Bolano's fragmentary story and Donald Hall's great essay in the current New Yorker

The New Yorker deserves credit for more or less discovering Roberto Bolano and introducing him to English-language readers, though it's too bad they couldn't have discovered him while he was still alive - but his posthumous fame has been remarkable and either heartening or disheartening to other writers, depending on your point of view. I guess we have to assume that most or all of his great works are now in print and in translation, but we will still be getting pieces and fragments, no doubt, over many years, such as the short story in the current New Yorker, which is in the form of an exquisitely detailed picture of 8 French 1970s intellectuals sitting at a table in a crowded sidewalk cafe - Bolano examines each of the writers (some pretty well known, others not) and imagines their lives and inter-relations outside the frame of the photograph - not a great story but a bit of a tightrope walk, a daring experiment, and amusing at times as Bolano thinks about the sexual relations among the couples (and inevitably we keep turning back to the photo and thinking: they did that! with him?) - funny; and also funny that he seems to have introduced a version of himself as a young man (not in the photo) who visited some of these writers at their magazine (tel quel) office and was pretty roundly snubbed - and Bolano, from wherever he is, or his heirs, are now getting the last laugh as he's clearly the greatest writer of the whole nonette. A footnote: the Donald Hall essay, Out the Window, is probably the best piece in the current New Yorker, a beautiful and sad and thoughtful essay on growing old and on the narrowing of one's views and capacities, combined with the deep, reflective sensibility of age - not wisdom so much as perception and acceptance. He describes his world as ever-narrowing circles - but he could also have described it as ever sharper perceptions of a smaller domain.