lab of their apartments.

He's fun, and I kind of hate that about him. But I've only ever read V. COL49 and the first third of GR.

Has he ever written a character you felt anything at all for, if you have that capacity?

Yes I have. Even though Vineland is mostly dismissed as his worst, especially here, is one of my favorites and has heart.