I very much prefer that you have physical copies of the main texts: Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and whatever long book you choose for yourself. We are, after all, interested here in the book as a material thing, and the physical and affective aspects of your engagement with it. We will, however, also have to consider how reading a physical book is experientially different from reading on screens or a device (computer, tablet/Kindle, or even phone).
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).
- Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006).
Shorter texts will mostly, if not exclusively, be taken from:
- Roberto Bolaño, The Unknown University, trans. Laura Healy (New York: New Directions, 2007)
- Roberto Bolaño, The Collected Short Stories, trans. Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer (New York: Vintage, 2024).
- Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer (London: Picador, 2012).
For the most part, we will do our reading of shorter texts in class. We will thus share the experience of reading collectively together, at the same time and in the same place. I will usually if always either project the readings, or make them available via print-outs and photocopies, depending on their length.
As for books that you might choose to read alongside our reading of The Savage Detectives, here are some suggestions:
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
- Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands
- Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet (at least two volumes)
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
- Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (at least two volumes)
- Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
- Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
If you want to choose a different book, please check first with me. The main criteria are that:
- It must originally have been written in a Romance language (Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese etc.), though you are welcome to read it either in the original or in English translation.
- It must be at least 400 pages long.
Note that if, whether by accident or design, more than one student chooses the same book to read alongside The Savage Detectives, that is fine by me.