Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The Tempest (Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition). The play that makes me feel closest to Shakespeare. This superb critical edition provides very useful sources, criticism, and creative responses to the play. An essential tool for teaching the play. Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman .  Caliban speaks and shows that he can do more with the English language than to curse. The Norton Critical Edition has a terrific essay by Kwane Anthony Appiah about the disingenuousness of Soyinka's claim that the play is not about a clash of cultures.  Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction .  An entertainment. When we were young and heroes to ourselves, if to no one else. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man .  Brutally hilarious. The run-in with the Communists is a powerful warning never to allow oneself to become a System man.

Finished reading 2666 and now I'm ready for 2015! It's a masterpiece from a master storyteller. I was completely absorbed by the different stories, the main ones and the many "digressive" others that enter so quietly and then leave with a memorable exit. The Part about the Critics, about a love quadrangle, is almost mathematical in the working out of the plot. The Part about Amalfitano is an acute psychological portrait of fear. The Part about Fate moves like an American TV series. The Part about the Crimes is almost unbearable to read as it recounts, like a police procedural, the serial killings of women in the city of Santa Theresa. The last section, The Part about Archimboldi, is the biography of a writer. Oscar Fate, a black reporter from New York is at the center of of his story, just as his section is at the center of book, his name raising obviously questions about fate and choice. Part 2 balances Amalfitano's fear of losing his daughter against Part 4'...

Just finished reading The Savage Detectives this afternoon, and loved it for the poignant depiction of the loss of youthful hopes. The formal ambition is also thoroughly admirable. The first and third parts are written by a young visceral realist novitiate Juan Garcia Madero in the form of diary entires. The second, and largest part, consists of the stories of about 50 people whose lives crossed with those of the founders of visceral realism, Ulises Lima (based on Bolaño's friend Mario Santiago) and Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter ego). Written as if they are being interviewed, these stories show how impossible it is to pin down who the poets are; everyone has a different take on them. The parallel in the detective plot lies in the quixotic search by Lima and Belano for the stridentist poet Cesárea Tinajero, the mother of visceral realism.