Latest / The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast / Episode 85: Roberto Bolaño

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Episode 85: Roberto Bolaño · The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Mooks and the Gripes podcast.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is Trevor.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Terrifyingly, Paul.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, how are you doing today?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing well.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm a little daunted by what I'm... I'm going to follow up on that, but yeah.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing well.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if your presence is terrifying,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: like that's what's so terrifyingly noted,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: or you're terrified.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well...
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not terrified, so maybe that means I am terrified.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess so.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: We are delighted today to be joined once again by our good friend Ron Restrepo.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Ron, how are you doing?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Doing quite well.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: I am truly pleased and honored to be here.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I will say,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: coming down here,
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like those two guys on Wayne's World saying,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not worthy to talk about Bolaño.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: But I look forward to talking about that with you guys.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think we both feel maybe the same way.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're a bit intimidated.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably where the terrifying me came in, Paul.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, if that's what we're talking about, it's a little more accurate because I do feel the same way.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we brought you in, Ron, I always say.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: You're one of the smartest readers I know.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I feel like we've got backup today.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I appreciate that.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll see.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Backup?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to have Ron be in the foreground.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Lead the charge.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: No, you're the completest.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: You're the Bolaño completest.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is true.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And weirdly, it doesn't.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, probably more weirdly, we'll get into this.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Upon completing, I felt more adrift than ever.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited to talk Bolaño for sure.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll get into him.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: As listeners may remember, we did a Bolaño read-along earlier in the year of The Savage Detectives.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we kind of threw around ideas as to how do we address this?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Do we just have an episode about the book?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or do we make it an episode about Bolaño where we talk about the Savage Detectives
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: while we also get to talk about other things?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, we went this direction and we'll maybe get into some of the whys here in a bit.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I am excited because one thing that I do know with Bolaño is sitting down and
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: reading his stuff,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can often feel extremely perplexed and lost.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's in talking about it with others and getting their insights that I start to
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: make connections and I'll get lost again.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I kind of think that might be part of Bolaño's game.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're right.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: If so, he's nailing it.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: yeah exactly what a genius yeah exactly all right before we get into Bolaño though
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to ask what you guys have been reading and why don't we go ahead and start
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: with you Ron what have you been reading well with all the weather we've been having
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: down here I've had uh but it's one good thing is more time to read uh
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I just finished up for the Brazos Summer Book Club, a book you both are familiar with.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: We read Selva Ameda's Not a River.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: So that just finished up.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things I thought,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: because I was looking forward to talking with you guys,
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: the last time we got together was to read about,
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: talk about open letter.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so that prompted me to dig into my stack and pull out one that I had not read yet.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually recommended by another friend of yours,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Lori Feathers,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: who,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: when I visited her store about a year ago,
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: said her favorite or one of her favorite open letter books was Chronicle of the
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Murdered House,
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Lucio Cordoza,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: translated by Margaret Joel Costa and Robin Patterson.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of promoted by Benjamin Moser, who was also instrumental in bringing Clarice Lispector,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: to the public recently.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it turns out, uh, Lucio Cardoso is a very good friend, uh, of hers.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they were very close.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so that, uh, was just, uh, really an amazing book.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Laurie was right.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's a, it's a great book.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: and the last one that I just,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: I know we get to the big topic,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: but another one that I had a lot of fun reading was,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: and it comes,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: I've,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: I've got,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: proudly wearing my Deep Ellum book.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to have a Deep Ellum book on the list.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it's caving the divine Herod, Sergio Patel, uh, with George Henson is the translator.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And actually I got to meet George that weekend.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: We were supposed to take this when I was up in Dallas, which was a treat.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I know, um,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to read because one thing I think I won't be too long,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: but it was sort of see if you see yourselves in this.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the character, the narrator, and it's one narrator throughout who's a lawyer.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I can appreciate that.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: He's talking with his architect who they've co-developed buildings with.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Milares is his name.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, he goes on this sort of diatribe and talking about all his travels.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: He went to Istanbul and he says, that said, I don't regret going to Istanbul.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I complain.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: I talk about my traumas, my pain, et cetera.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: But deep down, I must admit that in the battle that took place there, I was the only victor.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the only winner in that terrible contest.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: An infinite space opened up to develop my spirit.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: I fear, Belarus.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: architect that you reduced as you are by your inclination for pulp literature which
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: is reading during this talk won't be able to understand the pleasure that another
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: kind of book produce can produce there is nothing in my opinion in the world that
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: surpasses the thirst for knowledge looking for certain works and catalogs that are
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: difficult to obtain ordering them waiting impatiently for their arrival spending
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: several hours a day engrossed in their company making notes
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a different man, despite the efforts of my wife and the world to keep me at ground level.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: A heroic effort that many don't understand, but whose realization is enough for me.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: I thought, yeah, I've been seen.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a real treat.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what's been keeping me busy.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it was actually one of the reasons I joined that, too.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was the successor to the Love Parade.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: which prompted me to go visit the house where the love parade occurred in Mexico City,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: which is right about a half mile away from Cafe La Habana,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: where Bolaño hung out with a lot of other people.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll sort of come full circle to that.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: But that's some of the things that I've been up to of late.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: Also reading Lanark with Chad Post for his podcast.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Something else fun.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Next up is Pedro Paramo, since you guys have been talking about that one.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: See Trevor, I told you he's like the most interesting me in the world.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: I had no, I had no issues with that.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't mean it like that.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: every time I say that,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: and then he talks about what he's reading and I'm Ron,
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: you're a,
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: you're a great reader.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lenark is one that I just picked up recently at the Boulder bookstore based on the
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: fact that Chad was running that.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I just picked up a copy and I'll just quickly say that Sergio Patel,
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: I read the art of flight a few years ago and was really blown away.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: still have yet to read more of his works but uh george henson the translator is
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: such a such a kind guy and just every time i've interacted with him on social media
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: i just wanted to say like he's just i don't know so it seems like such a genuinely
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: good person and i really love how he's kind of connected with patal and translated
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: him now for years if not decades it's very cool no i agree it was a treat to me i
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: mean he was delightful and i will one thing i comment you guys
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: have had such an influence on my reading because before I listened to you guys,
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: I would never read more than one book at a time.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: And now, you know, it's like, I think, okay, what things will go together.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the wonderful things we'll talk about it a little later is some of the
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: synchronicities that come in as a result of,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: reading similar things at the same time.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's a, it's wonderful.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: So thanks.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the many things you've helped me with in my reading.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: do you mind if we also take just a quick moment to remember the late,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: great,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: best translated book award?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because that Chronicle of the Murdered House was the winner of the best translated book award.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: the year that I was a judge and Laurie was on the panel.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And also in that little bit of synchronicity, George was on that panel.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I didn't know that.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: I knew Laurie was on there.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we didn't practice this before.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's awesome.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was very excited that you were bringing up so many good memories while also
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: looking ahead and being so excited about what's going on right now.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, how about you?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked a lot about all these books that we desperately want to read and we
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: pick them up right away and then they languish on our shelves for years.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: months or years.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I had one like that, that finally got inspired to read this week.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the people who inspired me to do it was our good friends, not our good shelves.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: I keep doing shelves.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Our good friends, Dylan and Kasia, who hosts that wonderful NYRB Classics podcast, Unburied Books.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they recently had,
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: speaking of the Republic of Consciousness Prize,
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Villa,
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: who's one of the judges for this forthcoming year.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: They had him on to talk about John Ely's book, The Landbreakers.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: this one has just been one that's called to me for years and years,
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: but for whatever reason,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I just have never picked it up.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I finally did based on that because I wanted to listen to the episode,
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: but I didn't want to listen before I'd read it.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So this book is set between 1779 and 1784, and it's in the wilderness of North Carolina.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so basically we just follow this small group of settlers who are trying to
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: scrabble out an existence in this really,
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: to them untamed and wild land.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I really like the way the MYRB description describes it.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: It says,
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: it's quotes,
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: a story of first and last things,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: of the violence of birth and death,
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I just really like that description.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I won't read a whole lot here,
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: but I just wanted to read,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: just give a little taste of the language.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it's following this young girl who's kind of breaking away from the community.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: She's basically running away.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: She's unprepared and it's kind of just an impulsive move.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so she's climbing up to the top of this mountain and she's wearing just like a
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: very thin shift and just like I said,
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: very unprepared.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it says, she should move on, she knew, but she liked the site too well.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is her looking down off the top of the mountain.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was all rolling clouds,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: billowing and changing as if a giant were underneath them,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: blowing them around.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: He was lying on his back in the valley, she thought, breathing in big gasps of air.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when he had his 14 lungs full, he blew and the clouds rolled as the breaths came through.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: He had a family of giants down there with him, and he just did it to pleasure the little giants.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: He just did it of a night before they had to go to sleep.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: He told them stories in blue, so they'd have big notions in their heads by the time of sleep.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: And those little mountain peaks jutting up here and there in the clouds were his toes.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: He was snoring now.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: She laughed at the idea of that.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: The clouds began billowing differently,
