In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald cryptically alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius”, which plays with the idea of an idealist world created by eighteenth-century encyclopedists to bedevil their empiricist heirs. The passage Sebald had in mind was this: “Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre”. In the preamble to this same strange tale Borges’s narrator recalls a dinner with a friend at which “we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality”. This is of course Sebald’s own fictional methodology, and I believe only a very few readers have grasped the atrocious and banal reality that he wishes us to perceive, despite the myriad clues that are scattered throughout his texts.

If it is not an especially good book of poetry, however, it is a book of some very good poems. The difference lies in the fact that this is a grab-bag of works that show few signs of ever having designed to fit together into a single manuscript and that, without the original Spanish facing the English versions by Laura Healey, would have been not much larger than a chapbook. Not a lot of poetry to show for a life’s work, especially alongside such mountains of fictive prose as 2666.

The pose of Bolaño-the-poet may well be more important – and certainly more powerful – than the fact of the poems themselves, but what might be most useful here is to note the whole notion of Bolaño posing. The unifying – indeed distinguishing – element of these poems, written in a post-Beat free verse that might be closest in English to Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ray Bremser, is the consistency of the pose: the intellectual as tough guy but one who is, at all moments, hard as nails & deeply sentimental. Think of upper limit Jean-Paul Belmondo in the films of Godard, lower limit Charles Bukowski (not as Mickey Rourke so much as Johnny Depp or, had he lived, Heath Ledger). Imagine Kerouac mixed with Camus.

In a recent interview about Jane Austen, Fran Lebowitz said that great art is "not a mirror, it's a door." Mediocre art is a mirror, and either you get it or you don't, either you relate to it or you don't. Jean-Philippe Toussaint? His story is a mirror for a small segment of Europeans and Americans who are obsessed with the World Cup. And, embarrassingly, me. But your own country's mediocre, mirror-like writing is going to hold more appeal than, say, France's. (The Greats, the doors, the Tolstoys and Kafkas and Flauberts don't even enter the conversation of translated literature.) The signs are the same, you know how to decode the jokes and the metaphors, and you probably don't have to Google Image Search plant names to picture the scene in your head.

Humorous take on Dalkey's Best European Fiction 2010

It’s the first Tuesday of the month, which means that the Kwani? Trust (the question mark is part of its name), a Kenyan literary collective and nonprofit publishing house, has sponsored open mic night at Clubb Sound. The event brings together Nairobi’s intelligentsia and literary dabblers.

In the literary world, there is perhaps nothing more insulting than being labelled "insular". Any accusation – such as Nobel prize permanent secretary Horace Engdahl's 2008 comments about the parochialism of American letters – is damaging, hurtful and also guilt-inducing. Insularity, after all, is inimical to literature, the opposite of fiction's artistic goal of understanding others. And it's not just writers who are shamed by the allegation. Publishers and, by implication, readers are often indicted on similar charges, their rigid tastes blamed for the shockingly low availability of fiction in translation.

Found in Translation Award nomination, Deadline January 31st

The Found in Translation Award is presented annually to the translator or translators of the best translation into English of a work of Polish literature published as a book in the previous calendar year.