Roberto Bolano- By Night in Chile

Bolano's prose in By Night in Chile is beautiful. I don't think I've ever read such a poetic narrative. Of all the writers we've studied, Bolano seems to come the closest to stream-of-consciousness. He begins telling a story and softly wanders in and out of the primary narrative with other stories and observations but I think the reader is always aware that we are being told a story about the narrator's life- we are inside of his head. The first thing that struck me about the novel was the lack of chapters of even paragraphs. It's so unusual and really adds to the experience of reading the novel as the narrator is sort of thinking it. It was a little difficult for me to get my bearings at first, but once I did, I didn't want to put it down. It is so dense with literary and cultural references and with imagery that I'm not sure where to begin analyzing it. In this sense, Bolano does strike me as quite a bit Borgesian. And like with Borges, I underline far too many sentences just because they struck me as so beautiful- especially from the story about the shoemaker. I think it is interesting that, as far as I know, Bolano's other novels are written in a more traditional style.