A slice of Roberto Bolaño’s review of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (from New Directions’ forthcoming Between Parentheses, a collection of Bolaño’s essays, newspaper columns, and other ephemera)——
Blood Meridian is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms in its leading role, imposingly—truly the new world, silent and paradigmatic and hideous, with room for everything except human beings. It could be said that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a landscape out of de Sade, a thirsty and indifferent landscape ruled by strange laws involving pain and anesthesia, laws by which time often manifests itself.
Biblioklept 
Is this review available online somewhere?? I don’t think I can wait until May to read it.
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Couldn’t this statement apply to 2666? I love the comparisons in setting and tone between these two novels.
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@Josh A — totally. I actually thought the same thing
@ Josh (not A) — If it makes you feel any better, I think I posted the most interesting section of the review—but the book is fantastic, just full of stuff like this: Bolano riffing on all his favorite writers and books, but other stuff too. Publication’s just around the bend, but if you can’t wait, you may wish to look for it, although I’m sure it’s in Spanish if it’s out there.
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Damn insiders and your damn ARs. Makes me miss working at Powell’s.
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