The writer who died way too young

The story of Roberto Bolano is sad, instructive, frustrating, heartbreaking, enraging - choose your adjective, all can apply. The poor guy could hardly earn a nickle while he was alive, apparently moving around from Latin America to Spain, perhaps some time in the U.S., doing a lot of writing, a little bit of publishing (nothing translated into English, or alomst nothing), dying way too young (about 50) of cancer, leaving behind lots of manuscripts, then, bang!, The New Yorker "discovers" him, publishes a story or two, and then nobody can get enough of Bolano, book after book comes out, each one raved about by reviewers, receiving awards, published in beautiful editions, complete success, way too late (for him). How about for us? I think I've posted on Bolano before, and I continue to read his work as it becomes available, am always amazed by his sensibilities, his ability to set a scene and evoke a world, a world so different from mine in most ways (Latin, footloose, kind of crazy) yet similar in others (literary passions, youthful ambition). His best stories, such as the oft-anthologized one about his trip to the coast with his father, stand up to any other fiction. Others start very well, create a mood or establish an offbeat, eccentric, lonely character but don't develop much beyond the premise. The story in this week's New Yorker, The Prefiguration of Lalo [?], is more of the latter - though maybe it's part of a longer work to come? Lalo tells his life story, or more accurately the story of his mother, a Colombian porn star, and some really intriguing minor characters appear, but to some degree the story is an opportunity for Bolano to do one of his "lists," a series of one-paragraph descriptions of various porn scripts (whole sections of his novel 2666 are devoted to lists on unseemly topics), whereas at other moments it's tender and provocative. I have to think that we may be doing some bottom-fishing here among the last remaining untranslated Bolano manuscripts, but who knows?