The Spirit of Science Fiction

“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