Bolaño Blitz

FSG released two gorgeous editions of the late Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño's posthumous opus 2666 on Tuesday, and New Directions released his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, Romantic Dogs, last month. Both have caused quite a stir in what Books sections we have left in the weeklies and dailies of America this week, as well as in the onlinosphere.
The PoFo feature this week is an in-depth essay by Ben Ehrenreich on Bolaño's relationship with poetry--the poets who populate his fiction as well as the Chilean's own "Infrarealist" dossier.
This is fast on the heels of Jonathan Lethem's lengthy postmortem in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, which the Old Gray Lady complimented with another appraisal by Janet Maslin today (accompanied by a photo with a weird Taliban-esque doctor job. W, may I ask, TF?) .
The Village Voice chimed in with their own glowing review. New York speculated the book could be the best of the year, and the Boston Phoenix one-upped that by saying it could be the next great American novel.
(I'm going to add more fuel to the fire right here by announcing that the poet trapped inside A-Rod's body? It's Roberto Bolaño's. Fact.)
The LA Times chuckles about all the hubub on its blog here, and it should be noted that I had all of these suckers beat with my story in Paste back in October, but whatever.
The first hundred pages of Bolaño's Savage Detectives are a romantic boho poet's dream creation myth, and I highly recommend anyone unfamiliar start there. Or, if you just want to dip a toe in the Bolaño, then the short story collection Last Evenings on Earth is always available for short flights, bus trips, and coffee/cigarette insomnia jags. I've only started in on Romantic Dogs this week, but I'm sure others have taken more time with it and might offer some opinions here. Maybe? Yes? Well, whenever you're ready, the comments section is open, so feel free.
UPDATE: Finishing Romantic Dogs I turn to the back cover and belatedly read this appraisal:
"A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called 'unimproved'--lacking the polish of a shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only 'fist-fucking' but 'feet-fucking' in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up . . . The poems shine their beery light on life's romantic dogs: dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double time as saints and martyrs."
--Forrest Gander, The Nation
Yes.