"amulet"

Is there some sort of rule written that if we like a particular author then we must like their entire body of work?
If the answer is yes then I am in some trouble.

The problem is not that I did not like “amulet” by Roberto Bolaño, but more that I even have to ask. I will be the first to say that Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” did more to influence my writing and me as a person than I can really remember in recent reading. There lies the problem with “amulet” a book taken from a small vignette in Detectives. It has references to all of these characters that I love but it is not really about them. It is about something different.

More confusingly I could never really tell how Bolaño was writing the book. I continually expected the style to become smaller, the stories denser and the writing tighter. I wanted him to switch styles from an epic (Savage) to a novella form (I wanted it to be like the excellent short book “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox a really excellent read and novel/la I would really encourage reading) (The Great Gatsby, The Turn of the Screw, etc.) Bolaño never does this though. He keeps doing what he did before, but with mild variants made more to fit the story than the size of the book. What can be said is that is written in a similar and different manner than “The Savage Detectives”. This work feels less like the work of a visceral realist and more like really good not-so-magical (it is light on magic but heavy on musings on the actualities of modern physics[there is a long diatribe about the nature of time and place that runs through as a general idea as the entire book could be viewed as happening in one moment in a Women's bathroom) realist.

It could be said that I am harping on this book because it is not the book I wanted it to be. To such a question I would respond with “Yes, but why did Roberto Bolaño bother publishing a book that is so similar, but falls so much shorter. Why did he impress us with such skill and talent only to show it used to a lesser extent on a project that from the beginning is going to be second rate.”

Maybe my problem is I have too many expectations of what a book should and should not be. Maybe I invest too much into what a book will be without recognizing that all my favorite literary experiences have been surprises. However, it is impossible to go into some sort of artistic experience without preconceived notions, and in reality mine only existed because I loved the author’s previous work so much which really is not that bad, is it?

It could almost be said in his big books he does not do enough, but in Roberto Bolaño’s small work he tries to do too much.