Just a week remains until we discuss Roberto Bolano’s novel By Night in Chile. Excitement is building. I’ve been entertained, perplexed, and engrossed in this slim book. I can’t wait to hear what everybody else thought, and I can’t wait to learn about how to better read this disjointed text. Love it, hate it, you have to have a reaction to it, and I think that’s the whole point of what we’re doing here.

This book doesn’t give you breaks. Fine. We can figure that out. But, what it does give you is a beginning. The start of this book, oddly enough, is a call to put it down and pick up another book. Bolano’s vague epigraph is as follows:

“Take off your wig.”

CHESTERTON

A little research shows this line to be pulled from a short story by G.K. Chesterton called The Purple Wig. So here are…

Voyagers,

Another region down, another region began. The king is dead, long live the king.

We finished our three-part exploration of the women of contemporary British literature last month with Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. This month we move to the warmer climates of Latin America with Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile.

The Winterson conversation was wonderful, as always. We haven’t read a lot of love stories, so it was nice to explore one of the most intelligent romance novels ever written, and it was great to do so with such a willing group. People came ready with quotes, and passages, and opinions, and we all left knowing a little more about reading than what we came with.

Now we move on to the most cultish of cult authors, Roberto Bolano. Bolano was a bohemian cut from the same cloth as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Kerouac, and…