Angelo Hernandez Sias at n+1:
The Obscene Bird of Night is a cursed book. Its first translator, already a stand-in, disappeared from the project under mysterious circumstances. Its second translator, tapped to finish the job, never translated another book. Its third translator, some fifty years on, has been asked to revise rather than re-translate, grafting excised segments onto a nearly five-hundred page tome.1 Its author, who meant to knock it out in a few months, got lost in it for seven years, at the end of which he suffered his third bleeding ulcer, received an infected blood transfusion, had an allergic reaction to morphine, and nearly threw himself from a hospital window. Like that other seven-year endeavor, Ulysses, it has kept the professors busy, but the professors (the North American ones) have not kept it in print. It made Bolaño a lazy critic, it made Knopf the CIA, and it made your humble literary servant think that perhaps he should stick to serving ice cream. I’d have missed out. As the novel’s narrator puts it, “Servants accumulate the privileges of misery.”
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