Literature

Roberto Bolaño intended 2666 to be published in five parts. Against his wishes, however, all five have been combined into one whopper of a book where every character is in pursuit of something else, and death reeks throughout. Adrián Jiménez dissects the latest Bolaño masterpiece to be translated into English.

Some consider her adventures heroic, while others see her exploits as privileged opportunism. The life of Emma McCune was complex and thrilling, which is why her actions in Sudan have inspired both fictional and biographical portraits. Lauren Young examines a novel and a semi-biography of the romantic Brit with ulterior motives. Through the lens of McCune, the two books also examine the roles of Westerners on idealistic foreign aid missions. 

Great and disruptive events behind the march of history, like war or political upheaval, color one's existence and experiences. So too, though, do the personal experiences of love, loss, and friendship. In essence, life is constructed and given meaning by those events which seem near and far, both in time and space. In this reflective essay, Jonathan Amid examines four novels by acclaimed author and poet, Michael Ondaatje, to discover an extraordinary talent for capturing and conveying the facets of grand and individualized experiences that give meaning to the arc of a life.

Anton Chekhov. Thomas Pynchon. Raymond Carver. Jorge Luis Borges. Writers like these, all of whom Roberto Bolaño has been compared to, represent a literary class of demigods. Although he had been writing poetry and novellas before, it was the publication of The Savage Detectives (Los detectives salvajes) that lofted Bolaño into this distinguished pantheon. Patrick Guyer digs into this masterpiece.

Thirteen Cents is the coming of age novel of Azure, a street child trying to survive the shadowy streets of Cape Town. Grace Kim reviews the first novel of K. Sello Duiker, a promising South African author whose unconventional and gripping portrayals of seedy urban life once garnered an enthusiastic following. Alas, the young writer took his own life at the age of thirty. In Thirteen Cents, the reader is treated to the magical realism of Cape Town's seedy side, and the magic of a young scribe who, unfortunately, writes no more.