The treatment of sex in A Little Lumpen Novelita is a sharp contrast between how it's treated in Jim Harrison's The Big Seven. Our narrator here treats sex almost as something that just happens, even if she initiates it. It's not an all consuming drive, or a constant thought. If there are details, they're clinical, as opposed to gratuitous.
Bolaño's work is both realistic and dreamlike for me because there isn't necessarily a clean break or a turning point -- things just kind of peter out. The randomness gives the work a verisimilitude that more classically delineated novels lack.
That said, there's just not a lot here. Maybe that's something I should have expected, given the title. Not that it's bad by any means -- it just feels a little misshapen and abrupt.
