The Lasting Impact of Bolaño's Quotes [3 Books]

After a couple weeks of touring and hosting events, I finally have time to get back to my “weekly” write-ups of new and forthcoming books. Last time I talked about a couple Indonesian titles one of which, Home by Leila Chudori, I’m greatly enjoying. I also complained about school starting before Labor Day, arguing that that should be illegal. Well, guess what? In Michigan it is! This is why the Midwest rules.

Before getting to the books themselves, I have to jump on the bandwagon of hating all the insufferable DraftKings and FanDuel commercials. I’ve been complaining about these for months, but with the start of the new football season we’ve now reached the pure saturation point. I’m not even sure there are other commercials or products out there anymore. Even when I check Twitter I’m greeted with a “sponsored post” about how “Parvez” won $100,000 and I could too!

That’s one of my big beefs with the ludicrous way these sites advertise themselves: the winners featured on these commercials are always moronic looking Patriots fans, piss drunk in a bar, wearing their baseball hat backwards, looking cross-eyed at the screen (sometimes not even at the right one), fist pumping the air and screaming like dumb New Englanders scream, then getting a massive oversized check. The overall message? You’re not as dumb as this fucking guy, are you? Just look at him. EVEN HE CAN WIN AT THIS. (Note: DraftKings is from Boston, which is a city that type-casts itself, and why it must be so easy for them to find stupid looking people to be in their crappy ads. Why waste your time casting someone who appeals to your target demographic when you can just hire the demographic!)

And it’s only going to get worse. The NCAA is freaking out since this isn’t considered gambling, therefore allowing people to play this “daily fantasy draft contest” with college football and basketball players. DraftKings signed a $250 million deal with ESPN that will lead to it being “integrated” into ESPN’s sites. They raised an additional $300 million in July. All because regular fantasy isn’t good enough anymore—we Americans need things to be more immediate and more oversized! WE WANT KING SIZED FANTASY!

What changes this from a dumb rant into something sadder is that all the money lost by the suckers trying to outwit “Jimmy from Watertown Mass” will benefit a corporation operating just barely on this side of shady. At least with the lottery, the poor are preyed upon to help fund schools and shit. It’s still awful, but at least the money doesn’t go to someone who says things like “Once they try it, they like it. It’s sticky.” Gross. Just gross.

So fuck their ads. I hope all of those oversized checks catch on fire and some Russian teenagers hack the shit out of their site.

Well, that, or that these “games of fantasy skill” get outlawed in every state. Either or.

Now, to the happy stuff!

One Out of Two by Daniel Sada. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Graywolf Press)

Sada made a lot of waves back in 2012 with Almost Never, a novel that’s basically 328 pages of foreplay. It’s a great novel, and I’m really excited that Graywolf is going on with him. (Although saddened by the fact that he died back in 2011. I would love to have brought him to Rochester.) This novel is about identical twins who do everything together, until a man enters the picture . . .

Sada’s writing style reminds me a bit of Alejandro Zambra’s—there’s something direct, anti-metaphorical linking the two in my mind—but is also quite unique, fun to fall into the rhythms of and, I assume, a beast to translate. (Which is why Katie Silver deserves such accolades—for this and all her works.)

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were identical. To say, as people do, “They were like two peas in a pod,” the same age, the same height, and wearing, by choice, the same hairdo. Moreover, they both must have weighed around 130 pounds—let’s move into the present—: that is, from a certain distance: which is which?

If none of that sells you on the book, maybe the Bolaño quote on the back will: “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” It’s amazing, and very admirable, how many people Bolaño helped out and wrote about. And it’s not a surprise that us publishers keep putting his quotes on all of our books, knowing that he’s probably the one Spanish-language author outside of Gabriel García Márquez who normal Americans might recognize. Which brings me to:

The Things We Don’t Do by Andrés Neuman. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. (Open Letter)

Front cover: “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.”—Roberto Bolaño. Quotes from this statement of Bolaño’s—made when he was on the jury for the Herralde Prize, a statement included in Between Parentheses—are also on Andrés’s earlier books from FSG. It even kicks off this amazing Flavorwire feature on the book. And will be forever!

I actually asked him about this quote when we were in Chicago—and before we sang karaoke at the bar, which, by the way, Andrés is really good at, although he’s not as good of a singer as he is a ping-pong player—and he talked about how unfortunate it was that Bolaño didn’t get to live long enough to see if his proclamation came true. “Maybe he would’ve hated my later novels.” I can’t believe that would be true, but I understand the anxiety.

Andrés followed that up by telling a story about playing chess with Bolaño, who was super serious when it was his turn to play, then, after making his move, would jump around playing air guitar to the loud music of a Mexican punk band . . .

I really loved hanging out with Andrés and Naja Marie Aidt over the past two weeks, and, I have to say, even though it sounds cheesy and clichéd, that these visits sort of reinvigorated my interest in books and publishing. We all need a jolt sometimes, and coming in contact with literary geniuses is one great way to make that happen.

Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia. Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman. (Deep Vellum)

No Bolaño quote! But there is one from Robert Coover, which is really cool, and actually references Macedonio Fernandez.

The only Piglia I’ve read is The Absent City, which was inspired by Macedonio’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), and which is brilliant and narratively complicated in an Onetti, Labbé sort of way.

Although it sounds like this book brings back some of the themes from his earlier novels—life in Argentina during the Dirty War—it also sounds like much more of a definable, noir novel. This is a book that Tom Roberge will be raving about at some point. And I probably will too—just check this bit from Sergio Waisman’s intro:

Experimenting with form, innovating with narrative, recounting gripping tales that revolve around a central plot, Target in the Night starts as a detective novel, and soon turns into much more than that. Piglia takes the genre of the detective story and transforms it into what can be called, using Piglia’s own term, “paranoid fiction.” Everyone in the novel is a suspect of a kind, everyone feel persecuted.

OK, as soon as I’m done with Home, I know what I’m going to pick up . . .