Barry Seaman’s brilliant, rambling monologue covers subjects ranging from money to danger to food to stars (movie stars, star athletes, and the Milky Way) to the usefulness of the sun. In Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666, he devotes a dozen pages of the novel’s third section to a speech delivered by a character named Barry Seaman, a figure apparently based on the Black Panther leader and 60s activist Bobby Seale. I didn’t know that a writer could do that. Some of our most exciting and memorable reading experiences occur when we discover a story or novel, essay, play or poem that seems to us so original, so unexpected, so apparently unaware of-or unconcerned by-past models, conventions and clichés, and yet so steadily faithful to a guiding principle all its own that, regardless of how much else we may have read, we think: This is something new.
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