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: and the sight beat the feather stuffing out of anything she'd ever seen,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: or that anybody had seen,
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: she guessed,
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: for she'd never heard tell of anything like this in her life.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: not only the natural,
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: like the beauty in this case,
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: kind of a fanciful take on it because she's,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: a younger girl without any formal education.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I really like that.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I also just like the way that he puts you into the different mindsets of different people.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them are,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: probably like many of the settlers where there's a reason they're there,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: they've been chased out of their communities or whatever.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them like her have been kind of dragged along by their family.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there's all different reasons why the small group is there.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I really like that aspect of it.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then just he does a great job of conveying the wildness of this landscape and,
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: the wolves and the bears and.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: the sounds they hear at night and the natural disasters that take place.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm about a little more than halfway through and really enjoying that one so far.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll report back.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it's one of those, like I said, that I'd wanted to read forever and finally was prompted to.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so far, really, really loving it.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's excellent.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't quite the same connection that Ron's book brought up.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: But did you know,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Paul,
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: this will go back to our Jane Austen episode,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: that John Ely is Jennifer Ely's dad?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And she's the actress who played Elizabeth Bennet in the great BBC adaptation of
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Pride and Prejudice back in the 90s.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, I had no idea.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty amazing.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there you go.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Have that running through your mind as you're reading this great book in Appalachia.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite a jump.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: I never would have predicted that in a million years.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: The book I'm reading, I'll be able to explicitly pull into one of our episodes, though, our next one.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am reading other books,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: but I thought that I would just remind readers that the next episode,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: unless things,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Paul and I do have to work on our scheduling.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually going to be out of town our normal week of recording and maybe even next weekend as well.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we may have to do some rearranging,
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: but as it stands the next episode,
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: and certainly an episode that's coming up is our summer book club on William Trevor's,
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: the story of Lucy Galt.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I have started it.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm loving it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought just to give readers a taste of,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here's how it begins.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: it'll tell you the date so specifically in the first sentence,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: so never mind about any background on the date.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to situate you.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Captain Everard Galt wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the 21st, 1921.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Aiming above the trespassers' heads in the darkness,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: he fired the single shot from an upstairs window,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: and then watched the three figures scuttling off,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: the wounded one assisted by his companions.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: They had come to fire the house, their visit expected because they had been there before.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: On that occasion, they had come later, in the early morning, just after one.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: The sheepdogs had seen them off,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: but within a week the dogs lay poisoned in the yard,
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: and Captain Galt knew that the intruders would be back.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're stretched at the barracks, sir, Sergeant Talty had said when he came out from Enesalia.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, stretched.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Shocking, Captain.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: La Hardane wasn't the only house under threat.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Every week somewhere went up.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how the constabulary were spread.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Please, God, there'll be an end to it, Sergeant Talty said and went away.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Martial law prevailed since the country was in a state of unrest, one that amounted to war.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: No action was taken about the poisoning of the dogs.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have you started it yet, Paul?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm feeling like I'm running behind.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Too bad.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I beg to differ.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have just started.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Good point.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: You gave me a little assist.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things I will, I stayed up late to finish that last night.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: And since I won't be around for that, it's wonderful.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so glad you guys picked it because I never would have read it otherwise.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: But tying it back to the Chronicle of the Murdered House,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: one of the things I read a couple months ago was reread Obscene Bird of Night,
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Jose de Noso.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a great introduction to that from...
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Alejandro Zambra.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it starts out with Jose De Noso said that for him,
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: the words house and novel were practically synonymous.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's just, you know, as I thought that was wonderful.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the book you selected was, as usual, delightful.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I look forward to that discussion.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's going really well.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some other people have been reading it and letting us know, and that's been really nice to hear.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just excited.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul, like I say, you just started it.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Congratulations.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: You are well on your way.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, we talked about it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's always a fine balance of I want to have plenty of time to read it and absorb it,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm also like,
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: I want to read it as close to when we talk about it so I can actually say something cogent.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And really quick before we move on, Ron, did you say rereading that obscene bird of night?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: I celebrated the 50th anniversary of my first reading.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's so cool.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have not read it once yet,
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: but when you said that it reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: goes to like the intelligent school and sits down and one of her schoolmates,
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: her bag kind of opens up and there she's got a copy of gravity's rainbow.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Lisa goes, Oh, you're reading gravity's rainbow.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the kid goes, well, rereading.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's great.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of rereading and just reading in general,
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: I do know that Paul and I have both enjoyed the works of Bolaño enough to reread
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: some of our favorites and others we waited on.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: But are we ready to jump in to Bolaño?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know about ready, but I think it's time.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: We'll never be ready.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I kind of thought maybe it would work.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you my background and you guys can kind of think of yours.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I remember back in 2007,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: 2008,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: after The Savage Detectives was published in English,
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: hearing a lot about it,
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: seeing it on the New York Times Best Books of the Year list.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember going and buying it at that time, but I didn't read it.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: I bought it and it sat there, you know, nicely translated by Natasha Wimmer.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Very excited.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then word started coming out of this, the new one.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: The big one,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that he had died and that he'd kind of left behind what was by many
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: considered to be a masterpiece,
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: even if an unfinished masterpiece in 2666.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that was also translated by Natasha Wimmer and published in 2008.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: the same year that my second son who just turned 16 yesterday he was a baby and i
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: went and bought this one and it may have had the same fate except for he loved to
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: stay up at night screaming unless we were rocking him and we would take turns but
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: while i was out there rocking him
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I cracked open 2666 and started reading it, and I didn't know what to make of it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I put in my early review.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have the 900-page paperback, or hardback.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had the 900-page but split into three-volume paperback edition, kind of the box set that FSG put out.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: and was able to tote it around, and I was able to read it while rocking my son to sleep at night.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Many late nights recently, and I couldn't have done that with the hardback tome.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore,
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm honestly not sure I would have finished it had I not had the feeling of
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: completion every 300 pages.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Having it split like that helped it feel like I was moving through.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Prose is smooth.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: There are pages and pages and pages.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the book, in fact, where there are no paragraph breaks.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was nice to see that fake end.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't know what to make of it.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I put here I'd done like three or four paragraphs.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, can you tell I'm avoiding an actual review?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I did finish it.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but it haunted me.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I started reading everything else that I could,
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: except for The Savage Detectives,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: which stayed on my shelf until earlier this year.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: But New Directions had been publishing Roberto Bolaño's work for some time.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we already had some of his short stories.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: We already had By Night in Chile, translated by the, you know, always, always,
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: welcome to see in any translated work, Chris Andrews, who also does a lot of Cesar Aira.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started going through it.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I read Nazi literature in the Americas next.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think I probably went to by night in Chile.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: and The Skating Rink was out, Distant Star.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And by that time,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was fully invested in thinking I really need to reread 2666 because all of this
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: is starting to feel like some weird obsession for me.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept doing that.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: I kept reading everything as it came out.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of famous that...
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: When he died, he left behind a lot of notes or computer files.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some were notes, it seems like, for things we'd already read.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I read all of those, too.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then earlier this year,
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: finally had the opportunity to become complete of what we have in English anyway at
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: this point and read The Savage Detectives.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I'll leave it.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get into that here in a little bit.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I am curious about your own experiences with Roberto Bolaño.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: I would have called him one of my favorite authors.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think things have become complicated over the last few years with that and
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: reading The Savage Detectives further complicated all of that.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: But he's certainly an enigma to me and a major part of my own
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say literary development.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's great.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I can jump in real quickly if you don't mind,
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Ron,
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: and just kind of echo in some ways what you say,
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny because I've long considered myself to be a huge Bolaño fan.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: But if I'm being honest,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of that's been built around kind of expectation,
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: reputation,
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: recommendations from friends,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: and then 2666.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have said this before,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: but I credit Trevor completely because your blog and your raving about it online
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: inspired me to pick it up.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think I had a very similar reaction to you and probably to many people who read
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: it of awe mixed with intimidation and confusion and all these other things.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: But what you said about being haunted by it absolutely is the case to the point
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: where I think I read it twice before I read anything else by Bolaño.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: That might not be right.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: I might have slipped one other short one in there, but I mean...
