A Little Lumpen Novelita

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Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime’: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager – ‘our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us’ – she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness at night, and drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can drift lower . . . Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita – one of the last novels Roberto Bolaño published – delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.

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