Sunday book pick: ‘A Little Lumpen Novelita’ is the perfect introduction to Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre
The novel was originally published in the Spanish as ‘Una novelita lumpen’ in 2002. It has been translated into English by Natasha Wimmer.
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
Join our WhatsApp Community to receive travel deals, free stays, and special offers!
- Join Now -
“All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt.”
Roberto Bolaño’s novella A Little Lumpen Novelita (translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer) starts in the future as the heroine of the novella, Bianca, clarifies, “Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I had led a life of crime.”
At 600-plus pages, The Savage Detectives and 2666 are Bolaño’s most famous – and lengthiest – works of fiction. In comparison, Lumpen wraps it up in a little over 100 pages. In both forms, Bolaño is prodigious in what he had probably set out to achieve – to make the reader fall head over heels in love with his brand of writing.
Bianca and co
In Lumpen, Bolaño doesn’t bother much with anyone else besides the teen protagonist Bianca. Orphaned along with her brother after their parents die in a car crash, the teens become desperate to keep their lives afloat. They drop out of school – Bianca finds a job at a salon and her brother, at a gym. They have the house to themselves and empty hours are spent watching the television. Strangely, her brother rents X-rated movies...
