Sunday book pick: ‘A Little Lumpen Novelita’ is the perfect introduction to Roberto Bolaño’s oeuvre

“All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt.”

Roberto Bolaño’s novella A Little Lumpen Novelita (translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer) starts in the future as the heroine of the novella, Bianca, clarifies, “Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I had led a life of crime.”

At 600-plus pages, The Savage Detectives and 2666 are Bolaño’s most famous – and lengthiest – works of fiction. In comparison, Lumpen wraps it up in a little over 100 pages. In both forms, Bolaño is prodigious in what he had probably set out to achieve – to make the reader fall head over heels in love with his brand of writing.

Bianca and co

In Lumpen, Bolaño doesn’t bother much with anyone else besides the teen protagonist Bianca. Orphaned along with her brother after their parents die in a car crash, the teens become desperate to keep their lives afloat. They drop out of school – Bianca finds a job at a salon and her brother, at a gym. They have the house to themselves and empty hours are spent watching the television. Strangely, her brother rents X-rated movies from the video parlour and the two watch them as they’d any other TV show.

Bianca worries she might dream about the “filth” she watches, but instead, she dreams about the desert and being in great pain as she makes her way through it. The videos encourage odd questions from her brother – for instance, he asks her if she’s still a virgin. As for himself, he falls in love with an adult star whom he has only seen on the screen.

The brother takes to bodybuilding obsessively – as Bianca calls it, “sit-ups and other things” – while the exact nature of his job at the gym remains a mystery. She cannot say whether he’s a trainer or a cleaner there. Soon, he brings over a Libyan and Bolognan whom he has apparently befriended at the gym. Their names aren’t revealed and neither are their physical descriptions besides that both look similar. They set up camp in the siblings’s home and though their sources of income are not mentioned, they help Bianca out by cleaning after themselves and keeping the house spotless.

Bianca takes to sleeping with them in turns but all the while she seems uninterested in really knowing her bedmates. In time, the brother and his guests convince – or perhaps coerce – Bianca to seduce a bodybuilder to steal a fortune that they believe is hidden in a locker somewhere inside his villa.

The bodybuilder is hardly a looker – though he had won the “Mr Universe” title twice, he is blind in both eyes, has no hair on his head, and is curiously smooth all over. Bianca addresses him as Maciste, one of his many names. Her pride in never prostituting herself despite having lived a life of crime seems quite misplaced here, though, of course, it is also indicative of the wilful dissociation that victims of abuse are often known to practice.

Taut with tension

The reader isn’t made privy to Bianca’s crime-related adventures until her marriage, but one deduces that this episode with Maciste might be her first taste of criminal activity. Bolaño employs unsettling homes, indiscriminate sex, and unknowable characters to create an atmosphere of psychological terror where you know something horrible is waiting to happen. In Lumpen, Bolaño practices tremendous restraint by refusing to give away anything, either about the plot (which, there is very little of) or the protagonist who is steering it. He keeps the reader on their toes even though they already know they’ll be left with more questions than answers.

This is very similar to how he treats his protagonist Bianca too. Even after she is out of this particular situation with the Libyan, Bolognan, and Maciste, she reflects on how she “lived on tiptoes” – an indication that like us, she’s not fully out of the story yet and is still trying to grapple with the circumstances that led to prostituting herself. At one point, Bolaño even presents the possibility of Bianca developing feelings for Maciste – she insists he’s never violent with her, pays her handsomely, and doesn’t mind her asking about his lost eyesight – and having a “future” with him. The prolonged seduction doesn’t lead to any violence from the Bolognan or Libyan either, even though it must surely be an impediment to their time-bound scheme.

Bolaño refuses to offer a confrontation or climax. Nothing really happens but the carefully-crafted tension latches onto you. Just like Maciste’s villa, Lumpen is dark, sinister, yet enchanting. There’s almost a fairytale-like quality to it in the way the rooms and the halls, and the corners and crevices of the characters’s hearts and minds provide endless possibilities about who the villain or the victim might be. With every chapter, you change sides. Bolaño withholds information and stretches the tension till it can no longer be manipulated by him – Lumpen is exactly as taut as it needs to be.

The author breaks every rule of fiction writing as he leaves plots, subplots, and threads hanging. There is no need to connect them or answer the questions that might pop up in the reader’s head. The plot ceases to exist, so do the characters – the only thing that matters hereafter is what is left (quite literally) in the dark. The reader has walked into a scene of the crime and Bolaño just throws incomplete thoughts at them to make of them what they will.

Like most remarkable horror stories, Lumpen does not divulge the details. There are no jump scares, no grand revelations, no epiphany. The macabre lies in the unsaid and the un-done. A Little Lumpen Novelita is the perfect introduction to Bolaño – it is the hunger-inducing appetiser to prep you for a more scrumptious, elaborate main course.

A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto, Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Penguin.