Matthew Powell on the Style of Roberto Bolano

I've got a lot of authors that all fall into the "favorite" echelon. but one whose style i find particularly interesting/strange/confounding is Roberto Bolano, the late great Chilean author who died just a few years ago at 50. assuming that his Spanish-English translator Natasha Wimmer has done a good job translating, this description of his style should be fairly accurate (altho might i preface this by saying that his style is hard to define because it is inconsistently consistent, so i'll just name some prominent characteristics in his writing): 1. he is wordy, but not necessarily because of over-descriptions, 2. he uses LOTS of parentheses, 3. he sometimes goes off on tangents, 4. he focuses on narrative (i.e. "these are the facts" or "this is how it happened"), and 5. he leaves endings open for the reader to figure out himself

ok now HERE is parte dos:

Fernando heard his stomach rumble. He walked into his living room and got on the phone with Felipe. He asked whether Felipe would like to go get some food with him. (The conversation lasted fifteen minutes. The word taco was said four times, hamburger three times, car four times, expensive three times, and no twelve times.) In the end they decided to go to McDonald's.

Felipe's truck pulled up in front of Fernando's apartment half an hour later. Fernando got in the passenger seat, noticing the flies buzzing around the old chocolate wrapper by the gas petal. There was dirt on Felipe's boots and his fingernails were black. Felipe's truck rattled out of the parking lot and onto the seven-lane road that bisected the town. Fernando and Felipe talked about Felipe's work at the farm and the cockfight last Saturday. A sedan swerved right past the truck's flank, Felipe yelled, "Asshole!", and they laughed.

They entered the McDonald's restaurant and walked over to the brightly illuminated counter. The adolescent at the counter asked what they wanted to eat. (The boy was Arturo Gonzalez, the son of Sebastian Gonzalez, the actor who had gathered a cult following in Mexico for his portrayal of Fabio the mechanic in Un Noche en la Sonora. Un Noche flopped in theaters but was a huge success on videocassette, and a sequel was under production until Rosa Mendez, the lead female from the first Un Noche, died of a drug overdose. Sebastian had a few more roles in feature pictures, but he soon lost popularity among moviegoers and was promptly forgotten by all those who never saw Un Noche.) Fernando ordered a Big Mac and Felipe a Quarter Pounder. Fernando finished his hamburger in five minutes and Felipe finished just a few seconds later.