Roberto Bolaño

[Stewart]

There's been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere and in some print publications about the forthcoming translation of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. To be honest, prior to this I'd never heard of him, or, at the very least, the copy of The Savage Detectives sitting on the shelf in my local Borders hadn't registered with me.

Anyway, a brief bio courtesy of Wikipedia:

For most of his youth, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain, where he finally settled down in the early 1980s in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes. There he died of a liver disorder he suffered from for more than a decade. He was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland." Bolaño named his only son Lautaro, after the Mapuche leader Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic La araucana.

A crucial episode in his life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution." During his travels to Chile, he met revolutionary poet Roque Dalton in El Salvador. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Salvador Allende, he was arrested; Bolaño spent eight days in custody, although he did not suffer torture, and was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. In the 1970s, he became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. Although deep down he always felt like a poet, in the vein of his beloved Nicanor Parra, he is known for his novels, novellas, and short story collections. Six weeks before he died, his fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville.

It's always a shame, I think, when a writer comes to wider attention after their death. But Bolaño must be good - and by good I mean exceptional - as I feel that what I'm reading on the blogs and whatnot is genuine excitement rather than prepublication hype. So, how good is he? And what makes him for you, so great?

[miriring]

Hello Srewart,
In the new forum of the participants of The New York Times Latin American Lit. forum, we decided to discuss The night in Chile by Bolano.
Would you like to join?
The site is:
http://forums.escapefromelba.com
you just need to register.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by miriring

Would you like to join?

Well I've signed up, but I don't know how you can manage to have multiple discussions raging on all on a single thread. Surely people must talk over each other, with some posts getting lost in the mire?

[miriring]

I don't know what do you mean.
We vote for a book and then start posting messages.
Bolano - The night in Chile is probably the new vote, only in the Latin American Literature thread.
Did you read the book?
I am reading it just now.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by miriring

I don't know what do you mean.

There was a single thread called Latin American Fiction and it spanned pages and pages of discussion. Just like every separate forum on the site had a single thread. Different people could be talking about three or four different books on the same thread at the same time, making the stream of conversation hard to follow. Add a book group discussion to that, rather than have it in a separate thread dedicated to The Night In Chile alone, and I'd find it very hard to follow everything that is going on.

Did you read the book?

No. I hadn't heard of Bolaño until I started reading the hysteria about 2666 on a number of blogs. I've looked up The Night In Chile and it seems to be out of print in the UK. Not to say I can't pick up a second hand copy, but I've sworn off buying books at the moment as I have far too many that I haven't read (almost 500!) and I need to work my way through some of them to clear space as my books are threatening to take over the house.

[miriring]

Stewart,
It is a great book The Night in Chile.
And in www.bookfinder.com
you can buy used for less than a dollar.
I try not to buy more books as my library is so "full"...but you know how is it with peope who love books.

[Morten]

I was severely disappointed with The Savage Detectives...

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Morten

I was severely disappointed with The Savage Detectives...

In what way? I suppose it's good to hear a bit of a negative response to it as I was pretty much going to head into the book (when I got it) on a wave of praise that I could, most likely, expect nothing else but sheer disappointment. That's been my experience before when I start a book expecting the world of it.

[Howard]

And I thought I was alone in the world in not liking The Savage Detectives...

Read the book three years ago (in Spanish) at a publisher's request and wrote a report on it which ended with the words "adds up to six hundred of the most pointless pages I have ever had the misfortune to have to plough through". Needless to say, that particular publisher didn't buy the book, but it was quickly snapped up by another publisher and eventually appeared to enormous acclaim (especially in the USA), with the author praised as the greatest Latin American writer since Marquez.

Guess I must have missed something...

[nnyhav]

Bolaño Englished online (collected from my postings at EscapeFromElba):
Excerpts from Nazi Literature in America:
The Mendiluce Clan, The Many Masks of Max Mirebalais, The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys
Another writer-story, not part of the above: Álvaro Rousselot's Journey
One not about a writer as such: The Insufferable Gaucho

Poem: Self Portrait at Twenty Years

[nnyhav]

via Bookbench, at triplecanopy:

In 1999, four years before his death, Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño won the highly prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize for his novel The Savage Detectives. “The Caracas Speech” is his acceptance of that prize.

(use -> key or onscreen + to navigate thru)

[ions]

Finished The Savage Detectives a couple days ago. While I wasn't impressed by it there were moments that will keep my interest in his work to try him again. Far too much name dropping - places/people.

[ions]

Clara

Good stuff!

