Woes of the True Policeman
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Narrated by:
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Armando Durán
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By:
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Roberto Bolaño
About this listen
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 Oscar 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.
©2011 The Heirs of Roberto Bolano; Translation copyright 2012 by Natasha Wimmer (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes."
By: Emmanuel Carrère, and others
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
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A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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The Meursault Investigation
- By: Kamel Daoud, John Cullen - translator
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus' classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: He gives his brother a story and a name - Musa - and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
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An enthralling double feature!
- By Kaui on 06-28-16
By: Kamel Daoud, and others
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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Maya's Notebook
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Maria Cabezas
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Neglected by her parents, 19-year-old Maya Nidal has grown up in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother Nini is a force of nature, a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973. Popo, Maya's grandfather, is a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya's adolescence. When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime in a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas.
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Narrator ruins this book
- By R.J. Mulder on 05-13-14
By: Isabel Allende
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed contains a dozen short works by John Irving, beginning with three memoirs, including an account of Mr. Irving’s dinner with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The longest of the memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend,” is the core of this collection.
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Unabridged?
- By K. Stiffler on 02-11-22
By: John Irving
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
What listeners say about Woes of the True Policeman
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JZMW
- 08-01-16
Like a window into the soul of the bolaño-verse.
This elucidates so much of what is often unsaid in the narratives of 2666 and Savage Detectives. As its own piece, a rumination, we see into Bolaño's mind and it is glorious to see, as if happening contemporaneously with our reading this book is Bolaño's persistent formulation of these characters and themes.
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- Barbara
- 02-01-13
Outtakes maybe, but not very funny
I loved 2666 and didn't want it to end, so naturally I chose this book, recently published posthumously. Some of the characters had the same names as those in 2666, The works of fictional author Archimbaldi showed up--in fact there is a list of his complete works. What's wrong with this, I asked myself? Why am I falling asleep? Why don't I care about these people? This novel lacks the sparkle and polish of Bolano's other works. It lacks humor. I often felt like these were scenes he had tried out for 2666 and then discarded in favor of more interesting ones. t was interested, and I finished it, mainly as a window into Bolano's process and style.
That said, there is a beautiful and touching series of letters near the end of the novel that were worth staying for.
I could not sort out if the narration was a problem or not. It was easy enough to follow.
If you haven't read Roberto Bolano yet, try the Savage Detectives or 2666.
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1 person found this helpful