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: When I think of Bolaño, that is what I think of.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And to the point,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: we've talked about this,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: but even though I've read it twice now,
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think about rereading it almost constantly.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Very soon we'll jump back into it.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know when.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where this gets complicated because I think of myself as a huge fan,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: but I realize I think a lot of it is just all about that book.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of that tricky thing we talk about where sometimes when you have an
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: author that you're really excited about,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: do you start at what you think is probably the pinnacle?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because then there is the potential risk of not being let down,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: but just,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: you've read the thing that is the fit for you.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway,
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: since then,
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: I have been picking away at some of the other ones that I have heard are some of
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: his best.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I've read The Savage Detective,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: or yeah,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: obviously The Savage Detectives,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: but By Night in Chile is,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: and Last Evening on Earth.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I have really been intrigued and fascinated by all of them for different reasons,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: but I will say I've not yet reached anything for me that has taken me to the
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: heights of 2666.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And yet,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: even as I'm looking at those different titles I've read,
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: and some of the ones you've talked about,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: that you've read and that I have not read,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: I still am pulled back in by him.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: I want to go back and reread all of these.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: I want to continue to explore his world.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it is complicated and intimidating and messy,
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: but yet it's one that I keep wanting to pursue and continue this relationship with
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Bolaño despite everything.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So again,
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: we can talk more explicitly as we move along,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: but I mean,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: that's kind of my convoluted relationship at this point.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not as explicitly as the books.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just kidding, Paul.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very true.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: How about you, Ron?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: The road to Bolaño for me started with a mutual friend of ours,
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Mark Haber,
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: because there was,
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: at Broadbush Bookstore,
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: our local bookstore,
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: there's a,
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: every summer is devoted to something.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: And
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: This summer is actually Latin American fiction.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: But about 10 years ago, it was 2666.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I had known of Bolaño and Mark was a huge fan.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: He could remember the day when he was actually in high school at the time.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: He was waiting for that to be published so that he could run down to his bookstore and get it.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so we read that.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it was really helpful to read it in the context of a book club,
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: with 10 other people,
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: 15 other people with different backgrounds.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Just you get a sense for what different people thought about it as you were reading
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: over the three months we met.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: So and I, like you, was just enamored of it.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: It was because it brought in really so many different things that I had read from
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: Latin American fiction before.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: I,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: I've read a lot of the books with the femicide that takes place on the,
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: at the border area.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it just makes us the fantastical and the hyper realist,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: if you will,
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: and brings in a lot of characters in the discussion of the professors and then the
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: sort of literary conferences,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: it's just,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: there was so many different pieces that I enjoyed.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, that was the entree.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: After that, I just, same thing, started reading intermittently, just pretty much most of them.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: At this point in time,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: I became a huge fan of Amulet,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: actually,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: which sort of ties in with what we talked a little bit about,
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: the Savage Detectives.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: But the real reason that drove me, and this I'll be aging myself, to the Savage Detectives was
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: I read at some point that he wrote the book as a love letter to his generation.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so and he's was born like two years after me.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of what he's talking about is as far as including here and what was
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: going on in the late 60s and so many different parts of it.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of the times when I started to get a sense for
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of what was going on in the time period he's talking about,
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: what was going on different in Mexico City than at Berkeley,
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: than at Columbia,
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: University.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then it was right about the same time that I had read the years,
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: Annie or No,
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: and I,
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: who parallels it from France.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I was just really interested in what he perceived to be a love letter to a
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: generation that I'm a member of.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and, uh, so that was it.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: And just some of the, the characters, uh, are just quite memorable.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's always, what do you remember from the first reading to the second reading?
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I got with a hundred,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: with the obscene bird of night,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: what are the echoes that remain and what do you get differently than,
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: the second time around?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: But that was, um, uh, what really drove me through that.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing that I,
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: have so enjoyed and why it is fun going back is when you see the characters either
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: the same or echoes or shadows of characters and you start seeing them in the
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: different books.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of reminded me of Javier Marias that,
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: in the sense that one of the fun things reading the book is just,
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: and he may,
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: some character may come in for two pages,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: but you're,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: oh yeah,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: I remember reading about that person in some other book.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so it does.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you mentioned, I forget if it was Paul or Trevor, but one, his world.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's that world of these people and you keep seeing them again in other books.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one of the things I find fascinating about it.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Bringing up Mark Haber,
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think something interesting here is,
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: and we've talked about Cesar Ira a little bit already as well.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Cesar Ira has a new kind of duology book that I already mentioned on the podcast
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: some time ago that came out from New Directions.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark Haber and I were talking just a little bit about it.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I love that Ira doesn't have
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember how he put it,
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: but the book,
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: the one book that you have to read by Cesar Aira.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's got a whole oeuvre that is one big project and everybody can have their own
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: favorites and they all kind of add up to something.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm thinking of that in terms of Bolaño.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: To me, he's got...
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: I would say one book, you know, two, six, six, six.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And though others would, would say, and then now throw in the savage detectives as well.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly that's a significant work of literature for many,
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: but the rest of them all seem to support what he's doing in those two books and,
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: and where he's going through the political,
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: the poetic,
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: the,
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: the,
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: the history, the mythology of his life in all of this.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then eventually with 2666 publishing just a magnum opus that seems to pull so much of that together.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't resent him for having that kind of significant works and all of these
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: other ones supporting it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I remember years ago,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: talking to my friend David Blakeslee about, you know, film and such.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I can't remember exactly how it came up, but he was asking me about Roberto Bolaño.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he had seen that.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: I see that they're publishing all these like little scraps.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, well, that's because his work is,
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: is its own piece of art.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: His life influences it.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: His own myth of who he is influences how we see the work.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And each little tidbit seems to be a clue or something that expands on or focuses
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: in on some aspect of these other works that we have come to love.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just curious about your response to that idea.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Have we pedestalized him to make it seem like every little scrap that he had was
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: part of this greater work does give some clue or some ideas to what's going on?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not because we don't know what's going on in 2666, but, you know, there's so much that's fun in there.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: So many little Easter eggs and tidbits and mysteries and paranoias.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do they add to that,
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: or have we bought into,
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: his own attempts to mythologize the poetics of his own life and his own work?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Again,
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a fan,
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: so I think it's all worthwhile,
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: but I am curious about your responses to a question like that with Bolaño.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to what you said about him building up his own mythos.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he clearly, he had fun with it.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's playful,
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: like even in The Savage Detectives,
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: the fact that he's basically one of the main characters.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Much of it covers, you know, fairly closely.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: One of the main characters you never really see.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: I do too.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing is, that's what I mean.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's playful.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: He's building up his own mythos, but like you said, he's hardly in the book or his character.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And when he is half the time,
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: he doesn't come across very well.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's naive,
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: he's silly,
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: he's immature,
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: and they're forming this and joining this group of poets who they're not really
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: even reading a lot of the works.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so that's the interesting thing about the way that it has been done by him
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: in my limited so far experiences,
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: there is a little bit of an ego obviously to that,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like a playful,
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's,
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: it's an interesting way to approach it.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just gonna say, as far as his reputation,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: I do think he has been put on a pedestal, but then you start reading, and I was trying to search.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: I know I had some of the quotes from various Latin American authors and other
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: people around the world who just revere him.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: So despite the fact that he has put himself on the pedestal,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that clearly people with very high literary chops
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: are in the same boat.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think to me,
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: that's always intriguing too,
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: is just seeing how formational he's been on an entire part of the world,
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: which has been spread out kind of and built this reputation.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think that there is some myth making that took place with him,
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: but I think a lot of it has come,
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: late in his life and then posthumously through people that,
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: definitely,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: um,
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: revere him and who he shaped the works of, if that makes sense.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's,
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: it's an interesting thing to kind of watch this posthumous reputation kind of shift
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: and grow over time.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: it's actually listening to,
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: I guess it's One Bright,
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: what's the other podcast that our friends are on?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, One Bright Book.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: One Bright Book.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: They were talking about in the last podcast with David Namath about
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: you know, what is the effect of marketing?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, are you reading this because of marketing?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: And you feel sort of bad because none of us wants to read something because it's well marketed.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so, but that's always in the back of my mind, you know, am I doing this?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: But,
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: and I come back to,
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: it's one of the only,
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: and my family hates it when I say it,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: but from things that I remember from my sociology classes in college was the whole
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: idea of
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: inner observer reliability,
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: that if a bunch of people who you respect think this is good for whatever reason,
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: that gives the sort of an imprimatur to it.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: And two of the people just that I've read about,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: two other people that I really like,
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: two other authors who know him very well,
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: Carmen Boyosa,
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: who was actually the first book ever published by E.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Bellum,
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: going back to that,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so I've read a lot.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if you've read her interview with Bolaño back in like 2002, which is great.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I may take a look at Zimbabwe magazine back then.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, she knew him very well.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: And because they were in Mexico City at the same time.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: And he's fascinating.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean,
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: he's got so many facets himself because he was,
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: she talks about the time she was afraid.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: to read in Mexico City because he could like to show up with his crew and they'd
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: start yelling,
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: about how horrible the book was and stuff like that.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: But then they became very close because they both had children about the same time
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: and they're about the same age.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: And another big fan of Rodrigo Frison,
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: who was very close to him when they were together in the Barcelona area.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so just reading some of what they say about him,
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: and like you said,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: Paul,
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: just the influence he's had on people I have a great deal of respect for as writers,
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: tells me that there's something there.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: And again, just the characters that are as nuanced, really, as he is.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you see, and you're exactly right, Paul, and Trevor, just
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: that he is sort of a character, but it's, it's, you triangulate for what everybody else says about him.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: he appears infrequently other than the,
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: the quest to find,
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: the author in Sonoma,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: Sonora,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: excuse me.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um,
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: and so you just,
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: and so he just,
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: he lets other people talk about him and it's not particularly,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: like he's up there.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's the best guy in the world.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_03: Oh,
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we go ahead and dig into it a little bit more,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: into The Savage Detectives,
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: and then we'll come back out of that and discuss other favorites.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I do want to make sure that we have time for 2666 as well.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: But The Savage Detectives, this was an interesting read for me.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul, I know that you felt similarly.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: We were both looking forward to this for some time.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: While I ended up really enjoying it,
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: it was so different from what I was expecting that I found myself wrong-footed
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: again and again and again and a little bit frustrated.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't enjoying it the way I wanted to, which is totally on me, of course.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I had read the premise from the back of the book about this trip across the
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: deserts of Mexico to find a poet that...
