A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano -- (Book Review)

A Little Lumpen Novelita
By Roberto Bolano
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Published by New Directions, 2016
Print : $13.95
Ebook : $9.99 

This little novel starts off with the interesting first line " Now I'm a mother and a married woman, but not long ago, I led a life of crime." Bianca, a high schooler in Rome, Italy is the narrator and the story picks up shortly after her parents are killed in a car accident. She and her younger brother drop out of school because it doesn't interest them anymore and get jobs. They don't have any real skills so the jobs they get aren't really good career choices. Bianca washes hair in a salon and her brother becomes a janitor at a gym. The siblings soon find two other equally ambitious roommates when the brother brings home two dudes who don't seem to have names. They are simply called the Bolognan and the Libyan. Bianca, for lack of anything better to do, begins to sleep with both of them every night. She doesn't even know which one she is sleeping with! In the dark, one of them, the Bolognan or the Libyan, comes into her room, and they have sex. For all we know, sometimes it might even be her brother! Life just bumbles along for them from day to day, pretty meaningless, until Bianca's brother and his two "friends" come up with an idea to score money. Problem is, it might involve some criminal activity.

When a book starts with the narrator talking about leading a life of crime and the blurb on the back of the volume says "Bianca learns how low she can fall" you would expect her to do some awful things, right? I don't know how that jives with what I read. To me, Bianca never really did anything horrible. She doesn't murder anyone, she doesn't steal anything. Yeah, she watches porn and sleeps with two guys, not really caring who it is she's having sex with. Is that bad? She never really sinks to the depths of say, Eponine in Les Miserables, or any number of characters from Dickens. She just has a crappy job, a loser brother, and two useless roommates. Instead of being some kind of anti-hero or villain, she too just seems like a loser.

I know this book is short, clocking in at 109 pages, but you can still tell a whole story in that length. To me, the ending of A Little Lumpen Novelita just leaves you dangling. I wasn't really clamoring for more but don't just stop mid sentence. I felt as though the book was unfinished, like it was the beginning of a longer novel. The back of the book says this was the last book published before the author died, so I wonder if it was rushed just to get something out on the market. This was the first time I've read Bolano, and while I wasn't very impressed, I think he could do a lot better with a longer book instead of cutting himself off like he did in this work. I'll definitely try another one of his books.

My Grade: C-