I found one review and one story whose discovery were perfectly timed. The first, is a review in Letras Libres of a new book by Jorge Edwards. The second is a short story Meeting with Enrique Lihn by Bolaño in the New Yorker. The two items coincide nicely because the Bolaño story, although not particularly evident in the story what role Lihn performs in Bolaño’s personal pantheon, he is obviously someone, unlike Paz, worthy of moving through a dreamscape.

Edwards book, according to Edmundo Paz Soldán, uses a character based on Lihn to represent a generalized view of one whole generation, the generation of the 40’s and 50’s, before Bolaño and after Neruda. The book has many similarities to The Savage Detectives: the bohemian life style, the traveling here and there, the nightlife, the disgust at the established poet, in this case Neruda. But unlike the savage detectives, the Poet’s writing is what takes center stage.

En Los detectives salvajes, Belano y Lima son la periferia de la neovanguardia, hombres en fuga que para resistir al sistema, a la institución de la literatura, se entregan a la poesía como una experiencia vital. Para el Poeta de Edwards, la experiencia es intensa, pero la obra se antepone siempre a esta: “En los últimos días había empezado a escribir de nuevo en uno de sus cuadernos escolares. Eran hileras de versos que se curvaban, se entrechocaban y se desplomaban por las orillas, asomándose a veces en el otro lado de las páginas.”

In the Savage Detectives, Belano and Lima are peripheral to the neovanguard, men in flight to resist the system, literary instruction, and to live poetry as a vital experience. For Edward’s poet, the experiences are intense, but the work is always first: “In the last few days I had begun to write again in a student’s notebook. They were lines of verse that curve and chatter and tumble down by the shore, peeking out at times on the other side of the page.

It is an interesting article and gives a wider frame of reference to Bolaño, especially given the story in the New Yorker. It seems Bolaño wasn’t the only Chilean poet to reject so throughly what came before.

On a different note, the opening sentence is a great little capsule of Chilean literary controversies of the last few years.

El mundillo literario chileno suele alborotarse cada tanto con polémicas genuinas y otras que son más bien gratuitas. En las últimas décadas le tocó a Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gómez debido a la antología McOndo, y a Roberto Bolaño y Diamela Eltit, enfrentados por unas declaraciones nada diplomáticas del primero; este año el turno ha sido de Jorge Edwards (Santiago, 1931), ese escritor de modales tan finos que es fácil confundirlo con un diplomático (de hecho, lo ha sido durante muchos años).