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: probably no one really knows about, but is significant still.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: They found the real poet.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not the famous poet, the real one.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: And their quest to find her,
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: and I was shocked to find out that they were not central characters in this story,
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: that they were consistently being talked about or showing up in a scene as a side
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: character for a little bit while we focused on someone else's story.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as intriguing as those stories may have been,
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was not reading the book I thought I was sitting down to read ever.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, it was a bit of a strange experience.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: I kept looking for Bolaño.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: I kept looking for the by night in Chile Bolaño or the 2666 Bolaño.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some of it's there in the style.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you do get some buildup of paranoia.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: You do get some buildup of just that fear of something, something unknown.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you do get ultimately that kind of love and maybe the religion of poetry that these characters have.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: As naive and as misguided and sometimes as unpoetic characters you can find seem to
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: share and revere,
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: even while they might not think that they are genuine poets or that the others are.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: You get this great visceral realism, you know, poetry.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I loved so much about it.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: But again,
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: ultimately,
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was like,
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of glad this was not my first Bolaño because it's not the Bolaño that I've
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: come to love.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yet.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I again, I kept on wanting more.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we do kind of get there.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you do get a big climax in this in this in this book, which you don't get in 2666.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think maybe part of me was glad for that, but also was like, well, but 2666 was unfinished.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe he would have written one, but it's better because he didn't.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of the book's intrigue and the mystique of that book and the mystery
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: and the point of that book.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas this one has all of that.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so subversive of what these characters love and want and
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's so fresh still, The Savage Detectives.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to reread it.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'll get a lot more out of it on a second read.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: But thank goodness for our reading group because they kept on putting so many good
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: points in the discussion that I was like,
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: okay,
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: it is just me not quite connecting.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to be straightforward and honest.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason that we said let's just do a Bolaño episode is I didn't want to
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: just talk about the status detectives.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's true.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: I will echo what you said.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think Trevor and I have talked offline about this quite a bit during this whole process,
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: and we both did have some complicated and surprising reactions to this book.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: And again, you're coming at it, Trevor, from a much more completionist perspective.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: view than I am, whereas I'm still making my way through some of the major works.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: But still,
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: there was that idea,
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: like you said,
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: that 2666 and the Savage Detectives are the two,
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: like if you had to put two up there.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: And speaking of our reading group, Connor, who had some
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: very insightful things to say throughout that process.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: He posted something that said,
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Bolaño once said,
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: all American novelists,
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: including those who write in Spanish,
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon,
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: two fates.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: One is Moby Dick and the other is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Connor says,
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: I also recall either him or a critic saying 2666 is his Moby Dick and Savage
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: Detectives is his Huckleberry Finn.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was just a really fascinating way to look at it.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: But what I was going to say about that is the reputations of these two characters.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: In 2666, it worked for me because I kept hearing all these great things.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: I went into it with high expectations and they were met for me personally.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think with the Savage Detectives,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: one of the things that you mentioned,
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor,
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's not always fair what we bring back.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: to a book with our expectations,
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: but having read 2666,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: revered it,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: built it up in my head for a decade or whatever.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then to have this other one mentioned always at the same time with it,
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think I probably had some,
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: maybe unfair,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: but also just misplaced expectations of what this book would be about and what it
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: would be like.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did,
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: I went through a very similar experience to what you did,
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: where I felt like I kept waiting for it to get to something that I would recognize,
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe this is just like one section and it'll shift.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it did shift several times and different sections kind of resonated with me in different ways.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I did have a very similar experience to what you just described where, um,
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know, fairly or not, it just, it wasn't what I expected.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it did lead to some frustration and I would say disappointment,
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: but again,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: only because of what I was expecting.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: But to your point,
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: hearing the way other people reacted to it,
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: and I can't wait to hear what you have to say,
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Ron,
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm already thinking,
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: I know this was me.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder when I'm going to reread this thing again and come to it with
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the good things about rereading is as you go into it,
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: you still,
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: have expectations based on your first reading,
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: but they're not misplaced as much.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think I could go back and reread this and appreciate it and enjoy it the second time around.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Weirdly, your reread would be with a clean slate versus your first read.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, strangely, that's pretty much true.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I don't know.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Moby Dick versus Huckleberry Finn comparison.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I can definitely see that connection because one of the things I
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: struggled with for the first part of this,
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'd seen that,
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: some people that said the visceral realist could be compared somewhat to like the beats,
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: that whole movement.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: And The Beats is a movement I always feel like I miss the boat on,
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: not based on like when it was originally taking place,
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: but like I feel like with The Beats,
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: if you read them at a certain point as a younger person in your teens or something
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: like a lot of people,
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: that's when they get these really,
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: it really resonates.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so reading the first section of The Savage Detectives,
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: was one of those where I felt maybe a little bit if I'd read it at a different time.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: even though he is making fun of it,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: there's still like that,
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: the,
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: the passion and the coming of age and all the sexual exploits and all that stuff,
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: which,
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: it was,
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: it made for some colorful and interesting reading,
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: but it maybe didn't resonate with me the way it would have if I'd read it at a
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: different part of my life.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm rambling a little bit here, but Ron, I want to hear what you have to say about this book.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: What has been your experience?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: You said reread, right?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is your second reading.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: yeah,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: yeah,
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: which I think is,
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: again,
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: because just,
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: again,
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: if you remember sort of the echoes in the first,
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: well,
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: some of the things that put it in place,
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: and that goes back to the sort of synchronicity of reading things,
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: but when Alejandro Zambra was writing about Obscene Bird of Night,
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: he mentions that Bolaño,
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: who sort of was looking at Obscene Bird of Night just because it was,
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: who's the best Chilean writer?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: So it was,
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: But and Bolaño could be sharp.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: it's apparently he if he didn't like a book,
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: even if,
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_02: from wherever the person was from.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he was pretty for it.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, and he was Bolaño wrote about Obscene Bird of Night.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: He said it was, quote, ambitious and uneven.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so what Zomber says, yeah, that's pretty much like what Bolaño's books are.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a great quoted here.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's that same could be said of Bolaño's own indisputable masterpieces.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: And Zambra adds,
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: I remember Nicanor Parra,
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: who's a poet whose name is littered throughout this book and several of the books,
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: his witty defense of Pablo Neruda.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: And here's the poem.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: To some demanding readers, the canto generale is an uneven effort.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: the Andes mountain range is also an uneven effort, esteem demanding readers.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, that's it.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: That to me is anything that's that this, this big is going to be somewhat uneven.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's how many points do you connect with?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_02: Do you like, you know, the character?
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: And there's so many characters here that give you some view from,
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: some place about the two primary characters and,
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and, and so, and it, it's a rough beginning with that, uh, the, uh, the diary.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: but I guess,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: it's sort of,
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: again,
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: that comes back to the,
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: that's,
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't engage at all the escapades that,
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: Madero,
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_02: Garcia Madero does,
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: but it's sort of,
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: it's like,
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: yeah,
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: that's sort of like what college was like when I was going there in the sixties.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it's sort of, it goes back to that.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: you know, love letter to a generation piece.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it is like the beats,
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: it's like I read some of it that if you read it now,
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: it just seems dated a lot of times.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so,
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: and I think there's some sense of that here,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: unless perhaps you've sort of lived through that time.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: And then going through the rest of the book,
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: there were just,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: there were themes or characters that I just,
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed that would anchor me whenever I would get to them.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's my favorite was the Amadeo Zavattiera, who they would share mezcal with periodically.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, he would just pop in January of 76.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that was like anchoring me throughout the book and some of the other themes.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: But, yeah.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's that's sort of, yeah, my general thoughts on some of those things.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about it seeming a little bit dated.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: I would agree with that.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder,
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: too,
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: how even between when it came to us in English in the mid-aughts versus reading it
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: in 2024 would even be different.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: We've gone through a lot, and we...
