{"id":281426,"date":"2011-01-11T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/01\/11\/the-insufferable-gaucho\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:28:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:28:21","slug":"the-insufferable-gaucho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/01\/11\/the-insufferable-gaucho\/","title":{"rendered":"The Insufferable Gaucho"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roberto Bola\u00f1o has recently become one of the new stars of Latin American fiction, which is made all the more tragic by his death in 2003. His mammoth novel 2666<\/em> was a posthumous smash hit in both North and South America, and although much of his work was available in translation, New Directions is now publishing what’s left of this formidable author’s work.<\/p>\n

The Insufferable Gaucho<\/em> is his latest collection of writings, compromised of five short stories and two essays. Each piece is remarkably different in both content and form: \u201cPolice Rat\u201d is written from the point of view of a rat in the sewer. \u201cTwo Catholic Tales\u201d is written as if verse from the Bible. And the essay \u201cLiterature + Illness = Illness\u201d connects fragments of vaguely related ideas like the faulty cause-and-effect thinking of one in a fever dream. These are just a few examples in which Bola\u00f1o is willing to explore the myriad ways in which fiction can be constructed, and reading each piece shows how rewarding such an experience is. A story ostensibly about rats, when talking about death and \u201chumanity\u201d become much more powerful when told from the point of view of a rat than an actual human being:<\/p>\n

\n

Rats are capable of killing rats. The sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I knew it was only a question of time. Our capacity to adapt to the environment, our hard-working nature, our long collective march toward a happiness that, deep down, we knew to be illusory, but which had served as a pretext, a setting, a backdrop for our daily acts of heroism, all these were condemned to disappear, which meant that we as a people, were condemned to disappear as well. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And what may be even more interesting is how the two essays in the back of the collection are written in a way that feels almost more like \u201cfiction\u201d than the actual short stories do. Too bad the actual subject matter at hand is not nearly as interesting as the way Bola\u00f1o writes it, once you sift through his bag of literary tricks. <\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o is certainly a talented writer, but he writes with the cynicism of someone who maybe knows a bit too much for his own good, so at times he comes off as kind of a smart-ass. I don\u2019t think the reader would find the eponymous \u201cinsufferable gaucho\u201d quite so insufferable otherwise, and Bola\u00f1o\u2019s namedropping of his favorite (and least favorite) writers can grow tedious, if you forget that, like any writer, this is someone who really loves literature. On the bright side, award-winning Chris Andrews’ translation is practically seamless, and save for one in text translation of some song lyrics, the reader could go through the whole book without realizing they were reading a translation. <\/p>\n

The Insufferable Gaucho<\/em> is certainly an interesting set of pieces that show that Bola\u00f1o is capable of many different feats with his writing. When it works, it really works, and the stories \u201cJim,\u201d \u201cPolice Rat,\u201d and \u201cAlvarro Rousselot\u2019s Journey\u201d show how good Bola\u00f1o can be. But overall I found the collection to be a mixed bag, and for someone who hasn\u2019t already contracted Bola\u00f1o-mania, it just quite wasn\u2019t enough for me to join his growing throngs of fans. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roberto Bola\u00f1o has recently become one of the new stars of Latin American fiction, which is made all the more tragic by his death in 2003. His mammoth novel 2666 was a posthumous smash hit in both North and South America, and although much of his work was available in translation, New Directions is now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[27236,766,37406,56,756,6516,28316],"class_list":["post-281426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-chilean-literature","tag-chris-andrews","tag-insufferable-gaucho","tag-new-directions","tag-roberto-bolano","tag-spanish-literature","tag-will-eells"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346326,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281426\/revisions\/346326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}