Roberto Bolaño

[Eric]

I have found some pretty convincing evidence of Bola?o's existence:

Muere Roberto Bola?o, un gran renovador de la literatura en espa?ol** :: e-barcelona.org :: F?rum de Cultura, democratitzem la democr?cia

Roberto Bola?o - Viquip?dia

So you must be right - this man is not a fiction, after all. There are indeed hundreds and hundreds of articles on him and his books on the internet. The books certainly are real. But there is still an aura of mystery about his person, despite all the details about Chile, Mexico and Barcelona.

I saw the YouTube interviews. My Spanish is not good enough, but he looked real enough. No denying that. But he did dabble in personality shifts or alter egos, like Pessoa, from what I gather.

After Arthur Valdes and others, I'm always a bit sceptical about writers whose biographies aren't immediately clear. But it looks as if you're right this time, Fausto.

[Mirabell]

Christ...

*cracked up*

[fausto]

Unreal.
Say, Eric... I can't find any photos of you via google and when I do a search with your alledged name, the fourth hit is this:
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight Home | Who is Eric?
Now tell me: are you the invention of some bored Newsnight temps staff, let loose on the world wide web?

[Eric]

Fausto, of course I don't exist. I was telling Mirabell at great length only the other day that it is about time he stopped believing that there exists some Englishman, with the surname Dickens, who lives in the Netherlands, translates from one or two relatively obscure languages and reads others (including basic Yiddish and intermediate Finnish) and claims to have lived in Poland, Estonia and Sweden for more than a year, met people at the PEN Club in Stockholm and London, wrote for Newsnight, had one grandfather that was an architect, another who was a coal miner, etc. I think that my inventor did over-egg the languages, and other things, somewhat. That tends to give the game away in the end. Makes a good persona, though.

It takes quite a degree of skill to forge a fictional biography, but I'm beginning to get the hang of it, though you do make mistakes (like claiming to have been born in Dewsbury, inspired by the fact that the town has been in the news recently for less than happy reasons). I'm rather proud of having pulled the wool over people's eyes, really. Nevertheless, I can risk revealing my distortions of the truth and downright whoppers to this website, as we're all friends. I like my fictions, but they shouldn't be taken too seriously by the real people that the rest of you are.

I will leave it for you to guess precisely which Newsnight journo or backroom boy/girl got so bored that s/he had to invent me. But suffice it to say, that I remain a possibility, a kind of Virtual Eric.

[saliotthomas]

How fascinating !

[ions]

The only details we had were ions' and to those I can only say, Stone Cold Steve Austin style, "what?". Name-dropping is used to refer to people using names of many people to give credibility to what they're saying. Can this be applied to fictitious characters? Is Pynchon name-dropping when he used the names of his hundreds of character in Against the day?

Do you know X?
No.
Oh I do.
Oh. That's great, what was he like?
Pretty cool, but not what you'd expect.
Have you been to Y? There's a bar on Main and First where X used to hang out in Y.

And repeat again soon.

Name & place dropping. There's a lot of that in Detectives. Especially when those listed could be obscure poets ya really couldn't care less about.

I don't know... I guess Ions is alluding to the central part who couldn't have worked if names and places weren't regularly used -- any other way and you would have ended with something very different to what Bola?o was trying to achieve, I think.

And no, not just the middle section by the many different narrators, something I rather enjoyed, the name dropping goes on with all the characters. As if it was endemic. It happened too often. Became egotistical. In between the myriad of these moments there are fantastic characters, great dialogue, interesting plot, vivid setting and so on. I'd point out a particular scene I enjoyed but my copy is loaned out unfortunately.

Nocturno de Chile / By Night in Chile is one of his best and definitely a recommended starting point. Short, moving and chilling.

Noted. I will try and get that read before I pick up 2666.

