Роберто Боланьо: A Little Lumpen Novelita

The Final Bolano Novella.

«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. 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, 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 how low she can fall.

Electric, tense with foreboding, and written in jagged, propulsive short chapters, A Little Lumpen Novelita delivers a surprising, fractured fable of seizing control of one s fate.