Woes of the True Policeman [Hardcover]

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: November 13, 2012

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished novel.

The novel follows Óscar Amalfitano—an exiled Chilean university professor and widower—through the maze of his revolutionary past, his relationship with his teenage daughter, Rosa, his passion for a former student, and his retreat from scandal in Barcelona.

Forced to leave Barcelona for Santa Teresa, a Mexican city close to the U.S. border where women are being killed in unprecedented numbers, Amalfitano soon begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings. Meanwhile, Rosa, Amalfitano’s daughter, engages in her own epistolary romance with a basketball player from Barcelona, while still trying to cope with her mother’s early death and her father’s secrets. After finding Castillo in bed with her father, Rosa is forced to confront her own crisis. What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano that involves a series of dark twists, culminating in a finale full of euphoria and heartbreak.

Featuring characters and stories from his other books, Woes of the True Policeman invites the reader more than ever into the world of Roberto Bolaño. It is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense, yet darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art, Woes of the True Policeman marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Yet another posthumous, unfinished novel by literary giant Bolaño has surfaced, though it’s said this will be the last. While it is no Savage Detectives (1998; tr. 2007), 2666 (2004; tr. 2008), nor many others, Bolaño fans, and there are many, will have no trouble delving right in to once again devour the master linguist’s every word. The story, about a Chilean professor, Amalfitano, forced to flee Barcelona with his daughter to Mexico due to scandal, uses character names and themes from Bolaño’s previous novels and therefore feels somewhat familiar. Still, this is far from table scraps. The work may be incomplete, but Bolaño, periodically tinkering on the novel from the 1980s until his death, in 2003, had nearly created a fully realized world, one begging to be further fleshed out. But even in an unpolished manuscript, his capacity for spinning out pages-long sentences using language in new and surprising ways shows that this is quintessential Bolaño. For writers, the various stages of completion wonderfully illustrate Bolaño’s creative process. With more time alive, Bolaño could have made this another treasure of world literature. --Casey Bayer

Review

One of the “Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2012 Book Preview” titles. - The Millions

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (November 13, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374266743
• ISBN-13: 978-0374266745
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Bolano's Best, But Worth Reading February 18, 2013

By E.A. Grange

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this a great deal. It's not his best, but certainly better than Third Reich. Interesting as an addendum to 2666, though not essential. Some people have called it the sixth book of that great novel, but it's really not. Still worth it, though. A great expansion on the Amalfitano character. The only real knock is that it ends rather suddenly, as posthumously published works often do, and left me with a sense of the story being not quite complete and I really felt like it deserved a better sense of closure.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Four-Star Review February 25, 2013

By Rob M. Fierstein

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This work fits nicely into the narrative space of those that precede it. It is both a gift to see more written by Roberto Bolaño after his passing and a sadness, because, well you know . . . It's as if reaching the end of the line and then there's something unexpected that suddenly catches hold of you for a brief moment, but afterwards the loss felt is all the more intensified. Read this because you're read everything else in translation by Roberto Bolaño; read this because it is a work that stands alone; read this because it beckons to you, read this, "Woes of the True Policeman."

3.0 out of 5 stars Waste Not, Want Not February 20, 2013

By Ted Mooney

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This volume, which Bolaño is said to have worked on from the 1980s until his death in 2003, is most likely to appeal to hard-core Bolañistas and novelists like myself, though it is full of interesting bits. It seems to be a side project to his masterly 2666, also left in a state of incompletion (though you wouldn’t know this unless you were told) at his death, and involves some of the same characters that appear in that novel, Amalfito and Rosa in particular. However, the versions of these characters as portrayed in Woes of the True Policeman do not really gibe with the their counterparts in 2666, and, and though Bolaño does occasionally refer to the former book by its title in his correspondence, there is ample reason to suppose that Woes is to some degree a sketch book for 2666, which he was working on at the same time. In that case many of the sketches in Woes may be seen as warm-ups for 2666, experiments finally omitted from that much more polished masterpiece. Since Bolaño frequently reused characters (slightly altered) from book to book, and never wasted a word he wrote, I’m tempted to think that when he finally had 2666 pretty much where he wanted it, he wondered if he could make another novel out of the leftovers that we now have as Woes. (And you can be certain his publishers wondered the same thing after his death.) Thus for anyone who writes and is interested in how Bolaño went about it, Woes is fascinating, even essential. It is very far from being a finished novel, however, even though there is new material included in it, particularly regarding policemen (consonant with the author’s abiding interest in detectives). For me Woes is a very instructive look into Bolaño’s writing process (“just do it,” in short), and for that I loved it.