Bøker av Roberto Bolano

The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. National BestsellerNew Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa-a fictional Juárez-on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS POWER 'A master of the short form' IndependentWide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels. From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue's gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolaño's short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolaño brought to life across his body of work. Bringing together Last Evenings on Earth, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolaño's posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolaño's literary legacy. 'Roberto Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time' Paul Auster'Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled' Mariana Enríquez

A tale of bohemian youth on the make in Mexico City from a master of contemporary fiction, and a sublime precursor to The Savage Detectives. Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world - or sacrifice themselves to it. Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction is a story of youth hungry for revolution, notoriety, and sexual adventure, as they work to construct a reality out of the fragments of their dreams. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction, and dreams of cosmonauts and Nazis. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city's labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses. The Spirit of Science Fiction is a kaleidoscopic work of strange and tender beauty, and a fitting introduction for readers uninitiated into the thrills of Roberto Bolaño's fiction. It is an indispensable addition to an ecstatic and transgressive body of work.

'The best and weirdest kind of literary game' - Financial TimesFeaturing several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature.Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies in hospital, hiccupping himself to death. When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud, the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. Pain, in love and eager to impress, agrees to help. But on a night that 'smells of something strange', things soon go awry... A wonderfully oneiric novella that blends the finest of Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges and Bolano's truly astonishing alchemical gifts, Monsieur Pain is a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS'A surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler' The TimesThis marvellous little yarn is dark, mysterious and rich in surprises... If you have yet to enter the daringly kaleidoscopic labyrinth that is Roberto Bolano's imagination, this is a lively place to begin what will be quite an experience' Irish Times

Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across these three novellas. In 'Cowboy Graves,' Arturo Belano - Bolaño's alter ego - returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. 'French Comedy of Horrors' finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in 'Fatherland,' a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER'His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction' Sunday Times'Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work' El Pais

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry. A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novella, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists 'choked by the brilliance of youth', Auxilio's passionate narration - both heartbreaking and lyrical - is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño's art. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS'Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history' The Times'Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become' New Statesman

'Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime'So begins Bianca's tale of growing up the hard way. Orphaned overnight as a teenager, she drops out of school and drifts into the bad company of two criminals her brother brings home. As the four of them plot a fantastical crime, Bianca learns she can drift even lower... Electric and tense with foreboding, A Little Lumpen Novelita - one of the last novellas Roberto Bolaño published - delivers a fractured fairy tale of taking control of one's fate. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER'Bolaño has proven that literature can do everything' The New York Times'The man was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time' Paul Auster

Considered the "big bang" of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novel--or perhaps the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely solitary, so strange, that he didn't share it with any publishers at the time; yet, decades later, he called it the only novel that didn't embarrass him. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a deserted highway, a seaside campground, an abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere, just beyond reach, a young, fevered writer named Roberto Bolaño drifts in and out of view. A haunting, radical, and utterly singular effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.

"A novel following a priest and a literary critic through Chile's 1973 coup d'etat and consequent military dictatorship"--

During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life.

When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead. More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women. Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolaño's masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER'Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel' Herald'We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius' Patti Smith

War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday. Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace. Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this 'game' are much more serious than he ever imagined. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER'Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño's first-rate efforts' The Economist'A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated... Classic Bolaño' Washington Post

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí's fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy - and revenge. Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old masion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn't tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene. Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS'A work of intense and unrealized longing' The New York Times'Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian

'In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk'... A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with. Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection' New York Review of Books'Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts' Observer 'A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work... You won't be bored' Los Angeles Times

'If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...'A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS'An exemplary literary rebel' New York Review of Books'A master of the short form' Independent'Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own' New York Times

'A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan's bookshelf' - Daily TelegraphAntwerp was Roberto Bolaño's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it. Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp is a short and cinematic experimental crime novel spliced together with voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolaño'. Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolaño's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But, there is a darker side to the town. Girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate. As a sense of conspiracy grows and an apocalyptic shadow draws closer, the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century history reveals itself in a novel of an astonishing scale and burning intensity. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER'A landmark in what's possible for the novel. Bolaño has proven it can do anything' New York Times'Wondrous... Unforgettable...will resonate for years to come' Daily Telegraph'As riveting as any top-notch thriller... 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world' Sunday Times

On New Year's Eve ,1975, two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later they are still on the run.The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe. Told, shared and mythologised by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, their testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of all time.

An unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the life and works of an enigmatic would-be poet turned military assassin during Pinochet's regime in Chile.

Den dype litterære åren med nazistisk litteratur har, frem til nå, blitt sterkt undervurdert. Nå er endelig den anerkjente forfatteren og poeten, Roberto Bolaños på overtid og grundig dokumenterte undersøkelse av forfatterne som har bidratt til pan-amerikansk nazistisk litteratur, tilgjengelig for norske lesere.Med pålitelige research av livene, politikken og den litterære produksjonen til disse forfatterne i uttømmende og medrivende detalj, så er dette den definitive, om enn fiktive, gjennomgangen av de forfatterne som har skapt det Nord- og Søramerikanske litterære landskapet av nazistisk litteratur.Nicole Krauss beskriver boken som «Opplysende, gal, dødsseriøs, vilt leken, biblioman og perverst fantasifull.»

Tres versiones de un crimen van trazándose en esta novela que transcurre en un anónimo pueblo de la costa española.Three versions of a crime are being plotted in this novel that takes place in an anonymous town on the Spanish coast.

Ville detektiver var boken som etablerte Roberto Bolaño som det store, nye håpet i Latinamerikansk litteratur. I romanen møter vi en rekke mennesker. I sentrum for dem alle står Arturo Belano og Ulises Lima. De er sentrale medlemmer av en gruppe undergrunnspoeter som kaller seg viscerale realister. De unge poetenes odysse er også en detektivhistorie: de er på sporet av den legendariske poeten Cesárea.

I Chile kort tid før President Allende blir avsatt i et kupp av Pinochet, treffes en gruppe venstreorienterte idealister for å diskutere poesi og politikk. Tre av dem er poeter og den fremste er den enigmatiske Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. Kvinnene er tiltrukket av ham, mens mennene ser på ham med mistenksomhet. Etter kuppet avsløres det at han er jagerflypilot og Pinochet-supporter med tysk opphav og at hans egentlige navn er Carlos Weider. Ved siden av å utføre drap på vegne av juntaen, blir han landskjent for å bruke jagerflyet til å skriver poesi i luften. Han organiserer også en fotoutstilling der motivene er ofre for drapene han har begått. Weiders perfomance-kunst blir til slutt for mye for hans overordnede og han rømmer landet - med en detektiv i helene. En stjerne i det fjerne blander politikk, historie og poesi og de brutale hendelsene tydeliggjør både regimets grusomhet og litteraturens ambivalens. «Den beste Bolaño-boken er Estrella Distante» Chris Andrews, oversetter av Bolaño til engelsk og forfatter av boken «Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe»

Amulett av Roberto Bolaño er en bok som på mange måter forteller om hva som gikk galt i Latin Amerika i 1968 og fremover, inkludert kuppet mot Allende, men også om hvordan de unge som vokste opp på den tiden etter hvert skal bli til det nye håpet for kontinentet. Og at disse «spøkelsesungdommens» kampsang er en sang som handler om deres mot, glede og begjær. Og denne sangen er deres amulett.«Dette blir en uhyggelig historie. Det blir en detektivhistorie, en hardkokt grøsser. Selv om det ikke vil virke sånn. Det vil ikke virke sånn, fordi det er jeg som forteller. Det er jeg som snakker, så det vil ikke virke sånn. Men egentlig er det historien om en grusom forbrytelse.»Hun som sier dette er AuxilioLacouture: Den meksikanske poesiens mor. Høyreist, tynn, blond, hun som ble kjent som den eneste personen som sto i mot militærets overtagelse av universitetet i 1968. Hun gjemte seg på dametoalettet i 12 dager. Mens hun venter inne på do, uthungret, begynner hun å minnes sitt liv og tenker på tennene hun har mistet, på vennene, poetene, men snart befinner hun seg i en underlig tilstand, i et slags merkelig, kaldt landskap og i lugubre barer der «Sjelens mørke natt tar seg gjennom Mexico bys gater og feier alt med seg.» Samtidig som hun kravler rundt på toalettets måneopplyste flisegulv.