🦋 Referencing
Bolaño spends a lot of his time in these stories talking about other authors. A long, climactic scene in "Days of 1978" is spent explicating the plot of Andrei Rublev; a central point of interest in "Wandering in France and Belgium" is the cryptic writing of Henri Lefebvre (whom I hadn't heard of before reading this story but who appears oddly not to be the same as the Henri Lefebvre whom I can find via Google -- his dates of birth and death and his life story and (afaict) work are all distinct. Seems very strange to reference a name, a name "B does not know from anywhere" and which gets B interested in deciphering his scribblings, and then have it be a different person from the historical owner of that name... (Lefebvre is supposed to have contributed a piece to an issue of Luna Park which also contains writing by Sophie Podolsky, Brion Gysin, Roland Barthes, Roberto Altmann.):
The second day, after finishing a novel in which the murderer lived in a retirement home (although this retirement home seemed more like Carroll's looking glass), he makes the rounds of the anticuarian bookstores; he finds one on the rue de Vieux Colmbier and here he finds an old issue of Luna Park, number 2, a monograph devoted  to graphics and typography, with texts and pictures (and after all, text is a picture and the reverse as well) by Roberto Altmann, Frédéric Baal, Roland Barthes, Jacques Colonne, Carlfriedrich Claus, Mirtha Dermisache, Christian Dotremont, Pierre Guyotat, Brion Gysin, Henri Lefebvre and Sophie Podolsky.
And then a page is given over to describing B's acquaintance with the work of each of these authors except Lefebvre... It seems very unlike what I am used to. Not complaining, not at all.
 Further... The issue Bolaño is referencing is the actual Luna Park #2, which features actual logograms by an actual Lefebvre. If the biographical information Bolaño gives is accurate (and it's hard for me to see how it wouldn't be), this is just a different person with the same name as the Lefebvre profiled in the Wikipædia article linked above.
posted evening of Friday, April 23rd, 2010
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