After the recent news that David Foster Wallace’s unfin­ished man­u­script of The Pale King will be released by his pub­lisher some­time next year, two more lit­er­ary buried trea­sures have been unearthed posthumously.

Roberto Bolaño:

Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have report­edly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death. The pre­vi­ously unseen man­u­scripts were enti­tled Dio­rama and The Trou­bles of the Real Police Offi­cer, reported La Vanguardia.

The news­pa­per said the doc­u­ments also included what is believed to be a sixth sec­tion of Bolaño’s epic five-​part novel 2666.

William Shakespeare:

Dr John Casson claims to have unearthed Shakespeare’s first pub­lished poem, the Phaeton sonnet, his first comedy, Muce­dorus, and his first tragedies, Locrine and Arden of Faversham.

He also explores the plays Thomas of Wood­stock and A York­shire Tragedy, and claims to prove that a ‘lost play’ called Car­de­nio is a gen­uine work by Shake­speare and fellow play­wright John Fletcher.

That is a lot new of great­ness to read. I’m not quite sure I can handle it. But, per­haps more impor­tantly, Dr. John Casson proves that aca­d­e­mics can write great book titles: “Enter Pur­sued by a Bear.” Although the great­ness lies not him­self, but in his stars…I mean, sources.

This morn­ing I expressed hes­i­ta­tion about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 on account of my expe­ri­ence with The Savage Detec­tives. This after­noon, Wyatt Mason laid those wor­ries to rest:

There are many ways of explain­ing the sudden, stratos­pheric pop­u­lar­ity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. At his essence he was a writer who was always think­ing of new ways to use fic­tion, attempt­ing to get things across to a reader who has seen it all. Bolaño him­self was such a reader, and his books cun­ningly incor­po­rate that aware­ness of fic­tion with­out turn­ing the enter­prise too ter­ri­bly self-​conscious (I would argue that The Savage Detec­tives courts, and some­times is over­come by, a preen­ing lit­er­ary self-​consciousness that leaches life from the enter­prise it’s trying so vig­or­ously to stim­u­late, but that’s a 5,000 word con­ver­sa­tion for another day). 2666, how­ever (as in his per­fect By Night in Chile), evades that tendency.

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*):