No te ama

Abstract

her that she has disgraced the family and driven their mother to drink. Fusako writes, “My own personal feeling is that you should apologize by taking your life.” Meanwhile, in America, Sakiko confronts racism, sexism, and her own ambivalence regarding motherhood, while the lonely but haughty Hiroko falls into inappropriate relationships with white American men and struggles as an artist. Unable to fulfill her father’s ambitions for her, she sees herself as a white elephant: “something burdensome, a costly encumbrance.” The novel has virtually no plot, and the point of view changes frequently. Occasionally, the otherwise straightforward narrative becomes overly self-conscious , as in flashbacks relating memories of conversations overheard from within the womb. Overall, however, the collageeffect results in a refreshingly frank portrait of these materially privileged Japanese women. Although the lives of the fictional sisters seem, at times, unbearably bleak, it’s consoling to know that the reallife Mako Idemitsu, daughter of Japanese petroleum executive Sazo Idemitsu, went on to become a successful author and video artist. Suzanne Kamata Tokushima University SPOTLIGHT: CHILE Roberto Bolaño. El espíritu de la cienciaficci ón. Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 223 pages. The continuing polemic about this novel’s publication confirms that it hardly matters whether it disappoints professors fretful about pre/ur-texts, or faithful Roberto Bolaño readers fixated on soap operas starring publishers, estates, and serious critics. El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción exposes what occurs when you read an early version of what makes an author unique (i.e., classic Bolaño), writing in 1984 like his future (mainly The Savage Detectives). A third of the way into the novel one reads, “You know? it was like Marlene Dietrich singing Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ something odd, horrifying, but very close, I don’t know how, but close.” Thus, new readers of Bolaño will be amply satisfied and challenged. Publishers have the prerogative to present posthumous work as new, as do readers to perceive it for what it is. Even so, this prodigious novel casts a pall over others by his contemporaries, just as all of Bolaño’s published prose has. Bitingly brilliant and superior to twists that David Foster Wallace could have envisioned, without academese El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción— which includes an appendix with images of the manuscript and the author’s early notes—shows a superb yet faintly imperfect Bolaño of old, or rather new for firsttime readers. Future characters appear under various guises, like José Arco, a forerunner for The Savage Detectives’ Ulises Lima. Belano, an ever-present mimeograph of Bolaño, becomes this novel’s Jan Schrella, a freakish cultural and literary omnivore who with the beatnik Remo Morán become a wondering trio of nascent poets. Set in 1970s Mexico City, Morán ekes a living by writing book reviews and attending literary workshops; Schrella, terrified by the public sphere, reads science fiction, writing deranged letters to Ursula Le Guin (one signed “Roberto Bolaño”) and other science-fiction masters. Various genres (epistolary, bildungsroman , poetry, a delirious interview that starts and closes the novel) alternate within the frame of a fragmented detective-esque search. That structure, the presence of the mendicant poet Estrellita, and the Kafkaesque “unknown university” prefigure The Savage Detectives and subsequent narratives . Just in that regard, El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción far surpasses previous posthumous works and the expectations of specialists and fans. Bolaño left the manuscript finished and decided not to publish it (such was his brilliance and perfectionism), but we should be pleased to have it. As Christopher Domínguez Michael concludes in his magnificently ironic prologue, this novel is more than a gambit for others, and as such Bolaño’s archive is certainly comparable to Pessoa’s trunk. Will H. Corral San Francisco Camila Gutiérrez. No te ama. Santiago de Chile. Plaza Janés. 2015. 131 pages. Those who know about literature know that what is easy to read is almost always difficult to write. That is the case of the work of the Chilean author Camila Gutiérrez , who appears in the young Chilean literary scene as a...