A Little Lumpen Novelita
Kuhusu kitabu hiki cha kusikiliza
“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime.” So Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita.
Orphaned overnight as a teenager—“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”—she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower.
Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita—one of the last novels Roberto Bolaño published—delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.
Kuhusu mwandishi
Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, France, and Spain. He has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” and as “the real thing and the rarest” by Susan Sontag. Among his many prizes are the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Bolaño is widely considered the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry before his death at the age of fifty.
Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and New York Times. Her translation of his 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.
Gabra Zackman is an actress, author, and narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. She was educated at Northwestern University. A classically trained actress, she has appeared in theaters all over the country as well as on film and television.
