A Little Lumpen Novelita

By: Roberto Bolaño

Published by Picador, 2025-12-02

Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime. So begins the story of Bianca, whom a car crash has overnight left an orphan and, only a teenager herself, a caregiver to her younger brother. Abandoned by social services, the siblings drop out of school, attempt to survive on their late father’s meager pension, and lie around their family home in an apathetic stupor. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Bianca’s brother brings home from the gym a pair of dubiously intentioned strangers, who move in and make themselves the odd bedfellows of the siblings. When the housemates devise a scheme to escape their indigence—one that involves a blind, aging former bodybuilder, an eerie old house, a fabled fortune locked in a safe, and Bianca’s powers of seduction—she finds herself in a moral haze, forced to consider whether the act that could beget her future may also be her undoing. Taut, tense, and tragicomic, Roberto Bolaño’s A Little Lumpen Novelita tells a tale of dispossession, dreams, and the blurred line between fate and fortune.