[fausto]

There is a problem with Latin American literature: it's always limited to the "boom", a vastly apocryphal concept. Actually, most people outside of the Spanish world only know Borges (though he is pre-boom), Garcia Marquez and al. Or Esquivel and Allende, who both made their fortune on the back of books imitating their predecessors, not bringing anything to the plate. So here comes Bolaño, and where does he fit in? Well, at first he doesn't. And then he gradually grows in stature. And now, 5 years after his death, he is praised by most latin american writers who started publishing in the last ten years. Why? Because he showed a way out of the magical realism trap. He is a sort of godfather for an entire genration. There is no doubt in my mind that he will still be read and commented in 50 years. Future generation might need to "kill" him as he did Gabo and Vargas Llosa (more for shows than anything else) or he might be as revered as Borges, time will tell but he will still be around.

Having read all his books save three, there is no doubt in my mind Bolaño is a giant -- even though some books are obviously of a lesser quality.

I did read Savage detectives first and loved it, although I would admit it's not the best starting place. However, if you think it's "six hundred of the most pointless pages I have ever had the misfortune to have to plough through" either you have only read masterworks your entire reading life or, yes, you missed something. But to comment further, I'd at least need you to elaborate -- as I would need some more details from Morten. 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? 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 Bolaño was trying to achieve, I think.

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

[ions]

And it gets covered:
Trade:


Hardcover:

[Eric]

There are further problems with Latin American literature to those that Fausto mentioned:

a) Brazilian literature is often ignored, as they wrote in the wrong language.

b) Latin-American literature is often equated with the magical realism of Márquez, or the stories of Borges, and if the authors don't fit these Procrustean beds they are ignored.

c) Do we know for sure that Roberto Bolaño actually existed? He sounds like a figment of Borges' imagination. Photos? One or two black-and-white studies of a curly-haired bespectacled man with a fag between his fingers. Detailed biography? Movements? Any second-rate actor could do an interview. I somehow doubt that he died in 2003, as he was never born in 1953.

When you look at the whole Infrarrealistas movement, how many of these people were real, how many holograms?

Roberto Bolaño, Cuauhtémoc Méndez Estrada, Ramón Méndez Estrada, Bruno Montané, Rubén Medina, Juan Esteban Harrington, Oscar Altamirano, José Peguero, Guadalupe Ochoa, José Vicente Anaya, Edgar Altamirano, Elmer Santana y Mara Larrosa

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Eric

Do we know for sure that Roberto Bolaño actually existed? Photos?

From the BBC:

[fausto]

Eric has to be on a wind-up. A figment of Borges imagination? In what ways?

[Eric]

Forget Borges, Fausto. That was just a name I pulled out of a hat. Borges liked subterfuge and layers of non-existence.

What I am trying to say without equivocation is that I think that Bolaño, with his nice little tilde, is the figment of someone's imagination, as is the whole of the Infrarrealistas movement. Showing that same photo of Bolaño again and again, in black-and-white and in colour, proves nothing. Any actor, critic, author could have posed for that photo.

The BBC are as gullible as anyone else. They could easily have copied this photo from a website. Until the Culture Show, with Loo Lav and Kermode, shows his grave, interviews his half-senile mother and a couple of his childhood friends, I will continue to think that "Roberto Bolaño" is a cyber-invention by academics who have not quite grown up.

I would like others, especially those who speak Spanish, to furnish much more proof that this man isn't just a fantasy, made up by sniggering academics with nothing better to do. U read this on the net:

EL INFRARREALISMO EXISTE Y NO EXISTE

And I've seen this picture, purporting to be one of the movement:



But I'm still not entirely convinced.

As there are so many other untranslated authors writing in Spanish, why make more up, when so few are available in English?

So, if these authors are real, and their works worth reading, let's have more details.

Check out this reference:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Belano

[fausto]

Christ...
So you type Bolaño in google, click on images and you'll find on the first page 9 different photos. You will also find on youtube videos of him being interviewed. A dutchman directed recently a documentary where you will see his wife and children and friend talk about him. He was a common, well-known figure in literary Barcelona, gave many conferences in Spain and in latin america, interviews to French newspaper, attended book fairs in Paris and Frankfurt, received prizes that he came and picked up in person, had dinner with Chile minister of culture and fell out big time with them because of his report of it, had many writer friends who wrote columns on his death, etc.

An actor? For twenty years? Dream on.

As for the infra-realists, those who are still alive maintain a website and hold public poetry reading. Fly out to Mexico and see for yourself.