Anti-Climacus

Read Bolaño's Tres over the weekend, as part of my general principled interest in everything the man wrote. It's definitely a lesser work, and barely qualifies as a work at all: three big sections with facing-page translation and a very generous use of white space make for a 180-page book that's actually 70 or so. Why New Directions didn't just publish it at that length, as they do with Cesar Aira, Javier Marias, and others, escapes me. Probably because they could charge more for it.

I'm of two minds about the proliferation of Bolaño's work. Nothing that's come out since his death has been as good as By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives and 2666. Much of it is interesting or revealing, but in ways interesting to me as a scholar and not as a reader. Bolaño's inferior works make the greatness of his better works more comprehensible: the reader sees the way in which things do not quite come together, or hint at but fail to develop an interesting idea or theme. They also make it clear what a good judge of his own talent Bolaño was: I'm not as sold on his poetry as he was but his relative appreciation of his work seems correct, and his decision not to publish various of his works almost always correlates to their literary worthiness.

As a scholar with a paper idea still waiting to be written, I'm glad to have the extra material, and anticipate still more. The form of publication is a source of annoyance, being mostly random collections of 150-200 pages of material sold for $12 a go, but once it's all published, it can be collected in a more useful way.

The process is particularly meaningful to me because in my regular academic life I have been constantly frustrated by the lack of these resources for the study of Hugo Grotius. They simply do not exist in any reasonably accessible form. The bibliography of all the editions of his work prior to 1950 (I have the book in my office) is 900+ pages, and yet: there is no completed critical edition of De jure belli ac pacis (the closest sells for $500-$1000 in the rare instance a copy becomes available); there are three critical editions of random religio-political books, but none of De veritate, De jure predae commentarius or his other important works; the best English-language translation of De jure belli is no longer in print, etc etc. Nor is this simply my choice of an esoteric subject: again, 900+ pages of editions and translations, and one of the major figures of European intellectual life for several hundred years. And again, these are academic subjects: surely someone has a few years to kill on one of these projects. All of which makes me think that the publish-everything cash-grab model may not be so bad, after all.