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Title: Between Parenthesis

Subtitle: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

Author: Roberto Bolano

Narrator: David Crommett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-15-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 9 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

The essays of Roberto Bolano in English at last.

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. "Taken together," as the editor Ignacio Echevarra remarks in his introduction, they provide a personal cartography of the writer: The closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'" Bolano's career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortzar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his "ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior": He argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure.

Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: "I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels."

Members Reviews:

"Books are the only homeland of the true writer."

This collection of non-fiction pieces is a treasure-trove for anyone who has read Bolaño's fiction and who came away smitten by the author's full-blooded, mercurial, poetic voice.

Seasoned readers of this author can comfortably enter and enjoy the world of these essays, speeches, newspaper columns, travel articles and other occasional pieces. This is because many elements of Bolaño's novels and stories -- their settings, aspects of their storylines, their narrators or chief protagonists, and their abiding spirit of inquiry -- are grounded in autobiography. Bolaño's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, who has assembled the 125 pieces found in "Between Parentheses," acknowledges the open border between the author's fiction and non-fiction in his hearty Introduction: "This volume amounts to something like a personal cartography of Roberto Bolaño and comes closest, of everything he wrote, to being a kind of fragmented `autobiography'."

If the reader perceives anything different in this collection it is that here the voice you've come to expect -- opinionated ("plagiarists deserve to be hanged in the public square"), passionate (his love for his soon-to-be-fatherless son beams bright), and with a tinge of the rapscallion ("one of the best ways to steal . . . I had learned from an Edgar Allen Poe story") -- is closer still to the elusive essence of "I, Roberto Bolaño."

In a piece from 1999, this autodidactic author declares: "I'm much happier reading than writing." His admiration shines forth the many times he notes that some friend or acquaintance "has read everything." The exhaustive scope of his own reading and interests is demonstrated by the nine-page Index that completes "Between Parentheses." The Index contains the names of over 600 persons mentioned in the texts, including musicians, filmmakers, and artists.