[ions]

A passage I had typed out to save in my quotes file:

There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter kind are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. Let's take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you're calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That's how I see it. I hope I'm not offending anyone. Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he's a limited reader. Why limited? That's easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who's unable to read to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they're exhausted! Why? It's obvious! One can't live one's whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he's cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly ? as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives ? he returns, as I was saying, to a literature for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what's called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, the bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Dami?n, and so they didn't listen.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bola?o p207

[Eric]

Ions, your quoted person makes some interesting points. But I am innately suspicious of people who don't write paragraphs, but just keep going, sentence after sentence. What is he actually saying, beyond that some novels require more application and a greater attention span to read? Is he on speed?

[Mirabell]

I am innately suspicious of people who don't write paragraphs, but just keep going, sentence after sentence

[Mirabell]

started to read The Savage Detectives in the Wimmer translation on the tube and it's a hell of a read. Lotsa fun so far, 75 pages in.

[Irene Wilde]

Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther.

Wow! It's like looking in a mirror!

I think I may have to read this now, however unappealing a title like The Savage Detectives sounds. I'm picturing Dean Martin with a .357 Magnum oh-so-cleverly tucked into the waist of his trousers. I hope I'm wrong.

[Mirabell]

well, Irene, currently there's lots of explicit confused-adolescent-boy-tumbles-into-his first-sexual-experiences-stuff going on. Not as off-putting as Grass' talks with his penis, though. A warning is in order, nevertheless. People who read over my shoulder on the tube recoiled and looked at me as if I was a perv.

[Irene Wilde]

well, Irene, currently there's lots of confused-adolescent-boy-tumbles-into-his first-sexual-experiences-stuff going on. Nopt as off-putting as Grass' talks with his penis, though. A warning is in order, nevertheless.

I hardly think Grass is alone in talking with his penis. Show of hands: men who have not had a word with John Thomas.

Anyone?

Anyone?

[Mirabell]

*raises hand*


men do that?

[Irene Wilde]

In my experience, frequently. He apparently needs a pep talk now and again, especially after a night's drink, and a stern talking to some morning afters as well. Of course, I'm female, so I don't know the full extent of these exchanges.

Oops! It's entirely possible I forgot which forum I was addressing. I think I shall retire for the night.

[Mirabell]

a pep talk???? maybe it's an age thing
or I'm the wrong kind of man
(i.e. one with a penis that doesn't have a brain of its own....)
or I'm a woman
whoopsie-daisy

[Irene Wilde]

Ah youth! When the mojo is unlimited and regrets are few.

Say g'night Irene.

G'night.

[Mirabell]

g'night irene. I#ll be off to bed now, too.

[Stewart]

From the Literary Saloon:

...readers are in for several more healthy doses of Bola?o: as the new New Directions newsletter notes (scroll down, second to last item), they have big plans: the novel The Skating Rink is due in August 2009, and then, 'In the Not-too-Distant Future', they're offering:

• Monsieur Pain (novel)
• Antwerp (novel)
• The Insufferable Gaucho (novel)
• Parenthetically (essays)
• Assassin Whores (short stories)
• Secreto De Mal (posthumous collection of writings-stories, sketches, poems, miscellany)

It seems Bola?o-mania will be properly fed for years to come!

[Stewart]

Looks like the UK will be getting some of the above titles too, following on from the success of 2666, now that Picador (UK) are set to publish them and some of those available in the States too:

Picador has announced its first acquisitions under new publisher Paul Baggaley, including 11 novels by the cult Chilean writer Roberto Bola?o.

Bola?o's epic work 2666 has just been published by Picador to critical acclaim, hitting the top 10 original fiction bestseller list. Baggaley bought The Third Reich, a novel completed by Bola?o shortly before his death in 2003 and as yet unpublished in any language, from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. It will be published in 2011.

Baggaley has also acquired 10 other Bola?o titles, previously untranslated into English, from Tim Bates at Pollinger on behalf of the US publisher New Directions. The first of these, Amulet, will be published in hardback this autumn, alongside the paperback of 2666. The remaining Bola?o novels will be published over the following two years.