Zombie story

Oscar Villalon, former book editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, reads an extract from "The Colonel's Son" by Roberto Bolaño, one of the pieces from The Secret of Evil.

"Revenge" by José Saramago

The boy was coming from the river. Barefoot, with his trousers rolled up above his knees, his legs covered in mud.

He was wearing a red shirt, open in front where the first hairs of puberty on his chest were beginning to blacken. He had dark hair, damp with the sweat that was trickling down his slender neck. He was bent slightly forward under the weight of the long oars, from which were hanging green strands of water-weeds still dripping. The boat kept swaying in the murky water, and nearby, as if spying, the globulous eyes of a frog suddenly appeared. Then the frog moved suddenly and disappeared. A minute later the surface of the river was smooth and tranquil and shining like the boy's eyes.

--from "Revenge", a short short story by the Portuguese novelist, excerpted from The Lives of Things (trans. Giovanni Pontiero), Saramago's only collection of short fiction.

Read it at Morning Star.

See also the story "Things" from the same collection, excerpted in two parts (Part 1, Part 2) in Guernica.

(Via Verso)

Evil contents

The Secret of Evil, the posthumous selection of prose pieces by Roberto Bolaño, is out this month from New Directions. It's translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. I've yet to read it but here's the table of contents. The three pieces marked with asterisks were also published in Between Parentheses, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

0. Preliminary Note

1. Colonia Lindavista

2. The Secret of Evil

3. The Old Man of the Mountain

4. The Colonel's Son--Animated and excerpted (not online) by Granta. Most likely based on the zombie flick Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) (via comment).

5. Scholars of Sodom--About V. S. Naipaul's critique of Argentina. Excerpted in NYRblog. See also links to Naipaul’s essays from The New York Review of Books: Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard, The Corpse at the Iron Gate, and Comprehending Borges (via Ricardo Blanco's Blog).

6. The Room Next Door

7. Labyrinth--Excerpted in The New Yorker.

8. Vagaries of the Literature of Doom*

9. Crimes

10. I Can't Read--Excerpted in Harper's.

11. Beach*--Read a background of this story here.

12. Muscles

13. The Tour--Read a translation by Venepoetics.

14. Daniela

15. Suntan

16. Death of Ulises

17. The Troublemaker

18. Sevilla Kills Me*--A short controversial and unfinished piece. I read an essay by Jorge Volpi (I think through Google Translate) criticizing Bolaño's Spanish editor Ignacio Echevarría for publishing it.

19. Days of Chaos

THE FINISHED COVER

See related posts on The Secret of Evil here.

With thanks to Michael for the contents and cover image.

Photo story

And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

- from "Labyrinth", a story by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in The New Yorker. The story was accompanied by an interview with Barbara Epler, New Directions publisher, in the magazine's blog.

See also: interview with Natasha Wimmer about her translation of the Bolaño novel The Third Reich.

Borges!

Here are links to Borges stories translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with Borges. They are versions of all the eight stories in Borges's story collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Branching Paths).

Foreword
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Approach to al-Mu'tasim
Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote
The Circular Ruins
The Lottery in Babylon
A Glimpse into the Work of Herbert Quain
The Library of Babel
The Garden of Branching Paths

Some background and views on these translations:

The Borges Papers
Working for the Future (via READIN)
Jorge Luis Borges's lost translations
Replacement of Borges/di Giovanni translations

Limpidity and deformity

One quality that’s distinctive among writers of an experimental bent is his limpidity: his prose rarely draws attention to itself; most of the time, the reader is fully occupied imagining what is being recounted and described. Aira has said that the “correctness” of his prose, which he has sometimes rebelled against (as in “How I Became a Nun”), may have been a side effect of his work as a translator. But as anyone who has read him knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well … deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.

- Chris Andrews talks about his translation of "The Musical Brain" (subscription only) by César Aira, at The New Yorker blog. Read more from the interview here.

Readings of Borges, Marías, and Bolaño

Regarding what happened in Symphony Space, there's a podcast with download link here or here.

The program is part of "PRI: Selected Shorts Podcast". Here's how it goes:

0:26 Introduction to Roberto Bolaño

2:08 Introduction to the first story

2:36 “The Shape of the Sword” by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. David A. Yates), read by Charles Keating

21:27 Introduction to the second story

22:15 "On the Honeymoon" by Javier Marías (trans. Margaret Jull Costa), read by Ivan Hernandez

34:15 Introduction to the last story

35:29 “William Burns" by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews), read by Michael Stuhlbarg

Attack of the zombies

"The Colonel's Son", a story of Roberto Bolaño (not online), appears in the Horror Issue of Granta. I'm presuming this is from the upcoming The Secret of Evil.

The story is about "a B-grade horror flick ... on late night TV." What is online is an animation inspired by this piece.

Nothingbutamovie.com is an HTML5-based animation inspired by Bolaño’s story. It was created by Owen Freeman and web designers at Jocabola.

"How not to remember the layout of that house."

How not to remember the layout of that house. The dinning room, a living room with tapestries, the library, and three large bedrooms in the section most recessed, the one that faced toward Rodriguez Pena. Only a corridor with its massive oak door separated that part from the front wing, where there was a bath, the kitchen, our bedrooms and the hall. One entered the house through a vestibule with enameled tiles, and a wrought-iron gated door opened onto the living room. You had to come in through the vestibule and open the gate to go into the living room; the doors to our bedrooms were on either side of this, and opposite was the corridor leading to the back section; going down the passage, one swung open the oak door beyond which was the other part of the house; or just be­fore the door, one could turn to the left and go down a narrower passageway which led to the kitchen and the bath. When the door was open, you became aware of the size of the house; when it was closed, you had the impression of an apartment, like the ones they build today, with barely enough room to move around in. Irene and I always lived in this part of the house and hardly ever went beyond the oak door except to do the cleaning. Incredible how much dust collected on the furniture. It may be Buenos Aires is a clean city, but she owes it to her population and nothing else. There's too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it's back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns of the tooled-leather desk set. It's a lot of work to get it off with a feather duster; the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture.

– Julio Cortázar, from "House Taken Over", trans. Paul Blackburn

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls."

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard Port Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L’Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against the gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

– Julio Cortázar, from "Axolotl", trans. Paul Blackburn