Woes of the True Policeman

Roberto Bolano

nov 2012 · Penguin Canada

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Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author's death in 2003, The Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño's last, unfinished novel. The novel follows Amalfitano—an exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. This border town is haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters such as Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers paintings to wealthy Texans. It is here that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life. Woes of the True Policeman is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense, yet darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art, it marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

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Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and 2226 which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.