On the cover of this there is a quote from The New York Times describing it as ‘A gem-choked puzzle of a book.’ Which is a very fair point. I ended this book and said, ‘I didn’t understand that.’ Which has nothing to do with its being in Spanish, as I was reading a very good translation.

I didn’t really get what it was trying to say, what the point of its existing was. Which sounds horribly dismissive, and I don’t mean it that way. I enjoyed it while I was reading, which didn’t take long, as it’s only 196 pages. But the ending…

Well, let’s start at the beginning. It’s a novel by a Chilean author who is very well thought of, at least posthumously. It’s about two twenty-something would-be poets from Chile, recently arrived in Mexico City. It has three strands. One is a fairly straightforward telling of their life, from the point of view of one of them, Remo. Trying to find writing workshops, learning about the literary magazines of their adopted city, partying.

In another strand, someone is interviewing someone else. The interviewee appears to be Jan, the less active of the two poets. In that first strand, it’s clear he hardly leaves their room. But in this one he has just won a major award. The interviewer may be Remo, but it’s never stated, and there are suggestions it’s someone else.

And in the third strand, Jan writes letters to real-life science fiction authors. Alice Sheldon, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Jose Farmer, and others. They are partly fan letters, partly weird philosophical discussions.

And that’s more or less it. They both get girlfriends, Remo gets a motorcycle. The book ends with a section entitled ‘Mexican Manifesto’, which describes Remo and Laura’s experiences in the bathhouses of the city. And then it just… stops.

Honestly, I feel as if there’s a whole chunk missing at the end. Especially since there are no pages after the last one, either with information or even blank, which is quite unusual.

Another review comment, from the Paris Review, says this book ‘functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions’. So maybe I need to read more of his books, and I’ll understand them collectively?

A couple of reviews linked from the Wikipedia entry suggest strongly that this — an early draft, not published in Bolaño’s lifetime — was indeed the wrong place to start.