"Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime." So Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager-"our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us"-she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower. Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita-one of the last novels Roberto Bola̜o published-delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one's fate

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