{"id":282986,"date":"2011-03-30T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/03\/30\/bolano-who-would-dare\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:39","slug":"bolano-who-would-dare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/03\/30\/bolano-who-would-dare\/","title":{"rendered":"Bolano: Who Would Dare?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at the New York Review of Books<\/em> Blog, you can find Who Would Dare?,<\/a> an essay from Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s forthcoming collection Between Parentheses.<\/em> (Which Jeremy Garber reviewed<\/a> for us.)<\/p>\n

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After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus\u2019s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what might have been predicted, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasn\u2019t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which is\u2014or was\u2014across from the Alameda, on Avenida Ju\u00e1rez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurais had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall<\/em>, none of which I\u2019d stolen there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Soon afterwards I left for Chile. If in Mexico I might have bumped into Rulfo and Arreola, in Chile the same was true of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, but I think the only writer I saw was Rodrigo Lira, walking fast on a night that smelled of tear gas. Then came the coup and after that I spent my time visiting the bookstores of Santiago as a cheap way of staving off boredom and madness. Unlike the Mexican bookstores, the bookstores of Santiago had no clerks and were run by a single person, almost always the owner. There I bought Nicanor Parra\u2019s Obra gruesa<\/em> [Complete Works] and the Artefactos<\/em>, and books by Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier that I would soon lose and that were essential reading for me; although essential isn\u2019t the word: those books helped me breathe. But breathe isn\u2019t the right word either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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What I remember best about my visits to those bookstores are the eyes of the booksellers, which sometimes looked like the eyes of a hanged man and sometimes were veiled by a kind of film of sleep, which I now know was something else. I don\u2019t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didn\u2019t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man who\u2019s been sentenced to death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the New York Review of Books Blog, you can find Who Would Dare?, an essay from Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s forthcoming collection Between Parentheses. (Which Jeremy Garber reviewed for us.) After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being […]<\/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":[38626,56,1796,1646,756],"class_list":["post-282986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-between-parentheses","tag-new-directions","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-review","tag-roberto-bolano"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282986","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=282986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":320996,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282986\/revisions\/320996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}