this is one of the most exquisitely beautiful things that i've ever read: at times, it is so painfully tender that it would break your heart and rearrange it all over again, the whole narrative taking on such a fragile aura about the relations we have with each other and how hard we might try to keep it going; at other moments, it is explicit to the point of being vulgar, a litany of quasi-profanities and crimes that litter the page in a sequence of baffling logic that nevertheless makes vulgarity into something approaching high art.

this is not a complete narrative. there is no closure or pay-off. the events we follow in this book form a tangled mess of lives at various points of intersections, which means that trying to divine both rhyme and reason in the succession of events presented here might be akin to trying to scale a mountain—or perhaps, as a thematically closer metaphor, to make sense out of your own life.

for some, the abrupt nature in which the story ends might be a very big drawback—and i completely and fully understand; but in my case, the lack of closure adds to the book's almost mystical allure. it is messy and there are entire sequences where bolaño simply relishes in literary fixations and lists off names upon names. we get hitched to a turn of narrative that segues into biographies of characters we've never met midway into the book before suddenly turning back onto a road two steps left of the original route: close enough to be familiar but still so very fundamentally different now in size and scope.

in any other writer's hands, it might have been a trainwreck; but roberto bolaño makes it all worthwhile. even better, he makes it beautiful.

there is life here in all its complete and vivid form.