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A Little Lumpen Novelita

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A Little Lumpen Novelita

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Overview

Published in Spain just before Bolano’s death, A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a fierce and tender love of women

“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight as a teenager—“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”—she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, and drifts into bad company. Her younger brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns how low she can fall. Electric, tense with foreboding, and written in jagged, propulsive chapters, A Little Lumpen Novelita delivers a surprising, fractured fable of seizing control of one’s fate.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811223362
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/21/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	346 KB

About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

★ 06/02/2014
Reviewed by Gabe Habash What is left to be said about Roberto Bolaño? And what could be said about A Little Lumpen Novelita, a slim novel that holds the distinction of being the final Bolaño book to be published in English? It’s understandable that the release of yet another of the author’s books might be met with eye rolls. But even though A Little Lumpen Novelita is not Bolaño’s best book, it’s still one of the best books of the year. Slightly longer than a chapbook, A Little Lumpen Novelita feels as substantial as a book three times as long, because Bolaño keeps his scope small and frantically explores all the little crawl spaces of the story. There are two main settings: an apartment and a house, both in Rome. There are five characters, one of whom is the restless narrator, Bianca. Bianca and her brother are orphans—“somehow that justified everything,” she says in the opening paragraph—and the death of their parents triggers an extended disillusioned period in her life. On the surface, the story has an aimless quality that reflects Bianca’s mind-set. The siblings pass their days without spending any money, trying to live off what’s left behind by their parents. They mainly watch TV. Bianca works at a salon and her brother works at a gym; one day, he brings home two men (“They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were”), known only as the Libyan and the Bolognan. The chief difference between the two seems to be that the Bolognan is good at answering questions from TV trivia shows. Bianca sleeps with them sometimes, but she leaves the lights off and can’t tell them apart. More days pass. Eventually, the four hatch a plan to rob an old, blind movie actor. Though the plot is linear, the “secret story,” as the author liked to call it, bends and twists, refusing to be pinned down, and thus drives the reader to glorious distraction. This is the book’s real draw. A Little Lumpen Novelita bears Bolaño’s hallmarks: dread, detective work, and dreams (two standouts include one about an apologetic parrot that’s too heavy to fly and one in which the dead parents are worms dragging themselves across pavement). Underneath the plot, one senses, like Bianca, something lurking and waiting to reveal itself, a great truth of existence, an answer to a question she can’t ask or is not ready to ask yet. At one point, she fills out a trashy magazine quiz: “‘What’s a good age to die?’ Thirty-six, maybe. Before I turn forty.… ‘What kind of geological feature would you be?’ A deep-sea trench.… ‘Would you call yourself attractive?’ Yes. ‘Would you call yourself intelligent?’ No.” Easy answers are an illusion in this story, and either everything or nothing means something important. If a reader places A Little Lumpen Novelita alongside the towering prose storms of The Savage Detectives and 2666, it will inevitably be blown away. But that’s not the way to look at it. Bolaño’s short novels and novellas distill his obsessions, but just like his longer works, they can drive you wild with a vague but definite sense that you’re onto something—and that if you keep searching, you’ll find out what it is. This is a glittering gem, as maddening and haunting as you’d expect from Bolaño. Gabe Habash is the deputy reviews editor of Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly

2014-07-23
A modest fable, the final work by the Chilean master Bolaño (1953-2003) published in his lifetime, encompassing sex, theft and doing what's necessary to get by. Bianca, the narrator of this short but philosophically prickly tale, tells us two things early on: first, that she used to live a life of crime; and second, that she was never a prostitute. What follows, though, complicates both assertions. When Bianca's parents died in a car wreck when she was a teenager, she and her brother were left to scrape together a living in Rome doing odd jobs. While working at a gym, her brother befriends two men who propose a scheme: Bianca will go to work for an aging, blind and wealthy former bodybuilder, effectively for sex, then case his mansion for a safe to crack. The two men have sex with Bianca as well while she's in the midst of her weekly assignations, but she deliberately avoids knowing which man has entered her room when. This kind of avoidance, Bolaño suggests, is just part of the emotionally fuzzy atmosphere a young woman needs to create to survive a man's world; Bianca self-medicates with television and can't distinguish night and day. For Bolaño, who's best known for epics like The Savage Detectives (1998) and 2666 (2008), this slim tale related in 16 brief chapters is relatively unambitious. But its watertight prose (via Wimmer's translation) and themes of criminality and the treatment of women make it of a piece with the writer's grander works. Bianca's narrative registers less as a mournful abuse confessional and more as a memoir of hard-won wisdom, about her acquiring the power to keep predatory men at arm's length. Did she truly commit a crime? Is what she did prostitution or not? Bolaño leaves those questions provocatively open. A concise but welcome addition to a major writer's canon.

Kirkus Reviews

"Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results were multi-dimensional."

The New York Review of Books - Sarah Kerr

"Gritty, compelling, profound."

The Philadelphia Inquirer

"As for Bolaño, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus."

Junot Diaz

"Electrifying."

Time

"As for Bolaño, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus."

Junot Díaz

"Bolaño has proven that literature can do everything."

The New York Times - Jonathan Lethem

"Bolaño has joined the immortals."

The Washington Post

"A Little Lumpen Novelita may be Bolaño’s best trick, and greatest gift, ever."

Gawker

"A Little Lumpen Novelita, while short, is among Bolaño’s most intoxicating works. Obsessive and ambiguous, its open-ended nature is reflective not only of the protagonist but of the author himself. And it further cements him as a master of the form, of any form."

NPR - Juan Vidal

"The very highest level of literary achievement."

Colm Tóbín

"Electrifying."

Time

10/01/2014
In the last published work by a posthumously famous writer, recently orphaned Bianca becomes the linchpin in a get-rich-quick scheme proposed by a couple of her brother's unsavory companions.

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