Roberto Bolaño as World Literature

Twelve chapters comprise the anthology, including the exemplary Introduction. It is the best Bolaño critical ensemble since Bolaño Salvaje (2006). It best compares with articles from a published conference, updating issues and inventing others, ahead of the next round on Bolaño it so well inspires. First Part: “Bolaño and World History” delves deep into fascism in fictional and counterfactual terms (Federico Finchelstein); into Nocturno de Chile, extended into Nietzsche and Junger and European aestheticism (Thomas O. Beebee); and also into Amuleto's “ethical turn” and its recasting of Mexico's 1968 students insurgency, less in revolutionary ideological terms, more so through the narration's distanced moral reflections (Juan De Castro). Second Part: “Bolaño's Literary Worlds” offers piercing and documented analyses of regional legacies and their cosmopolite betrayal by theory, counterfeit jargon, arcane correctedness (Will Corral); a subtle Bolaño who in Detectives Salvages experiments in modernist techniques as much as did older...