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: just so listeners know,
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: we totally recognize that we're three white men,
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: sitting here talking about this book.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we did want to have another guest to give the kind of a female's perspective
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: who was still a fan of Bolaño and loved the Savage Detectives.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder how much of my response to this book is also that that kind of
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: of approach to you know masculinity doesn't feel as as uh i don't know it it's it's
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: not as interesting maybe as it would have been even 15 years ago um that as
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was uncomfortable,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: but also a little bit silly and seemed a little bit puerile and a little bit just
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: out of step.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that's not Bolaño's fault,
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it is something that the book may continue to have on itself.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is a lot of mistreatment of women, as strong as those characters are.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of toxic masculinity, as much as Bolaño seems to recognize that it's awful.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's still there and it makes it unsettling.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's never,
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: it's not entirely,
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: not that I would ever ask this of an author,
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think when they're addressing these things.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't necessarily want them to always be moralizing or trying to say,
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: but stepping back from what they're presenting and saying,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: hey,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: here's what it is.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I also don't think Bolaño would have been capable of that.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: He grew up in a different generation.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think he has the same sensitivities or sensibilities even as we do these days.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes it where I might have been more comfortable evaluating things like that,
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: even maybe overconfident 15 years ago,
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: I've kind of come to the perspective that,
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hey,
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know anything about any of this and how it affects others.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes it, it makes it tricky.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: and this book is,
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that there were plenty of people in our read along who slowly bowed out
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: whether because of,
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: of the content or because of the,
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: the structure of the book being,
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not traditional by any means, you know, various things like that.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I saw so many readers of all backgrounds...
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: engaging with this and finding in it deep and profound insights into these very
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: perspectives that are still relevant,
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: that are still powerful today.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: They were engaging with it on its own terms, but also expressing why it was meaningful for them.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: And these quests almost, these characters are going on, the community, the connections,
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: that I realized,
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: again,
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's what I'm bringing to it,
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: which I can't avoid necessarily,
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: but I do want...
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: I,
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: again,
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: was just so glad to see other perspectives because it was pretty...
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is a book that...
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's unbelievable,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: frankly,
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: especially in the diary section at the beginning,
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: the 17 year olds exploits and all of that.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: It just, you know, but is it glorifying it in a silly way or is it making fun of it?
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: in a way that actually is, is important to talk about.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I find it so intriguing and,
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: and a book that I do want to revisit sooner rather than later.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because I do,
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: I just,
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there are a lot of things that I,
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was uncomfortable with or not prepared to address necessarily that I actually
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: think would be important to talk
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: to be able to deal with so that I can see all the rest of what the book is, is doing as well.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not like that kind of stuff is unique to this book in the rest of Bolaño's work.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's just kind of all over the pages.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, go ahead Ron.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to,
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: one of the things that going back to the marketing,
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was one of the articles I read when I was sort of,
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_02: taking a dive on some of these things.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: When FSG came out with Savage to Texas in 27,
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: the head marketing guy said,
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: and this is a quote about what he was saying,
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: it's about us in a way that very few novels dare to be.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_02: By us, I mean writers, editors, booksellers, critics, teenage poets.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: in a word,
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: readers,
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: those of us who cling sometimes absurdly to the idea of literature as an excuse for
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_02: our daily lives,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: as a last connection to something bigger than ourselves.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's one of the reasons that it was fun reading the comments from the
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_02: Substack and some of those things is different.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's so much in here that when you see different readers will find something
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_02: that connects to them that
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it really, the book starts so many discussions about some of these issues.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: And one of them is exactly the misogynist.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: there was,
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: I,
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: my daughter is a curator at the art museum,
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: contemporary arts museum here in Houston.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so we've, and we've seen a lot of exhibits and by Coral Andre.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so, and we were listening and that's, I kept thinking, you know, artists, they're,
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: They certainly wouldn't be misogynists.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they would be good people and all.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_02: But no, they weren't.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that was in the same period of time we're talking about.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_02: So as far as when you take a step back,
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: it's it's good to read these things that,
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: if you will,
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: are period pieces about a particular time.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: Just, OK, where are we today as compared with what was going on then?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because, right, a 17 year old, I mean, that's how much of that was.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: the guy's fantasy about what he thought he was doing on the numbers or whatever.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's still,
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_02: it's a focus on a period of time that in a bigger context raises a lot of these
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_02: issues for discussion.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, are we better now or, you know, how can we do better?
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's a great point.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think what you said about the exploits, I think some of our female, um,
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: readers and commenters on the substack had some questions about some of that.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like you said,
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of that I think was maybe in the guy's head,
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: but there were some really interesting conversations that broke off about,
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: some of the homophobic language,
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: some of the misogynistic stuff within that substack where I think a lot of it,
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: like you said,
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: depends on generational perspectives.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of it depends on cultural perspectives because I don't have it right in front
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: of me,
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: but I remember one of our readers who had a much more,
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: who had a very,
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: had a stronger background in that region of the world and in the Spanish language
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: was broke down,
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: some of these terms that were being thrown around that were,
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: the translator must have struggled with how to translate some of these words.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there was so much nuance within these seemingly just shocking and obscene terms for different people.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: But this person did such a nice job of kind of breaking down some of like,
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: there's layers and layers and layers,
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: just like so much of Bolaño's stuff.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's really fascinating, like you said,
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's the tongue-in-cheek aspect of all of this that Bolaño was aiming at himself
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: and the silliness of,
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think he was making fun of himself and these young characters.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: But even beyond that, I think there's a lot of nuance there that bears rereading and conversations.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: To your point,
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: Ron,
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: the more you talk about this stuff,
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: your first reaction is probably,
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: my first reaction is probably rarely,
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: if ever,
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: accurate.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what's so fascinating about him is the more you dig in,
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: it's not ever going to come out with like this is the answer or some kind of black
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: and white solution,
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: but it lends itself to just picking and picking and picking,
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: which is says a lot about the power of these works,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: and there's so many connections beyond even to his other works,
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: but to other literary figures,
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: some of them people that we might know,
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: but many of them people who we would never know.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: They've maybe even made a splash in literature ever before.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: in any place other than in this very small it's like your college buddies who wrote
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: something that was really profound to you no one else knows who that is but they're
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: real people in this book a lot of them are based on real people Bolaño knew
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: including his friend, the compadre in the text, Ulysses Lima, is an actual friend of his.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it was an interesting...
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know that his friend died around the time Bolaño was finalizing the book and such,
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: but I am curious...
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: about what that reaction would be like that's me what are you doing here buddy you
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: know but i also got the the sense that maybe it'd be like oh i love what you did
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: here with our with our story you know and and twisting it all around i mean i'm
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: sure not much of this never happened it was more
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, just just some interesting things.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, there's all those connections.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very Hall of Mirrors labyrinthy,
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: which is another,
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: one of my favorite stories by Bolaño is I think it's called The Labyrinth.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he was very.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think you did you write something on it because we read that at a book club and I
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_02: thought I saw something you'd written somewhere on labyrinth.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: It is labyrinth.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I loved that story.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was published in The New Yorker.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: Several of his stories were getting published in The New Yorker.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, for years have had people commenting on my site about New Yorker stories.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it was interesting.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: One of them,
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: my good friend Kevin from Canada,
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: basically after reading one of them said,
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: guys,
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: I got to call you out.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is a case of the emperor's new clothes.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like you guys are getting suckered by the story.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what he puts.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: He says, the best thing about this story is...
