Compelling. Fiercely compelling.
As if Roberto Bolaño dares a reader to put down his novelita after reading the first brief chapter.
"Now
I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of
crime." Bianca goes on to tell her story of the time in her life when
she was a teenager living in the wake of both her parents killed in an
automobile crash.
Bianca and her brother continue to live in the
same family apartment in Rome supporting themselves on a combination of
orphan pension and crap jobs but then her brother invites two guys he
met at the gym into their home. A plot is hatched so all four can escape
grinding poverty.
What a gripping tale. But wait. Let's not
forget this novelita is written by none other than Roberto Bolaño,
author with imagination on fire, master of constructing tales with
multiple meanings.
Let's return to A Little Lumpen Novelita
and take a closer look. Here are a number of facets from this literary
jewel that may unlock hidden mysteries if we choose to examine them more
closely:
One of the few political reference in the book is when
Bianca hears kids shout “Fascism or barbarism!” from cars. Recognizing
in a Marxist context the word “lumpen” refers to lower class people
uninterested in revolutionary advancement, what might be the political
undercurrents of the author’s use of “lumpen” in his title?
Searching
for employment, Bianca looks through the newspaper. “The listings,
whether they spelled it out or not, were mostly for escorts, but I’m no
prostitute. I used to lead a life of crime, but I was never a
prostitute.” However, she does have sex as part of the group’s grand
plan to get rich quick. At each point in her tale, I kept asking myself:
To what extent is Bianca suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?
How is she shielding herself from the harshness of what is taking place
around her and to her?
In the aftermath of her parent's death,
Bianca has a new psychic ability: for her, light is forever shining.
"Some nights I looked out the window and the night was as bright as day.
Sometimes I thought that I was losing my mind, that it couldn't be
normal, such brightness, but deep down I knew I would never lose my
mind." Coupled with the stress she endures, there is the looming
prospect, a la Edgar Allan Poe, we are witnessing an account of madness.
The two men currently living in their apartment look so much
alike they are frequently mistaken for brothers – one is a Bolognan and
the other a Libyan. During the night one of the men enters Bianca’s
room. Bianca’s tells us they made love. She thinks it was the Bolognan.
She
thinks? Very, very strange for a teenage woman to lose her virginity to
a man she’s been living with for weeks and not know who he is. Which
leads one to the question: What is really going on here? Bianca tells us
directly TV and videos play an important role in this story. Does such a
revelation serve as a tip-off that Bianca is creating her own script to
infuse her life with more depth, drama and intensity? Employing her imagination in this way is understandable when we
acknowledge the drabness of her work-eat-watch TV routine.
Taking
a step back we can also ask: Where does everyday reality end and
fantasy begin? Are the Bolognan and the Libyan real people or are they
made up characters playing a role in Bianca’s script? Or, perhaps these
two men are real but the elaborate episode involving a former Mr.
Universe is where Bianca’s mental movie begins. This is but one way in
which Roberto Bolaño displays his mastery as storyteller: to leaven and
color his tale with numerous meanings and myriad interpretations. I
encourage you to read this phenomenal short novel to explore for
yourself.
Lastly, I'd like to serve up a final reflection for consideration. The book's epigraph is from Antonio Artaud:
"All writing is garbage.
People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
All writers are pigs. Especially writers today."
Consummate
storyteller Bianca is obviously erudite and articulate, capable of
great finesse in turning a memorable phrase. If she wrote out her
adolescent saga in sixteen chapters, might not this epigraph also belong
to her? Viewed thusly, we are reading a personalized chronicle
written by a wife and mother who passes harsh judgement on what she has
written - very harsh judgement, for such writing has turned her
into a pig.
Roberto Bolaño, 1953 - 2003
“I
dreamed about the desert. I was walking in the desert, dying of thirst,
and on my shoulder there was a white parrot, a parrot that kept saying:
“I can’t fly, I’m sorry, please forgive me, but I can’t fly.” He was
saying this because at some point in the dream I had asked him to fly.
He weighed too much (ten pounds at least, he was a big parrot) to be
carried for so long, but the parrot wouldn’t budge, and I could hardly
walk, I was shaking, my knees hurt, my legs, my thighs, my stomach, my
neck, it was like having cancer, but also like coming – coming endlessly
and exhaustingly – or like swallowing my eyes, my own eyes, swallowing
them and at the same time trying not to bite down on them, and every so
often the white parrot tried to help, saying: “Courage, Bianca,” but
mostly it kept its beak shut, and I knew that when I dropped on the hot
sand and I was dying of thirst it would fly, fly away from this part of
the desert to another part of the desert, fly away from my expiring
flesh in search of other, less expiring flesh, fly away from my dead
body forever, forever.” - Roberto Bolaño, A Little Lumpen
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