I loved this book. Bolaño does this amazing trick - there are sections of this book that could effectively stand alone as stories and yet they work together to create a fuller picture of the characters. I was really impressed throughout.

An Astonishing masterpiece! Full review (Malayalam) :- https://melethilwrites.wordpress.com/...

Traversing life's journey from comedy to tragedy by way of omission. Kinda haunting & will stick to your ribs, but I like the short stories better.

I read TSD for the first time in 2009. It was my first Bolaño, and immediately upon finishing it I headed to the bookstore to buy everything else. When I finished reading all of his fiction the other week, I decided the best thing to do was go back to where I began with him. My first thought: this novel is better and more ambitious than 2666. There are a lot of connections between the two novels, both direct and indirect (Archimboldi, the Sonoran desert, Santa Theresa, Nazism, etc). I'm sure there is a lot in this book I missed. Bolaño is very concerned with the fate of his literary generation (mostly in Latin America but not exclusively). My ignorance about his generation, especially the poets, leaves me outside of this concern. What's so amazing about this novel is that one can come in blind, appreciate only the outline of its (polemical) history and argument about a generation of poets without getting most of the references and details, and still love it. I can only imagine what it'd be like to read if I were part of or knowledgable about the world it describes/mourns/attacks/celebrates. Bolaño, we don't deserve you.

This writing. I'm going to say it. It's visceral. It's so beautiful it hurts. And here's what I mean. I want to rush forward to read the next thing but at the same time I want to savor the sentence, the thought, the image, the slight flicker of delight. I once had an aunt who drove her car with her right foot on the gas and her left on the brake. I feel like that's what I'm doing when I read Bolaño.

I really wanted to give this book four stars, but I simply cannot. I found myself wanting to pick this book up every time I would finish a chapter or so. For pure space and weight considerations, I should not have brought this book with me on a trip to Pittsburgh. Instead, I packed it away, and finished it, with relish.