incredible. still hits me square in the chest like the first time.  Bolaño manages to squeeze so much in there from the references to the compression of time to the abstract imagery. It all flows together in one long stream of complicity and doomed resignation that literature, despite being important, doesn't really amount to much. along the way we get the importance of literature to politics and social movements and the necessity to act in one's historical moment. the part about the salons opening like a series of mystical roses or the hawk poetically killing starlings in a red dawn or the jump scare of what's underneath the Canales's house has stayed with me to to this reread. 

need to check out in more detail: neruda, nicanor, opus dei in chile, and a lot more