At the centre of Marion May Campbell’s brilliant new novel Konkretion is Monique Piquet, an aging academic-cum-novelist who is wrestling with the abjection of her increasingly frail body as she arrives in Paris, ‘the site of her lost aura’ and of an earlier self bound up with an emphatically European tradition of avant-garde aesthetics, left-wing theory and radical activism.

We might be moved, outraged or excited by a particular work of fiction, but it barely seems possible to imagine a novel that could change the way we envision the world or the way we live in it. What we have lost, and what Bolaño’s work seems to have rediscovered, is the sense that literary texts can shape, rather then merely reflect, the consciousness of the culture in which they circulate.