A newly discovered novel from the master author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives: a story about becoming a writer, and coming of age in the realms of sex and love.
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.
Admirers will find . . . a satisfying proleptic glimpse of his
picaresque masterpiece, 1998’s The Savage Detectives . . . [This]
gem-choked puzzle of a book . . . serves as a key to Bolaño’s later
work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions … [and] is a hardy
forerunner that stands on its own.
*New York Times*
The book’s very premise – two young poets drift around the literary
underworld of Mexico City – reads like a dress rehearsal for The
Savage Detectives, similarly soaked in poetry, disillusion, and
longing. The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures,
though they are mostly incidental. What The Spirit of Science
Fiction offers most is the tingle of the nascent. It allows us to
perceive the avalanche in the snowball before it rolls
downhill.
*Paris Review*
Bolaño-philes will relish this glimpse into the conflicting facets
of their hero’s personality, but the book is more than an
autobiographical curio. It brings the Mexico City of the Seventies
to life . . . The novel’s sunny sense of what it is like to be a
young man falling in love – with words and ideas as well as with
women – is irresistible.
*Telegraph*
The Spirit of Science Fiction is structured unconventionally,
enticing the reader to solve its mysteries. Bolaño adroitly braids
three related narratives . . . an entertaining, lyrical and
accomplished novel.
*Wall Street Journal*
[A] gem . . . Bolaño’s lusty, laughing passion for art and
literature, for women and Mexico City, is tangible here.
*Washington Post*
Self help for bookworms . . . The Spirit of Science Fiction
contains moments of brilliance and will satisfy Bolaño
devotees.
*El Mundo*
An intriguing and dreamy portrait of two writers taking different
paths in their pursuit of their love of literature, hoping to
discover their voices.
*Publishers Weekly*
As well as being a novel about becoming a writer, it’s also about
initiation into the world of sex and love. The Spirit of Science
Fiction shows, like few other novels written in the Spanish
language, the pain, the difficulty, the angst of the young man
faced with what Henry Miller, called aptly “the world of sex”. May
the archive of Roberto Bolaño’s work never close.
*Christopher Domínguez Michael*
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