A recent exchange in the com­ments over at Ads With­out Prod­ucts offers an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion for clos­ing the Roberto Bolaño-Roberto Bazlen-​Robert Musil loop that John Latta started and I con­tin­ued. (Advance apolo­gies if crib­bing com­ments like this is poor form):

Scott Eric Kauf­man:

I’ve got to say, I’m think­ing the way a person reacts to Bolaño’s directly tied to their feel­ings about Musil…

CR:

Yes! I’ve never been able to get past, you know, the first sev­eral thou­sand pages of Musil - you must be right!…

SEK:

Less cryp­ti­cally, Bolaño’s novels seem to have that (admit­tedly con­tra­dic­tory) qual­ity of being both a page-​turner and occa­sional. I’m not com­pelled to read them, but when I do, I can’t put them down. Musil was the same way—his pale shadow, Kun­dera, not so much—but this seems to exclude Musil and Bolaño both from the mod­ernist cat­e­gory into which they’re so often shoved….

And yet as soon as I offer the sug­ges­tion, I feel myself want­ing to draw it back.

Well, the finale to my little reverie on Elif Batuman’s LRB arti­cle is now fully two weeks in arrears, and I regret to inform anyone who cares that it will remain so for a bit longer. I sup­pose I should take all the blame upon myself, but I’d like to think that part of the fault is John Latta’s.

He opened his post last Friday with the ques­tion “So who is Roberto Bazlen?” inspired it seems by a ref­er­ence to Enrique Vila-​Matas in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that lead him to a book by Vila-​Matas (this one) that spoke of Bazlen thusly:

Bobi Bazlen was a Jew from Tri­este who had read every book in every lan­guage and who, while pos­sess­ing a very demand­ing lit­er­ary con­science (or per­haps pre­cisely because of this), instead of writ­ing pre­ferred to inter­vene directly in people’s lives. The fact that he never wrote a book forms part of his work. Bazlen, a kind of black sun of the crisis in the West, is an extremely curi­ous case; his very exis­tence seems to signal the true end of lit­er­a­ture, of the absence of output, the death of the author: a writer with­out books and there­fore books with­out a writer.

Latta learned more (and also about Félix Fénéon, who has been reborn on the inter­net as an anony­mous col­lec­tive here*):