ÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½

Over at the New York Review of Books Blog, you can find an essay from Roberto Bolaño’s forthcoming collection Between Parentheses. (Which Jeremy Garber reviewed for us.)

After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced CamusÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what might have been predicted, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which isÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½”or wasÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½”across from the Alameda, on Avenida Juárez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurais had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall, none of which IÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™d stolen there.

Soon afterwards I left for Chile. If in Mexico I might have bumped into Rulfo and Arreola, in Chile the same was true of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, but I think the only writer I saw was Rodrigo Lira, walking fast on a night that smelled of tear gas. Then came the coup and after that I spent my time visiting the bookstores of Santiago as a cheap way of staving off boredom and madness. Unlike the Mexican bookstores, the bookstores of Santiago had no clerks and were run by a single person, almost always the owner. There I bought Nicanor ParraÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s Obra gruesa [Complete Works] and the Artefactos, and books by Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier that I would soon lose and that were essential reading for me; although essential isnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t the word: those books helped me breathe. But breathe isnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t the right word either.

What I remember best about my visits to those bookstores are the eyes of the booksellers, which sometimes looked like the eyes of a hanged man and sometimes were veiled by a kind of film of sleep, which I now know was something else. I donÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man whoÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s been sentenced to death.