Taking us back to the world and characters of his acclaimed masterpiece, 2666, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolano's last, unfinished, novel.
When Oscar Amalfitano begins an impulsive affair with one of his students at the University of Barcelona he has no idea where it will lead. More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling town on the USA-Mexico border. Haunted by dark tales of murdered women, this mythical place is populated by mysterious characters. We meet Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers paintings to wealthy Texans; Pancho Monje, a son born of six generations of foundlings and Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work has been important to Amalfitano for some time, but whose return to prominence is just beginning.
Woes of the True Policeman is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense yet darkly humorous. Exploring the limits of memory and the power of art, it returns to the world and characters of Bolano's masterpiece, 2666 and marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.
‘[Bolaño] made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievement’ Colm Tóibín
‘Bolaño was one of those rare writers who write for a future time, and we, especially we in the Anglophone world, have only begun to appreciate his strange, oblique genius’ John Banville
‘Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño’ Sunday Times
‘It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius’ Washington Post
‘Bolaño has proved [literature] can do anything’ Scotsman
‘We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius’ Patti Smith
‘Bolaño writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable’ Guardian
‘Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world’ Guardian
‘He has the natural storyteller’s gift – but more important, he has the power to lend an extraordinary glamour to the activities of making love and making poetry’ Edmund White
‘His fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental’ Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator who is best known for her translations of Roberto Bolaño’s works from Spanish to English. She grew up in Iowa and also spent a few years as a child in Madrid. Wimmer attended Harvard University and studied Spanish literature. After college she began to work for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, as an assistant and later as a managing editor, where she happened upon Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. Bolaño’s translator was too busy at the time to work on this project and Wimmer was thrilled to take it on herself. Her translation was incredibly well-received. She has since gone on to translate several of Bolaño’s works as well as the work of Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2007 she received an NEA Translation Grant, in 2009 she won the PEN Translation Prize, and she has also received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her translation of Bolaño’s 2666 also won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year. She is a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches translation seminars at Princeton University. She lives in New York City.
