"With words alone, Bolaño summons a visual world, creating in this book, as in his others, what Mario Vargas Llosa has called 'images and fantasies for posterity'... admirers will find in these themes and players a satisfying proleptic glimpse of his picaresque masterpiece, 1998's
The Savage Detectives... [This] gem-choked puzzle of a book... serves as a key to Bolano's later work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions ... [and] is a hardy forerunner that stands on its own." –
The New York Times Book Review "[Bolaño] is a kinetic, epiphanic writer, and even his earliest works tremble like a whirring, unpredictable machine. . .
The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jeweled box of Bolaño's fictions, an index of the images that would come to obsess him. . . . longtime Bolaño fans will doubtless enjoy this familiar cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy." –
Paris Review "An entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel." –
Wall Street Journal "A fascinating blueprint of Bolaño's poetics and of the extent to which he drew from the Beat literature of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac . . . it also has achingly beautiful passages, and its lessons about the reach of American policy resonate to this day. A superbly talented young man wrote it, in 1984, believing that truth reached through art was the only means to revolution. In this sense, it reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave."
–The New Yorker "This is vintage Bolaño: a lusty and rapturous shaggy-dog tale of Latin American exiles and bohemian youth." –Vanityfair.com
"An unusual pleasure to read. You can almost feel Bolaño shaking out his limbs. . . It's a joy to watch such a brilliant stylist practice his moves, and to see such a brilliant mind expand on the page." –
NPR
"An impressionistic and prescient treasure.
" –Jane Ciabattari,
BBC Culture, Top Reads for February
"A minor gem. . . Bolaño's lusty, laughing passion for art and literature, for women and Mexico City, is tangible here." –
Washington Post "An intriguing and dreamy portrait of two writers taking different paths in their pursuit of their love of literature, hoping to discover their voices." –
Publishers Weekly
"A sort of raw spinoff of the extraordinary initial section of the first of Bolaño's international hits,
The Savage Detectives . . . Maybe it's precisely the sense of reading a work under construction that makes
The Spirit of Science Fiction such a pleasure." –Alvaro Enrigue,
Book Page
