The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño

I am just back from a short visit to Seattle. As usual, I brought with me more reading material than I could possibly get through in the four full days I was there. Also as usual, I visited a local bookstore and came home with more books than I started out with. I just brought two books with me, which is honestly not bad given my track record, but both books were rather long. I had already started one of the books and I doubted I would actually finish it while away, but I brought the second in case I wanted to read a different kind of book. After finishing the first section of the book I had underway I did, in fact, want to read a different kind of book. But by that time I had already visited Third Place Books and added five additional books to my collection, so I hardly needed the back up book I brought with me. Among the books I picked was The Spirit of Science Fiction, of which there was a stack of remaindered hardcovers on the bargain books tables. It was one of the few Bolaño books I didn't already own. 

After Bolaño's death, I remember being surprised at the seemingly bottomless supply of his works that had not yet been published in English. I'm not positive, but I believe that I learned about Bolaño in the same moment I learned about his early death, in a review of one of his books on NPR. (Googling leads me to believe it was probably this story about The Savage Detectives; I have a weirdly specific memory of driving on the BQE or possibly the Whitestone Expressway when I heard the story.) Then I remember clearly when 2666 came out and I was under the impression that he had just the two books. I got around to reading The Savage Detectives in 2009 and read 2666 a couple years later, and then at some point — I have no idea where in the timeline of all this exactly, though it must have been after I had read at least one of his books — my dad gave me a whole stack of Bolaño books, mostly those published by New Directions. After reading the big two, I read some of the smaller books here and there. I didn't pay too much attention as the posthumous works came out. But when I saw or heard reports that there was a new Bolaño book, I would marvel and rejoice that he'd left so much behind, that there was so much still untranslated. 

I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember hearing that The Spirit of Science Fiction is the last of his books to be published, suggesting they have finally reached the bottom of the volumes he left behind, though perhaps it is just the latest to be published. (Is it even that? I actually don't know for sure.) I had somehow assumed it was something he wrote late in his life, though on reflection given the timing of the publication of 2666 vis-à-vis his death, there's probably not much at all that came later in his life than that. In any case, I was surprised as I was reading The Spirit of Science Fiction to come across characters who were familiar to me from The Savage Detectives. When I looked into it and found it was written well before The Savage Detectives and published posthumously both in Spanish and English, things made much more sense. I enjoyed The Spirit of Science Fiction well enough, but it has nothing on the later works, including Bolaño's other short fiction. As someone with completist tendencies, this wouldn't have changed my decision to buy it or read it, though perhaps I would have chosen a different option from among the books I picked up in Seattle to read at just this moment. But I did manage to start and finish it over the course of my short vacation, so there's that. I read an entire book and a good chunk of another on a four-day trip, which definitely counts as rare for me.