Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author's death in 2003, Woes
of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño's last, unfinished novel.
The novel follows Óscar Amalfitano--an exiled Chilean university
professor and widower--through the maze of his revolutionary past, his
relationship with his teenage daughter, Rosa, his passion for a former
student, and his retreat from scandal in Barcelona.
Forced to leave Barcelona for Santa Teresa, a Mexican city close to the
U.S. border where women are being killed in unprecedented numbers,
Amalfitano soon begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry
Rivers paintings. Meanwhile, Rosa, Amalfitano's daughter, engages in her
own epistolary romance with a basketball player from Barcelona, while
still trying to cope with her mother's early death and her father's
secrets. After finding Castillo in bed with her father, Rosa is forced
to confront her own crisis. What follows is an intimate police
investigation of Amalfitano that involves a series of dark twists,
culminating in a finale full of euphoria and heartbreak.
Featuring characters and stories from his other books, Woes of the True
Policeman invites the reader more than ever into the world of Roberto
Bolaño. It is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense, yet
darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art,
Woes of the True Policeman marks the culmination of one of the great
careers of world literature.