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June 13  we are in Cumberland visiting Dad and Anne is there in the photo at Bob Evans.  Maybe this is after Aunt Eleanor's funeral?  or right before? 

June 16   Bolaño's idea of art

Finished the collection of stories called "Last Evenings on Earth."  Trying a little bit not to be too swayed by the "Bolaño bandwagon" that has been circulating the literary mansion for the past five years, but I did enjoy this book & it seems every time I read a Bolaño I look back once again to this Francine Prose essay and skim parts of it.  "Dentist" is indeed, I found, a haunting story, just as Prose claims.  Bolaño seems to be a master of what I'm terming "prose poetry" story telling.  He brings together what seem to be improbably associated elements---characters, situations, odd, ordinary details and all of it loosely woven in a generally boring tale of aimless wandering by the narrator, and then before you can notice just where or how he does it, some sleight of hand, he ta-da's the whole assemblage into a powerful yet not-easily sum-up-able coherence or gestalt-cloud (to try to be literary-theory-ish).  I would say he works some "magic" but he is clearly against the old "magic realism," so that term won't do.  Prestidigitation, then?

Or--how about doing it this way---"Dentist" : A warm blend of sparkling cynicism and fresh failure; Clean musk of dissonance between two friends, amid spicy glimpses of life in poor hamlets where a young man demonstrates nuances of literary genius and ignorant indifference.

Stolen---the mode---from a little bottle of shampoo from the Silver Spring Crowne Plaza Hotel.  Laughter at how everything is imitating wine tasting lingo, even shampoo.  So why not literary opinionizing?

Francine Prose's 2006 NYT article---from that

In one of the most haunting stories, "Dentist," Bolaño comes close to expressing his own aesthetic principles. The narrator is visiting an old friend, a dentist who introduces him to a dirt-poor Indian boy with whom he seems to be infatuated and who turns out to be a literary genius. In the course of a long evening of inebriated conversation, the dentist expounds on the nature of art:

"That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story. . . . The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie."

Like Bolaño's work, this definition of fiction is at once transparent and opaque, lucid and elusive. And yet we intuit what he means. Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.

Francine Prose  NYT 2006