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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Savage Consistency, February 6, 2009
This review is from: The Romantic Dogs (Paperback)
With "2666," Roberto Bolano is now a sensation in the United States. "2666" is a remarkable book, full of engrossing narratives; however, I find "The Romantic Dogs" in some respects more satisfying.
It is common knowledge that Bolano considered himself first and foremost a poet and I believe he is right, although his fame here in America will derive from his fiction.
Many reviewers have spent all their time talking about Bolano and Chile, as if "The Romantic Dogs" is only a political book. However, I wonder if the reviewers made it past the first poem. Yes, there are poems that make reference to political events but how can a Latin American not be political. However, politics are only a part of the soup of existence. Bolano writes about being in the sense that a philosopher writes about being.
"The Romantic Dogs" is an amazingly cohesive work. This is not a collection of poems written as one-offs. Instead, the poems hold together through various rhetorical devices: repetition of images, symbols, and themes.
The overall theme of the work is the shortness of life, the cruelty of illness, the fragility of existence, and the the beauty of poetry.
Unifying images are dreams, blackness, white worms, snow, cars, motorcycles, burros, films, detectives.
Bolano announces in the first poem of the collection that the dream of poetry opened up the void of his spirit and accompanied him through his life.
The first poem of the collection, "The Romantic Dogs," announces this theme. "I'd lost a country/but won a dream." He adumbrates the importance of poetry in the penultimate poem of the collection "Muse:" "she's the guardian angel/ of our prayers./ She's the dream that recurs."
"The Romantic Dogs" presents a brave story--because ultimately Bolano is a dramatic poet--of a dying poet fighting to remain here in being "with the romantic dogs."
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you think Bolano's fiction is good..., January 26, 2009
This review is from: The Romantic Dogs (Paperback)
Roberto Bolano the novelist/fiction writer is often wordy, ambiguous, lengthy (in the cases of The Savage Detetives and 2666), obscene, and utterly lacking resolution. He also wrote some of the best fiction of the past twenty years and is fantastic in his portrayal of the human condition.
Bolano took to writing to writing fiction as a means to support his family, but his greatest love was always poetry. He died considering himself a poet. In one interview he said, "I blush less when I reread my poetry."
After reading this collection, I understand why he always preferred poetry as an art form. Bolano as novelist is good, but Bolano as poet is everything good about his fiction plus his raw, emotive poet voice.
In short, this is some of the best poetry I've ever read. Get this. Although short, only 77+ pages (the side of the page is in Spanish, for the bilingual people), each poem in this volume stands up to repeated readings.
Highly recommended.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Romantic Dogs, June 7, 2009
This review is from: The Romantic Dogs (Paperback)
While I disagree with Bolano about him being a better poet than a novelist, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. I didn't read this because I like poetry, I read it because I like Bolano.
If you're like me, where you're not a huge reader of poetry but a huge fan of Bolano nonetheless, you should definitely pick it up. Most of these poems are excellent, and even the not-so-great ones are still worth reading. Here is one of my favorite poems from the collection:
I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American Detectives
who were trying to keep their eyes open
in the middle of the dream.
I dreamt of hideous crimes
and of careful guys
who were wary not to step in pools of blood
while taking in the crime scene
with a single sweeping glance.
I dreamt of lost detectives
in the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
our generation, our perspectives,
our models of fear.
These poems show an emotional level you generally don't encounter in his fiction, from creepy paranoia to stripped down poems of love and thankfulness. This deserves to be checked out by fans of Bolano and poetry in general.
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