I have been working through short stories by Bolaño, in a collection I bought when I accompanied MBA students to Chile. “William Burns” has that narrative ambiguity that I guess is his trademark: the occasional narrator remark that a detail (or even central element of the story) could be this or could be that, and then the narrator carries on, letting the reader perhaps decide which branch was the one to follow. Since I had just been browsing randomly a few hundred pages of Middlemarch, it is nice to be reminded and have salient the notion that narrators intruding into the narrative, to directly address the reader, is not something really that new. And since I was listening to a fun (if meandering) podcast discussion of Nabokov’s Pale Fire by supercontext, this was especially salient.

As usual, found a nice review and comments at Mookse blog: https://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2010/02/01/roberto-bolano-william-burns/