They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were.

Much like the apocryphal "last recordings" of Eric Dolphy which continued to arrive for years, the Bolaño caravan into English continues long after his death. There have been a number of jewels in recent years so I suppose a dud was inevitable. I am quick to qualify, the book is only inert as being an undercooked fancy. An Italian woman recounts her adolescence when after her parents died she and her brother were left to their own devices. Did a weird community develop a la [b:The Cement Garden|9957|The Cement Garden|Ian McEwan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166111732s/9957.jpg|1189398]? No, she worked at a salon while her brother hangs out with disagreeables at a gym. What follows is the slimmest of ideas. It can barely sustain the introduction of pivotal character two-thirds of the way through the novella. The effect is jarring. There is but a single aesthetic flourish around p.92 where the Master becomes apparent. That said, I didn't feel any hope in this text, not a philosophical hope but a literary one where somehow the plot could find its legs.

I remain ready to be convinced otherwise, but this wasn't the best way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Interesting dreamlike short little book that captures a very depressing part of the narrators life and their eventual way out of it.

[3,5]

This little tome engrossed and fascinated me. Oddly, and completely by chance, I read it concurrently with Joyce Carol Oates Beasts and the two novels made for interesting foils one for the other. While Beasts is about sexuality expressed criminally, A Little Lumpen Novelita is about crime expressed as sexuality. It's also, but very, very subtly--as the title suggests--political insomuch as the characters are caught not only in the traumatic state of their parents' unexpected death, but the economic collapse of the early part of the present century. Like the lumpen-proletariat that they are, they lack the language or learning to understand or articulate the economic forces that lead them to greater and greater desperation and why there seems to be no help for their kind other than turning to crime and joining capitalism's scapegoats.

As a longtime resident in Italy I loved the Roman setting and found the nostalgic pop culture reference to Maciste exquisite, striking the perfect melancholy and pitiful tone for this novel of an orphan's descent into the land of traumatic shock (a state of prolonged ambivalence and inaction) and slow emergence back to the struggle that is life, against a mostly indifferent, if not hostile, world. Although I haven't read it yet, it made me think of what I've heard about The Goldfinch but with the opposite ending. The narrative voice here, too, was totally believable although different in both age and gender from the author--no rare feat. I found her much more believable, say, than Oates' narrator in Beasts, although I also quite enjoyed that novel as well. This just felt smoother, more honest, a truer existential struggle. (Anyway, the narrator of Beasts is a liar. Ha!)

While I usually reserve 5 stars for more substantial works, this little gem was so perfect unto itself I can't resist. It's my first Bolano so, onward and upward now to his great(er praised) works.

PS someone has spray-painted a stenciled image of Bolano's face all over the streets of Palermo. That's kinda cool.