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is about William Burns, not Labyrinth.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: But he said, the best thing about this story is that it will be the last Bolaño that I will ever read.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: In my opinion, he has put over a tremendous scam on the reading world.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't intend to be a part of it.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, just this interesting thing.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't go through all of this to see how I responded.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: But Kevin does come after.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have kind of a lengthy comment and response.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps I was a tad excessive in my comment.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I kind of put in there,
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes the point is the pointlessness with Bolaño and the intriguing way that he
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: conveys that seeking for resolution or a point.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's weird, but that's the point, is that there is no point.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of an important thing to be able to look at when people are looking
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: for answers to the coincidences in their lives.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: People are looking for a poetic story when it's really the passage of time, the ups and downs forever.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: whatever.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's no end or resolution.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think maybe this can lead us into 2666.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I realize,
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: even as I'm saying this to you guys right now and talking about the Savage Detectives,
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: it's from the lens that I already created after reading 2666 a couple of times
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: before reading this.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like,
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: The wandering, the seeking is part of it.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that about him.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: I get that people don't and wouldn't find it appealing,
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it's just one of the best things about him is the way that you can
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: never find all of the answers because Bolaño's throwing things in there that no one
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: else is going to know about and that are going to subvert
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: whatever answer you could come up with anyway.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that shocked me, Oh, sorry, Rob.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say one of the things that shocked me and maybe that I learned while
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: reading Savage Detectives that I definitely,
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: looking back,
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: I guess 2666 maybe has humor.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, buried.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the ability to realize that a lot of this stuff was silly and tongue in
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: cheek and going into it,
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: maybe I wasn't expecting that.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that might've been, you mentioned being wrong footed.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor,
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think part of what wrong-footed me about The Savage Detectives is I was maybe
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: picturing some kind of like ode to literature,
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: this quest to find a poet,
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: very sincere and like,
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: the love of literature.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: And instead it was kind of like taking a lot of pot shots at artists and poets in a loving way.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there was some reverence mixed in,
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: but I think it's that ability,
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: somebody mentioned like the whole middle section where we're getting these little
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: snippets of interviews they said it's almost like a mockumentary and ever since
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: i've read that i'm like i've been thinking about that and if i went back and reread
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: it now with that lens i could probably appreciate it so much more and so again i
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: think it was my expectations and what i thought i was going to be reading versus
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: the reality is maybe where i struggled but to your point that's kind of like it's
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_01: picking at my brain and and you know the idea of going back and rereading it now
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: is intriguing and it's the maze and the subversion that continues with him to kind
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: of call to call to me and to so many readers.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's because you don't know what you're going to get, even when you're rereading.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's something to be said for that, but sorry, Ron, I interrupted you.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: What were you going to say?
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's just because one of the things I'm always fascinated with and it comes,
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_02: it comes because reading Labyrinth recently and some of this is he'll say,
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: he'll say something and then he'll put a parentheses.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's wrong.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: or, you know, you get both sides of it in a sense.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought that's, you know, that was some, something he built into the structure.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: But when I,
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: in that interview that I was telling you about with Carmen,
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: but you also,
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: one of the things that she was asking him about,
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: writing or something like what,
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_02: what do you get out of writing?
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so anyway, so he said, and this to me is, was emblematic of the way he writes.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: And this is just, you know, kind of back and forth, uh,
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: uh, an interview, not even a written back and forth.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it says, for me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, instead of waiting, there is writing.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm probably wrong.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's possible that writing is another form of waiting of delaying things.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to think otherwise, but as I said, I'm probably wrong.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so you get this and that's, I mean, that's sort of how we write, you know,
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_02: Here, you know, you've got this.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, maybe it wasn't that.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's this.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's, you know, and I guess it's something I like nothing certain.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that's sort of built into the storyline and into his writing.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just sort of baked in.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that goes back to your point, Trevor.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, there's no answer.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_02: You can take it whichever way you want to because there's somebody and actually it
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_02: was another the synchronicity.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody tweeted out on when I was in the middle of it,
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_02: a Bolaño quote that said,
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_02: people see what they want to see.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_02: And what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, it's almost wrong footings built into it.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: Can I jump in?
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: Just I mean, I've read this quote now.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: Probably this will be like the fourth time during the history of our podcast.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it's one of my favorite quotes from his from him.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's from 2666.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it ties right into all this messiness that we're talking about.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: You probably already know what I'm going to read, Trevor.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it says,
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: without turning,
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis,
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: Bartleby,
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: A Simple Heart,
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: A Christmas Carol.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_01: Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories,
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: not books,
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist who
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: He chose Bartleby over Moby Dick.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_01: He chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Picochet and A Christmas Carol over A Tale
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: of Two Cities of the Pickwick Papers.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: Not even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great,
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: imperfect,
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: torrential works,
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: books that blaze a path into the unknown.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters, or what amounts to the same thing.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: They want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: When the great masters struggle against that something,
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_01: that something that terrifies us all,
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: that something that cows us and spurs us on amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: And like,
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: every time I read that,
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_01: it just kind of gives me the chills,
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: especially that last part,
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: the,
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: imperfect torrential works,
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: works that blaze a path into the unknown.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that just ties into what we were saying is it's not clean.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're not going to come out of it having an answer or any ideas,
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: sometimes even what you read,
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: but how important it is that,
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: wrestling and fighting and all those words that he uses.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that really does sum up,
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: especially for 2666,
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: but I think you could carry that out across all of his works to some degree.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a great introduction into 2666, a little bit of a discussion on it too.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: Notably,
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: or not,
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: maybe not notably at all,
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: the New York Times just did their best books of the 21st century so far.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: Savage Detectives is on there.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's number 38.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the part of the list where I'm like,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_00: OK,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_00: I get that,
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: 2666 is number six on the list.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_00: A vertiginous novel with an epigraph from Baudelaire,
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: which I think is a perfect encapsulation of this book.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: And, and the wrestle of this imperfect, you know, approaching something that I do think scared Bolaño.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: I take him at his word there.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a part where he's being sincere.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he really does mean it.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he is approaching some absolute horrors.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: in this novel or whatever you want to call it you know maybe novels too small of a
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: word for something like 2666 and or or maybe what i'm saying is too big of a too
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: lofty for for what it is i don't know um but it is a profound um i do think there's
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_00: humor in it but there's so much horror in it too and it puts you in that to me that
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: sense of
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what's going on.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of my favorite images in 2666 is of a geometry book outside,
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: deliberately put there as an art project kind of or an experiment outside to hit
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_00: the elements and slowly that certainty of these diagrams and of these,
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: this mathematic certainty.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: starts to just get eaten away.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the book is done away with and devoured essentially by this time in the desert.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love this book so much.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we did reread it.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, maybe this will change everything.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I loved it even more on the reread.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I like you,
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Paul,
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always like,
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: it's about time to reread that 2666 again,
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: because it doesn't give me answers.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it gets me into that state of I think some sometimes you can almost call it.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: a state of clarity that I don't have them, if that makes sense.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: The seeking, the mystery, the getting away from something you might feel sure about
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Or feel like you could even feel sure about is gone.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that I love about this book is it's not just,
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_00: it's not a,
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: that may sound like I'm talking about like religion or existence.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of it.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_00: But he's talking about these murders too.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_00: This region.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: What is the answer to something that is so horrific?
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can't even find who murdered these women in this book,
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: let alone parse out all the reasons and resolve them easily.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it just creates this horror in this region that is based on...
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is a book of fiction,
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: but it is very much based on what has actually and is actually happening
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_00: in this mexican desert region and these you know what you find if you go searching
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_00: out there as is one gravesite after another um usually of women and that horror of
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: the the masculinity that i think he does so well with the part about the critics in
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_00: this book and the the horror of what do we do about this this is something that
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: should not happen
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that is happening.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that has happened forever.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, I don't know.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is a wrestle that I think is worth the wrestle,
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: even if you don't come out the other side with any easy answers or any answers whatsoever.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, the part about the women, is that what it's called?
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that whole section... The part about the crimes.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: The part about the crimes.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just unrelenting horror, like you said, based very much in reality and what's happening.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I think one of the things about that,
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: there's many things about that section that haunt me,
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: but I think part of it is the fact that as you're reading...
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's so long and so repetitive in some ways,
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_01: but also each one is unique that it starts to numb you and it starts to wash over you.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I'm sure there's all kinds of ways you could take that.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Just, you know, modern news, the horrors we're seeing coming through on the Internet even today.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: But on top of all that,
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_01: just the fact that like even within a region where this is happening so often,
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: how easy it is to let something like that.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know, just become your everyday reality.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about even Trieste by Derndich,
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: and there's that whole section where you're just reading the names of all of the victims.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it has that same kind of effect where it goes on so long that there's a part of
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_01: you that's almost like,
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_01: should I just skip ahead?
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_01: But then it's like, no, this is like, part of the exercise is to
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_01: be uncomfortable and pained and actually take the time to think of each of these people as individuals.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that whole part.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, go ahead.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: While also recognizing it is impossible for you to actually do so.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can't register all this information.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can't, it does, you can't make it not part of the flood.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And while that's the goal you have, like the trees, Percival Everett's The Trees does something similar.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had these thoughts too with them.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes,
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: you realize skipping seems inhumane,
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_00: but even if you read it,
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_00: you realize your brain is just moving through it.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can't stop and gather the lives behind these names.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in this case, even though there's more detail, the lives behind these crimes are
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I just wanted to jump in.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, absolutely.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great point.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's too much.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's too much.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean,
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: fast forwarding it to today,
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_01: like with the internet or something,
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_01: you look at what's happening.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to get into specifics,
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_01: but the stuff that we're seeing come across social media,
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_01: images and things like that,
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: even if you try to sit there and think about it and acknowledge what's happening,
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: your mind almost can't conceive of it.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I mean, that's just obviously one of the parts of this book that sticks with me, but-
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, 2666, like we said, it haunts me in so many different ways.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned that textbook, you know, decaying.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's images out of this that are just indelible in my mind.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And yet it's very dreamlike.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't really remember how it all fits together.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's such a, I don't know, it just haunting again comes up.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ron, I do want to hear what you have to say.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before you do, though, sorry.
