Roberto BolañoWoes of the True Policeman: A Novel

This volume, which Bolaño is said to have worked on from the 1980s until his death in 2003, is most likely to appeal to hard-core Bolañistas and novelists like myself, though it is full of interesting bits. It seems to be a side project to his masterly 2666, also left in a state of incompletion (though you wouldn’t know this unless you were told) at his death, and involves some of the same characters that appear in that novel, Amalfito and Rosa in particular. However, the versions of these characters as portrayed in Woes of the True Policeman do not really gibe with the their counterparts in 2666, and, and though Bolaño does occasionally refer to the former book by its title in his correspondence, there is ample reason to suppose that Woes is to some degree a sketch book for 2666, which he was working on at the same time. In that case many of the sketches in Woes may be seen as warm-ups for 2666, experiments finally omitted from that much more polished masterpiece. Since Bolaño frequently reused characters (slightly altered) from book to book, and never wasted a word he wrote, I’m tempted to think that when he finally had 2666 pretty much where he wanted it, he wondered if he could make another novel out of the leftovers that we now have as Woes. (And you can be certain his publishers wondered the same thing after his death.) Thus for anyone who writes and is interested in how Bolaño went about it, Woes is fascinating, even essential. It is very far from being a finished novel, however, even though there is new material included in it, particularly regarding policemen (consonant with the author’s abiding interest in detectives). For me Woes is a very instructive look into Bolaño’s writing process (“just do it,” in short), and for that I loved it.

The item was in better condition than the description. It showed up early. Thank you!

I enjoyed this a great deal. It's not his best, but certainly better than Third Reich. Interesting as an addendum to 2666, though not essential. Some people have called it the sixth book of that great novel, but it's really not. Still worth it, though. A great expansion on the Amalfitano character. The only real knock is that it ends rather suddenly, as posthumously published works often do, and left me with a sense of the story being not quite complete and I really felt like it deserved a better sense of closure.

ONe of his best, of the group published posthumously and considered by him to be unfinished. It arrived very quickly, a perfect first edition at a great $5-something price.

Excelente!

Many readers will argue that this work is not a "novel" at all. Certainly it does not adhere to the traditional expectations of a novel, no matter how flexible the reader is with definitions. Begun at the end of the 1980s and still unfinished at the time of author Roberto Bolano's death in 2003, at the age of fifty, The Woes of the True Policeman was always a work in progress, one on which the author continued to work for fifteen years. Many parts of it, including some of the characters, eventually found their way into other works by Bolano, specifically, The Savage Detectives and his monumental 2666.This book's "plot," such as it is, begins after the first chapter, which is a commentary about literature in general and categories of poetry in particular. In Chapter Two, Bolano gives the background for Padilla, a Barcelona student who has seduced his fifty-year-old professor, Amalfitano, the widowed father of a teenaged daughter and around whom the novel revolves. Padilla's childhood, his relationship with his father, his tendency to violence, the writing of his first book of poetry, and a film which Padilla plans to make about Leopardi, the Italian poet/philosopher, are all discussed in detail. When a whispering campaign regarding Professor Amalfitano and Padilla endangers Amalfitano's job at the University of Barcelona, Amalfitano must find another place to teach, this time going to the University of Santa Teresa, a town modeled on Ciudad Juarez, on the border of Mexico and Texas. Padilla stays on in Barcelona, writing a novel.The action swirls back and forth and around in time, gradually filling in, at random, details about Amalfitano's marriage and fatherhood, his various jobs in other countries, his changing political points of view, and his favorite poets and novelists. Though Amalfitano maintains a correspondence with former lover Padilla in Barcelona, much of the action in Santa Teresa centers on his new relationship with another young man, Castillo. Unlike Padilla, who is a writer, Castillo is a painter - or, rather, a forger of paintings by other, well-known painters, especially the pop artist Larry Rivers. Much later in the novel, amidst many other digressions, Amalfitano's life with former lover Padillo takes on new importance and leads to philosophical discussions about reality and what one may expect to gain from a long life of introspection.If all this seems wandering, diffuse, and lacking in focus, it is. Bolano leaves it to the reader - his "true policeman" of the title - to put it all together. Through additional digressions about the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa; the fighting of the Mexicans against the French and Belgians; the love story of Amalfitano's daughter Rosa; five generations of women named Maria Exposito; identical twins named Pedro and Pablo Negrete, one of whom becomes chief of police and the other of whom becomes a philosophy student; the investigation of Amalfitano by the police; and the succession of political leaders in Santa Teresa, Bolano keeps the reader intrigued, though puzzled. The disconnection, not only in our lives, but also in our expectations regarding writing and the other arts is apparently the objective of the author. "Look over there, dig over there, over there lie traces of truth," he says. "In the Great Wilderness... It's with the pariahs that you'll find some justification, if not vindication."

This book should not be marketed as a novel. The main plotline leaves off halfway through and gives way to a succession of fragments. Some of these are worthwhile, and the main plotline is achingly beautiful, but to call this a novel is just inaccurate. Definitely worthwhile to hardcore Bolaño fans and writers, otherwise I think you would feel conned.

Loved 2666 and The Savage Detectives, and this is almost up to those standards. Just recently read this article that could serve as a good gateway to checking out his stuff. Interesting read:[...]