Francisco Goldman reads "Clara," by Roberto Bolano.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear the story Clara by Roberto Bolano.
She once told me that there were three claras in her soul.
A little girl, an old crone enslaved by her family, and a young woman, the real Clara, who wanted to get out of that city forever.
The story was chosen by Francisco Goldman, whose novels say her name was excerpted in the in 2011.
Hi, Frank.
Hi, Debra.
When we first talked about doing a podcast, the first two writers who came to your mind were Bolano and Borges.
Why those two in particular?
Is there a connection between them for you?
There's a huge connection between them.
Bolano worshipped Borges.
He has a wonderful line in one of his interviews where he says, I could live under a table reading Borges, a famous spanish critic said, savage detectives, that this was the kind of novel Borges would have written if Borges wrote novels.
And people were so puzzled by that at first.
Cause savage detectives, this sprawling, multivoiced, sex obsessed, dirty novel, you know, about young people in Mexico City, you know, terse, seemingly cold, seemingly sexless Borges.
Right.
But Borges had this, as my late wife aura Estrada wrote in her wonderful essay called no direction Home, Borges, Bolano and the return of the epic.
When he idealized the novel, it was like he loved the kind of open ended epic form, right.