Roberto Bolaño! If you were still alive, I would perform fellatio upon your great member, bobbing up and down without break until I had attained the great literary spiritual condition known as chronic lockjaw. Do not fear, Great Literary Corpse of Bolaño! I do hope that you can hear me. I am not a necrophiliac, but I will still read every scrap you have ever written upon! If there is an obscure photograph of you, I will scan it and turn it into a screensaver. If there is an audio file of you flatulating into the great Chilean winds, I will link to it and declare it A Fart of Significance! For it came from your Great Literary Backside! If there is a 3,000 page first draft of a novel that you have written, I will read it and annotate it and do nothing else! I will sell all of my stocks and buy NOTHING BUT YOUR BOOKS! For you are Bolaño! And I am a mere literary peon! I cannot even think about your work without salivating or pissing my pants! You are Bolaño! A genius! Incapable of fault! To declare you a Great God is enough! With these hollow plaudits, I offer Significant Thoughts About Your Work that will be declared Significant because they evoke your Great Name!
I will name my first son Roberto and my second son Bolaño. I will name my next dog Tinajero. If he barks in objection, I will shoot him in the head and obtain another dog and name him Tinajero. And if the second dog objects, I will continue to shoot these dogs in the head over and over until I have found a mutt who answers to the great poet’s name! I will eat lima beans even though I know them to be unappetizing. For how else can I summon Ulises’s spirit than to invoke his name? How else might I find Tinajero?
I will have sex with any woman who will declare herself both a Bolaño lover and a Visceral Realist. I will obtain the clap because I know what it means to be both visceral and real. I will get into brawls with any literary acolyte who does not worship at your altar, who does not look to poetry as the solitary salvation of humankind, and I will be your pimp. I will start a cult and collect money for the Bolaño Foundation! The followers will then start harassing anyone who does not worship at your altar. We have learned lessons from Allende.
If others claim that my life is worthless, that I smoke too many bowls, that I do not write or take responsibility for my actions, then I will not listen. For your wisdom is final. I will wallpaper my room with your image. For you are Bolaño! And my collected output is worth worse than One Mighty Page of your oeuvre.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Who do you think is a better writer- Roberto Bolano or that guy who played Candyman?