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_00: I get excited about this.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_00: In my reread of 2666, here's my notes.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just one of my things at the end of this part that you're talking about, the part about the crimes.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I say, I admit that I cannot shape this part.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a horror I do not comprehend.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then I ended with this little quote here that just, again, shows that it's...
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is as best writing as this book, too.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: But he says,
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what he's like.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't,
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't move what I'm feeling with that into words that explain it,
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: but it's just the,
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: the,
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: the power of this stuff.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ron,
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I,
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: wanted to,
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: just sort of a transition to between,
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_02: the two books,
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: um,
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: savage detectives in 26,
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_02: 66 is,
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: so the,
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: uh,
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_02: where they end up in the Sonora Desert,
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Agua Prieta and the Savage Detectives is like within an hour of Santa Teresa,
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_02: where the events happened in 2666.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_02: So that's just another one of those.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other thing I was thinking about is he's writing this from Spain,
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_02: in the Barcelona area.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so you get this, it's another of those ideas about if you, if you know an area,
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_02: what is it like writing about that area or events in that area from Europe for a different perspective?
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it also,
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: shows,
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: I guess,
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_02: what,
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_02: six years difference between when the two books were written.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_02: So you sort of see the arc.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_02: How does he deal with a lot of these same themes, a lot of these same issues?
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it is,
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_02: because that's the part I remember for the reading group,
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_02: which was,
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: a diverse group that people were just saying to get anesthetized.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just,
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_02: you know, hammer and hammer.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of,
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_02: thankfully,
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_02: one of the wonderful things is that there's a lot more women's voices now in the
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_02: literature area.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And coming back to Selva Amada, I mean, dead girls, you know, you read that.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_02: In a lot of the books, there's a lot of the books where you get the femicide.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a key theme through it.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_00: um I would love to talk to her about Roberto Bolaño's books but I also realize that
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_00: that sounds reductive I would actually just love to talk to her about her books so
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_02: that too but I mean I think when it comes through and it's you see it in different
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean in some of the young Japanese women writers you know and uh somebody or kami
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_02: that or kami that that doesn't
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_02: particularly treat women well, but still has an influence on some of the younger writers.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's more what's that arc?
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, where are we headed with where some of these writers are going?
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think,
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_02: so he focused on something back in 2004 that in the intervening 20 years,
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_02: we're seeing a lot more of.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing, too, because I remember going through the whole
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_02: the political process and the United States comes in.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: where,
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_02: why do you have these maculadores,
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_02: that were created along the,
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_02: the whole idea is when NAFTA was passed,
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_02: to set these places up on the border where they would put everything together and
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_02: bring it into the United States.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you also get that the U S sort of economic influence again on what was going on
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_02: on the other side of the border,
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_02: which created essentially these maculadores where a lot of this was happening.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so the way that he deals with that, again, at one point I saw he said, all literature is political.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_02: But he does it in a very indirect way, the same like the characters in Savage Detectives.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_02: You hear about the two main characters from everybody else.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I said, you sort of triangulate.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it is true here.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's not
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't come right out and tell you the political events,
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_02: but you see it in what happens in the day-to-day life of some of these sort of
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_02: international economic influences and extreme machismo.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_01: What you said about female authors and how that shift is thankfully happening more
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_01: and more across world literature period made me think about
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_01: the toxic masculinity.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_01: But then what's interesting is I was thinking of,
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Charco Press publishes Ariana Horowitz,
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_01: an Argentinian writer,
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_01: and Die My Love,
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Feeble-Minded and Tender.
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Those books,
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_01: they are incredibly violent,
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_01: incredibly,
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if problematic is the right word,
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: but like it takes a lot of these same themes,
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: but it puts the power into a female protagonist.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's interesting just what you were saying.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's important to note that like
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_01: having this perspective of reading something from 15,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: 20,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: 25 years ago,
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_01: shifting and watching how different voices across the world,
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_01: but it's particularly maybe in like,
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_01: South America and areas like that,
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: how it's shifted.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_01: And now there are more works where, you know, the power has shifted or at least the voices have shifted.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's just fascinating to think about it.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_01: The more you read these works,
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's one of the things we talk about with world literature.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_01: The more you read and you start to build and figure out how they all connect.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway,
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_01: just when you mentioned that,
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_01: it made me think of her and some of the authors that we've talked about more recently,
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_01: female authors from this part of the world who are starting to do some very
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: experimental and fascinating things as well.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this has been a great conversation.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're about to where we usually start to wind things up.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_00: I want to just bring up one thing that I think is important with 2666 versus the Savage Detectives.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that by the time he's writing 266, in fact, by the time he's writing By Night in Chile,
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: he knows that he's dying for long.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: You died at 50.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a, it was a process, you know, that he, he could see the, the end coming.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that really affects maybe a difference in the tone and in what
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: he's going for while at the same time,
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_00: incorporating so much of what he has been writing about all of his years,
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: because you can go back to the earlier stuff,
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: when he,
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_00: in the,
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_00: in the nineties where he goes,
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_00: okay,
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Stop writing so much poetry and start writing some fiction.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think that you can see his brain just ratcheting up and doing all of these things
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: and knows that his art,
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_00: he's got this sense of his art from the beginning.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he is an artist.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_00: capital uh letters from you know and and one of my favorite parts about the savage
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_00: detectives is that you you've failed as an artist if your work becomes recognized
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_00: almost right sold out
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_00: I love that perspective of this sacralizing of even your silliest thoughts makes
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_00: them more genuine even than some very well-put thought by some other professional
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_00: artist or poet or author.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's so fun.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But he certainly started to see the importance of what he was trying to convey as
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: his life starts to wind down.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: and there's a part in by night in Chile that I wanted to kind of put out there.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't talked about this book at all.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's short.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I, you know, listeners should go, go and read it.
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've read it.
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is the one I've read the most.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've read it three times.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And again, always I'm like, I should read it again.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a character, the wizened youth who is antagonistic to our narrator and,
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_00: a priest, a corrupt priest who doesn't see himself as corrupt or as it being his fault.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's corrupt with the wizened youth.
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_00: What,
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_00: whoever the wizened youth is,
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_00: we have theories,
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: but we don't,
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_00: we don't know at this point,
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_00: but this is the wizened youth is watching from a yellow street corner and yelling
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: at me.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I can hear some of his words.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_00: He is saying, he is saying, I belong to Opus Dei.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've never hidden that.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I say,
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, he's not even listening to me.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can see his jaws and his lips moving, and I know he's shouting, but I cannot hear his words.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_00: He can see me whispering,
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_00: propped up on one elbow while my bed negotiates and meanders over my fever,
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_00: but he cannot hear my words either.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to tell him this is getting us nowhere.
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I love, I love that because this is a deathbed confession in a way by night in Chile.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And again, Bolaño knew that his time was coming.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love the, I would like to tell him this is getting us nowhere.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And yet I would say that the priest here is kind of wrong because
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_00: this is the point again,
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_00: this circling around this,
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: getting us nowhere is a,
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_00: is a necessary,
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: a necessary fight.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I, I, I could be, um, uh, funny and say, well, we've all been talking today.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is getting us nowhere, but I don't, I just don't, don't agree.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do sometimes,
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: when we talk about things like this,
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine there might be some listeners who are like,
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh,
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad that there there's an episode here on Bolaño.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_00: I've never got him.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: these guys will help me get him.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Probably we won't.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_00: But,
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_00: but maybe,
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_00: maybe this again is,
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_00: is just so much the point it's sitting down and,
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_00: and,
• 1:26:19
  SPEAKER_00: and talking about all those things we don't get,
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_00: or that we're like,
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_00: there's something here.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't quite, I can't quite get there.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and, and I, I love it.
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've, I've had a good time discussing all of this today.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_02: One thing I, you know, by my adding to is, is that,
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_02: from everything I've read about him,
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_02: and you can see it in the books,
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_02: he was a voracious reader of everything.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, apparently he loved French surrealistic stuff.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_02: He loved, he felt, you know, a lot of the United States authors.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's obviously in Spain.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_02: He read them.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it really sort of infuses it.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_02: you see there was the parts in Savage Detectives where he's talking about the
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Mexican poets,
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_02: none of whom I may have heard of one or two of them.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_02: But you could just see the breadth of his reading that sort of infuses the writing.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so another thing, another reason I love his books is it's about reading.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's about the wonders of reading and learning about different places by reading
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_02: the literature from that area.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so he really infuses his work with that.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_02: You just see the names sort of littered throughout.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I always enjoy that.
