Reception
According to Charles Bainbridge, writing for The Guardian:
"The collection is dominated by a series of sustained reminiscences, fuelled by rage and a sense of cornered idealism at key moments the writing pitches a kind of visionary anger. Bolaño seems most at home when describing the sparse Mexican towns near the border with the US and much of the best writing evokes characters, such as "The Worm" or "Lupe", who inhabit this violent world. But the book ends on a very different note with two sudden love poems – lyrical, even gentle – that celebrate the possibility of a kind of salvation"
Sarah Kerr, writing for The New York Review of Books found the poems to be "wonderfully unreserved" while Boyd Tonkin of The Independent states that Bolaño "can sound like a Whitman-esque visionary, as in "The Last Savage", or erotically star-struck, as with "La Francesa" and her love "brief as the sigh of a guillotined head", or lyrically touching, recalling teenage hooker "Lupe" and her lost baby."
Read more about this topic: The Romantic Dogs
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)