There was a good article about Bolaño in La Jornada’s Sunday supplement this week talking about Bolaño’s views of exile. According to Gustavo Ogarrio, Bolaño didn’t really believe in political exile because it made him a victim, which he was not. He also thought it was pointless to be nostalgic about the old country

“Can you be nostalgic for a country where you were about to die? Can you be nostalgic for the poverty, the intolerance, the arrogance, the injustice? The refrain intoned by Latin Americans and also by other writers in other poor or traumatized zones carries on the nostalgia, the return to the country of birth, and to me this has always sounded like a lie.”

“¿Se puede tener nostalgia por la tierra en donde uno estuvo a punto de morir? ¿Se puede tener nostalgia de la pobreza, de la intolerancia, de la prepotencia, de la injusticia? La cantinela, entonada por latinoamericanos y también por escritores de otras zonas depauperadas o traumatizadas, insiste en la nostalgia, en el regreso al país natal, y a mí eso siempre me ha sonado a mentira.”

The article goes on to talk about the novel Amuleto which takes place in Mexico during one of the darker times in recent Mexican history. The link between the dictatorships of Latin America are clear.

The exile, though, is not just political, but literary, yet the literary exile is, too, often over done.

If the novel The Savage Detectives is interpreted and read as the parodic and tragic dissolution of a certain narrative vanguard in Latin America, represented by the search for one of the founding poets of Visceral Realism—Cesárea Tinajero— and the motive for the wild detective investigation of the poets Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto allows another paralel reading, concentrating a parody of the post vanguard in the voice of a melodramatic and earthy poet, Auxilio Lacouture.

Si la novela Los detectives salvajes acepta ser leída e interpretada como la disolución paródica y trágica de cierta narrativa vanguardista en América Latina, representada en la búsqueda de una de las poetas fundadoras del real visceralismo –Cesárea Tinajero–, motivo de la pesquisa detectivesca y salvaje de los poetas Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano, Amuleto admite otra lectura paralela, al concentrar esta parodia postvanguardista en la voz de una poetisa melodramática y telúrica, Auxilio Lacouture.

Roberto Bolaño: los exilios narrados is well worth the read.