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Start taking, you know, who are these people?
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really gets you to read some of these other influences and stuff,
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_02: because it really is sort of baked into the DNA of sort of the in both Chile and Mexico.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_02: it's a part of the culture and you really see that piece of it,
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_02: which I also to me,
• 1:27:48
  SPEAKER_02: that's that gets me there.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great point.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you mentioned that.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_01: I had tons of bookmarks throughout The Savage Detectives on those sections where
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_01: he's listing authors and books and things like that.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_01: I had them marked because the same thing,
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to go on just these Google searches and see who they were,
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_01: what's available,
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_01: could I read some of them?
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_01: So absolutely, it's that passion and love of literature that...
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_01: is so addictive.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so speaking, I mean, really fast since both of you have more of an experience with him than I do.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: clearly I'm going to go back and read and reread these same books that I've read,
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_01: but for somebody who is coming to Bologna for the first time,
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_01: I would be curious to hear if you,
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_01: either one of you have a recommendation or is it just dive in wherever something is appealing?
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Cause that's kind of what I think is,
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_01: I almost feel like there's no right place because wherever you dive in,
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_01: will be intriguing and problematic and messy and will either,
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's not probably a right answer,
• 1:28:50
  SPEAKER_01: but what would you recommend?
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say dive in the deep end and go 2666?
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say something like By Night in Chile that's maybe slimmer and a little
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_01: bit more of an approachable tone?
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a good question, but that's where both of us dived in was 2666.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Was that, what was your first run?
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_02: That was the deep end.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_02: I dove into the deep end.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it might seem a little bit strange if we are like,
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_00: but not there because that's part of what hooked us on.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think there's anything wrong with that either.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's almost,
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_02: I said what really helped me,
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_02: and I think it may have been the same,
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_02: is if you're in a group,
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_02: especially if you get a couple others to read it,
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_02: would be great.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_02: But otherwise, you know, if you want to get a sense of, do I really want to take on something that large?
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Night Chili does a short story.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I really like Amulet.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_02: Amulet?
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_02: which appears in there,
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_02: because I went down at some point to Unam,
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_02: and you see where,
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:29:51
  SPEAKER_02: a lot of the
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_02: the police takeover of Udam took place and some of that.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I, for whatever reason, I enjoyed that too.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was selfishly going to ask because I'm clearly have a ways to go.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in some ways I've read like his quote unquote major works now,
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I know I've talked to Trevor about this before,
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_01: but I was going to ask that too.
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I think Amulet is calling to me is maybe one that I'm going to read for the first time next.
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that might be one that's calling out to me.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is there any others,
• 1:30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor or Ron,
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_01: that you think beyond,
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned kind of what I think of as like some of the big four,
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_01: 2666,
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_01: The Savage Detectives,
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_01: By Night in Chile,
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_01: and maybe The Last Evenings on Earth.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard a lot of people,
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Mark Haber is the one that recommended that one to me,
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_01: but I know there's a lot of ephemera and stuff in it.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_01: All of it has value.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that, but what other, you know, amulet maybe, is there any other ones you think would be
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_01: the next steps.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you three,
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_00: but it's going to make it so that you're like,
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_00: oh,
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_00: you're telling me to read all of this,
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_00: all the works he published while he was alive.
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_00: The stuff that was published after he died that wasn't finished,
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you're interested,
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_00: read that ephemera.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it is insightful.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of it's
• 1:31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Fun to read because it recalls things or you see where there have been shifts or whatever.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, the stuff that he did publish while he was alive is really good.
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so the last book that he saw published before he died,
• 1:31:22
  SPEAKER_00: before 2666,
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_00: was called A Little Lumpen Novelita.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And New Directions put that out, you know, in a translation by Natasha Wimmer back in 2014.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been about 10 years now since I read it, but I really, really liked it.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, I believe, narrated from the perspective of a woman, similar to Amulet.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Amulet, absolutely.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've kind of got the... This, for me, is a very interesting duology of Distant Star and...
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_00: oh what's the other nazi literature in the americas they kind of work together the
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_00: ones i didn't like as much that were published still while he was alive as the
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_00: skating rink i liked it but i don't have strong memories of it um that that's one
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_00: that i'm would say oh i i don't i don't know you know whatever if you're if you're
• 1:32:24
  SPEAKER_00: into it go for it but the rest of them
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're all short.
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're all worth digging into if you're intrigued.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: What you said, Trevor, when we were talking about Antwerp.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Antwerp.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a good one.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of the universe, I think you said something about that, Trevor.
• 1:32:45
  SPEAKER_01: One thing that had helped you was thinking of all these other little seemingly
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_01: minor works as building up into this universe that in some ways maybe revolves
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: around 2666.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: That idea appeals to me.
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I think as I continue to explore him,
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to kind of keep that in mind and just think of this as almost universe building,
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_01: world building and see how it all connects.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll get that for sure from the ones that we just mentioned.
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_00: To me, they all start to lead there.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what's so strange about the Savage Detectives is that it's there.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's just so different.
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_00: The other ones all have horror, all have...
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_00: this mystery I'll have this you know not this tone and that's why I was like what
• 1:33:26
  SPEAKER_00: am I reading here this isn't Bolaño how did I save this till the very end you know
• 1:33:30
  SPEAKER_00: um I but again I'm anxious to see what what what I can do as I continue my my my
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_00: trip
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Another book I do want to bring up is Chris Andrews,
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_00: the translator of many of these books,
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_00: wrote a book called Roberto Bolaño's Fiction,
• 1:33:46
  SPEAKER_00: an Expanding Universe.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Also came out back in 2014.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_00: That was a big Bolaño year.
• 1:33:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's also the year the MOOCs and the Gripes blog did rereads,
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_00: group rereads of By Night in Chile and 2666.
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Chris Andrews puts together a great look at Bolaño's work that I think is not
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_00: something that I would just say,
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_00: oh,
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_00: dive in there,
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_00: read that first,
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: of course.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, it's definitely something that helps have these fun conversations like we're having.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_00: It can feel like,
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_00: oh,
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_00: here I am with someone who knows his stuff,
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_00: helping me get new insights from the stuff that I'm intrigued by.
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_00: So does that answer your question, Paul?
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Are you reading Amulet next?
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's funny.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the skating rink is probably the one that like, eh, maybe.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And if that's of the ones that I haven't read, that's the one I own, of course.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, I just finished that because I liked it because there's the campsite.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_02: So you see that again, but that's more of a completist book, I would say.
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Later down the road.
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_01: As you know, I hate to buy books, so I'm really in a pickle here.
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what I'm possibly doing.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_01: No,
• 1:35:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have more quests to make,
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_01: which is the fun of all this,
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_01: that expanding universe and continuing to read and buy those books.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_01: This has been such a great conversation.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_01: It
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_01: It does really just help to talk to both of you about it and continue to kind of just pick at it.
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the best word for it for me.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_00: You walk away with new impressions and new insights,
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: but not something that makes me go,
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_00: okay,
• 1:35:35
  SPEAKER_00: done and done.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Never have to talk about that or reread that or anything like that because it just
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_00: continues to open up in intriguing ways.
• 1:35:41
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks to both of you, Ron.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's so nice to have you on again.
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you can join us again sometime soon.
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_02: I hope so.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Any last words from either of you before we say goodbye to our listeners and come
• 1:35:58
  SPEAKER_00: back with something quite different in some ways,
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_00: William Trevor's work soon.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm looking forward to the discussion of that because I really enjoyed that.
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then just I'll say, as we'll be hearing more, August is Women in Translation Month.
• 1:36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Good call.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Coming up there.
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'll just put in one more plug.
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_01: I know I embarrass you, Ron, but anybody who's not following Ron, I would highly recommend it.
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_01: He is such a fascinating reader.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_01: And as you could probably tell just by listening today, always reading things that inspire me.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'll just throw that out there one more time.
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's a mutual, because as I said, you guys have impacted by reading so much that it's, thank you.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I always look forward to your shows, your podcasts.
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Rob.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk to everybody soon.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_00: See you, everybody.
• 1:36:50
  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Mooks and the Gripes podcast.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can follow the Mooks and the Gripes and get show notes and book and film
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: reviews at mooksandgripes.com.
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_01: On Twitter, you can find Trevor at Mooks and Paul at BiblioPaul.
• 1:37:07
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• 1:37:11
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• 1:37:13
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• 1:37:14
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• 1:37:15
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• 1:37:17
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• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time.