Woes of the True Policeman

The item was in better condition than the description. It showed up early. Thank you!

I enjoyed this a great deal. It's not his best, but certainly better than Third Reich. Interesting as an addendum to 2666, though not essential. Some people have called it the sixth book of that great novel, but it's really not. Still worth it, though. A great expansion on the Amalfitano character. The only real knock is that it ends rather suddenly, as posthumously published works often do, and left me with a sense of the story being not quite complete and I really felt like it deserved a better sense of closure.

This volume, which Bolaño is said to have worked on from the 1980s until his death in 2003, is most likely to appeal to hard-core Bolañistas and novelists like myself, though it is full of interesting bits. It seems to be a side project to his masterly 2666, also left in a state of incompletion (though you wouldn’t know this unless you were told) at his death, and involves some of the same characters that appear in that novel, Amalfito and Rosa in particular. However, the versions of these characters as portrayed in Woes of the True Policeman do not really gibe with the their counterparts in 2666, and, and though Bolaño does occasionally refer to the former book by its title in his correspondence, there is ample reason to suppose that Woes is to some degree a sketch book for 2666, which he was working on at the same time. In that case many of the sketches in Woes may be seen as warm-ups for 2666, experiments finally omitted from that much more polished masterpiece. Since Bolaño frequently reused characters (slightly altered) from book to book, and never wasted a word he wrote, I’m tempted to think that when he finally had 2666 pretty much where he wanted it, he wondered if he could make another novel out of the leftovers that we now have as Woes. (And you can be certain his publishers wondered the same thing after his death.) Thus for anyone who writes and is interested in how Bolaño went about it, Woes is fascinating, even essential. It is very far from being a finished novel, however, even though there is new material included in it, particularly regarding policemen (consonant with the author’s abiding interest in detectives). For me Woes is a very instructive look into Bolaño’s writing process (“just do it,” in short), and for that I loved it.

ONe of his best, of the group published posthumously and considered by him to be unfinished. It arrived very quickly, a perfect first edition at a great $5-something price.

Excelente!

Loved 2666 and The Savage Detectives, and this is almost up to those standards. Just recently read this article that could serve as a good gateway to checking out his stuff. Interesting read: [...]

I was about 190 pages into the Bolano book, when it stopped abruptly and gave way to a simpleminded story about baseball. I researched the text and found it was pages from a MIke Lupica book called "The Big Field." It goes on for about 30 pages--different typeset, font, and graphics--until it resumes with the Bolano book. It's like a prank from the Devil himself. I read voraciously, and this has never happened to me before. Did anybody else experience this? I'll have to get a copy of an unmolested version of "Woes," because I was enjoying it immensely. The contrast between Bolano's searing story in Saint Theresa and Lupica's execrable hackery is astonishing.

This book should not be marketed as a novel. The main plotline leaves off halfway through and gives way to a succession of fragments. Some of these are worthwhile, and the main plotline is achingly beautiful, but to call this a novel is just inaccurate. Definitely worthwhile to hardcore Bolaño fans and writers, otherwise I think you would feel conned.