Nicholas Notes

Hi all, I will echo my peers by agreeing that this has been a very amusing read. Although by no means a light book in terms of its heavy theme, and the whirlwind of politics that were going on around the poets in this story, Bolano, or our narrator, wrote in a very digestible manner/tone. I’m someone who enjoys the more peculiar inclusion of details that authors/storytellers include - like when recounting Bergman describes Weider’s apartment as “naked and bleeding”. Although this perhaps was perhaps a slip of what was to come later in that same place. Another attempt to appreciate the structure of Bolano’s story is found in his opening of chapter 8: “This is where Abel Romero appears on the scene and I make my reappearance”. Beyond the syntax which I found fun in a way that it was unexpected - we are actively being told where we are in the storyline. This is unique from the more complex plots we’ve previously followed. … Beyond my liking - I want to reflect on a broader concept in the ...

Let me discuss a novel, but not just any novel. One whose narrator would “disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -- very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality…” (17). Labyrinths - as read by me - was a whirlwind of disorienting tales, told by a fantastical narrator who lived one thousand lives - and now recounts his adventures with a reflectively, philosophically, bitter taste. Unfortunately, I was not one of the ‘lucky few’ foreshadowed on page 17. At first, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ I was reminded of the ‘Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy’ , whereby seemingly absurd phenomena are recounted as the mundane organization of lands far far away. It is explained: “ One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory” (23) or “These small, very h...