In 'Spirit Of Science Fiction,' Seeds Of A Great Career

The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003, is as influential as a dead man can get. He's a literary giant across the Americas, with a mystique centered on the two massive masterworks: and In the years since his death, his body of work has slowly emerged in English, primarily translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. They have worked their way through his perfect array of novellas, his short stories, and the fragments left on his hard drive, which are better than most full-fledged novels I, which was released posthumously in Spanish and has now been translated by Wimmer, is among Bolaño's fragments. Though it's a complete novel, and one of Bolaño's earliest, any reader familiar with will recognize it as practice for that novel's shaggy, raucous first section.