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Roberto Bolaño: “Labyrinth”Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Roberto Bolaño’s “Labyrinth” was originally published in the January 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.  Click for a larger image. I can’t wait to get caught up and read this one. Feel free to leave any comments while I get back on my feet.  6 comments to Roberto Bolaño: “Labyrinth”Leave a Reply |
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Hi Mookse,
Hope you get to this one soon: it will be interesting to know how you see it. Hope all is well, meanwhile.
I found it very interesting and strangely compelling.It never becomes a story as such, I think, but is an imaginative riff on the photograph, like a literary jazz riff it takes off from the uncertainty and speculates. I notice that the eight figures captioned and more that are assumed present, are given a kind of virtual – or provisional – existence (“life”) outside the photograph.
What is interesting to me is the aura of the provisional that Bolano achieves and maintains in the writing of these speculative vignettes. It is hard to follow the scenes without referring back to the photo (so I stopped doing so) and the effect is really intriguing. He creates life for each figure, and more that we can’t see, but never more of a life than we might gather at a glance, as at a glance of a photo –so the sketches seem to be on a par with the photo!
The tell-take line is (something like) “Literature kisses these faces and passes by without their ever having noticed” which seems true on more than one level.
This is imaginative writing, and good writing, with a bit of humor thrown in, I think, and is well worth the read.
Regards,
kjml
Does the New Yorker indicate when this story was written, ie. is it early Bolano or late Bolano?
It’s been years since I lived in New Haven, but that particular New Yorker cover you picture here stopped me in my tracks:
January. February. It looks just exactly like that.
Although I had a hard time getting “swept up” by this one, I found it interesting enough to make a scan of the photo and print it out so that I could refer to it while reading.
I kept wanting more background on the photo: Is it just a random photo that Bolano found in a thrift store? Does it really have a caption with the given names? Did he actually know some of these people?
I can’t really say I enjoyed this, but it left me asking a lot of questions — like Tony S., my main question is when this was written and when it was discovered. On these issues, the New Yorker, in both print and web site, is almost perversely silent.
I think the old Saturday Night Live line “Francisco Franco is still dead” applies here. How much more can one squeeze out of Bolano’s corpse? This strikes me as the type of story of interest only to fans of his (which I actually am-I really enjoyed 2666) and should definitely be put in context, as requested above, of when it was written. I found the story intriguing but ultimately rather pointless, an experiment and yet one that I’m sure has been done before by someone such as Robbe-Grillet or Sarraute although I couldn’t say exactly who.
Good enough to keep me pleasurably entertained. And, in case people didn’t catch this – the photo is credited to a character in the story.