Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño Short Stories Overview at the Guardian UK

~ bythefirelight

The Guardian UK has a good overview of some of Roberto Bolaño’s short stories. (Tip: make sure you read through the comments. There is further suggestions of what to read from the author, Chris Power)

It is impossible to write about any one strand of Bolaño’s work in isolation, because nearly all of it inhabits one sprawling intertextual territory. Speaking in 1998 he said, “I consider, in a very humble way, all my prose, and even some of my poetry, to be a whole. Not only stylistically, but also as a narrative.” Enjoying contrariness, Bolaño rowed back from this statement elsewhere, but the recurrence of characters, themes and incidents in his work is undeniable. His alter ego Arturo Belano, for example, features in or narrates many of the short stories, as well as being a lead character in the novel The Savage Detectives, and the narrator of the novels Distant Star and – according to a note in Bolaño’s papers – 2666.

Bolaño’s stories take the form of fragments of memoir (“Sensini”, “The Grub”), unsolvable detective stories (“Phone Calls”), or anxious transmissions from a region between dream and reality (“The Dentist”). Sometimes, as in “Gómez Palacio”, they feel like all three at once. An account of a writer going to a remote town in northern Mexico to interview for a teaching post, the story establishes its strange air of lassitude and dread at once: “I went to Gómez Palacio during one of the worst periods of my life. I was twenty-three years old and I knew that my days in Mexico were numbered.” The narrator discusses poetry with the director of the art school, has bad dreams (Bolaño’s work is clotted with dreams), and stands in the room of his isolated motel “looking at the desert stretching off into the dark”. Parked at dusk in the desert in the director’s car, a situation with a vague sexual potential that perhaps neither party wants to realise, a man pulls in a few metres ahead of them. “It’s my husband, the director said with her eyes fixed on the stationary car, as if she were talking to herself.” The cars sit in silence. When the writer drives away the man in the other car “turned his back to us and I couldn’t see his face.” The director then tells the writer she was joking, that it wasn’t her husband after all.

Chile After the Boom

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Lina Meruane has an article (in Spanish) about Chilean authors after the Boom and after Bolaño. She mentions five authors which are worth looking at, including Diamela Eltit and Pedro Lemebel who most inherit from Donso. (Via Moleskine)

España se despide por estos días de su vieja criatura: el boom. Es un instante de duelo por la muerte de Carlos Fuentes y de nostalgia por la salida de escena de Gabriel García Márquez. (Acecha, además, el fantasma de Roberto Bolaño, que llegó a vislumbrarse como posible sucesor.) Junto con la deriva de Mario Vargas Llosa, que desde hace años sostiene un diálogo tenso con la cultura contemporánea, todas esas desapariciones se han vuelto una instancia única para examinar aquello que quedó a la sombra de esos escritores mayúsculos. Visto desde Chile o visto desde mi ventana fronteriza (un sitio de observación móvil entre Santiago y Nueva York) los autores del boom son menos una generación literaria que estrellas nacionales unitarias, estrellas internacionales nada fugaces que encandilaron a los lectores opacando el brillo de obras que no atravesaron la frontera. La literatura latinoamericana fue solo conocida por figuras solitarias (no ha habido hasta ahora espacio para más de un escritor, nunca para las deslumbrantes escritoras que fueron sus pares). La escritura chilena ha quedado a la sombra de José Donoso, nuestro embajador minoritario del boom con su extravagante novela El obsceno pájaro de la noche, y de Bolaño, que sostuvo, desde la ficción y la polémica, una relación nada diplomática con su origen. Sólo al desaparecer ambas figuras (y nombro solo a la narrativa, pero la poesía también ha cargado poetas estelares) se abre el espacio de la lectura, se buscan voces ocultas. Pienso que la prosa viva que surgió en el declive de Donoso es ahora visible en la obra poderosa de dos autores menos favorecidos por el brillo siempre caprichoso del mercado: las novelas de Diamela Eltit y las crónicas de Pedro Lemebel…

Andres Neuman’s New Novel

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Andres Neuman’s newest novel came out about a week ago. It is a departure from Traveler of the Century in that it is about three people: a dying man, the woman who takes care of him, and their son. In some ways it follows on some of the stories he wrote in Hacerse el muerto (read my review). In addition to the write up of the novel, this article also talks about his relationship with Roberto Bolaño.

Estas vivencias traumáticas han dirigido sus pasos hacia Hablar solos (Alfaguara). Una novela breve, concisa, rauda. Dolorosamente placentera. Fulminante como los pensamientos, desgranados en capítulos en primera persona, de sus tres protagonistas: el moribundo, su cuidadora y el hijo fruto del amor que han compartido y que se desvanece. Porque lo que logra Neuman, en última instancia, es una disección, urgente en las formas y trascendente en el fondo, del amor: de su enfermedad, de su tratamiento, de su agonía y pérdida.

En los orígenes de Hablar solos se encuentra también La muerte de Iván Ilich, de Tolstói. O, más bien, la voluntad de darle la vuelta a aquella narración. De convertir al expirante en objeto y traer a quien lo asiste a un primer plano. “En la road movie o el road book clásico se narra una experiencia masculina. Desde Ulises en la Odisea a Cormac McCarthy. Hay una exclusión, que ha atravesado todas las épocas, del rol de la mujer. Ese rol, como mucho, es el de Penélope: esperar al héroe. Es lo que tantas veces se les pide a las mujeres y a los personajes femeninos: que sean insoportablemente abnegados ”. Por eso, su protagonista femenina se convierte en una suerte de “Doctora Jekyll & Lady Hyde de los cuidadores, una madre preocupadísima por la seguridad de su hijo, una esposa totalmente leal y una cuidadora incansable que, al mismo tiempo, termina siendo una mujer infiel”

Granta en Español 13 Featuring Mexican Writing + New Bolaño

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The new Granta en Español has or is about to come out. It is featuring writers from Mexico in an edition that focuses on narco lit and anti narco lit, in a kind of battle of opposites. From El Pais

Siempre ha estado ahí pero, en los últimos años, se ha visto eclipsada por la repercusión mediática y editorial de la violencia y el narcotráfico. La literatura mexicana nunca se ha desprendido de los temas eternos: amor, muerte, ambición, venganza y la exploración de la condición humana en sus múltiples vertientes. Es verdad que el contexto influye en la obra de los autores, pero la mayoría ha elegido la ficción más allá de la realidad despiadada y desalmada para adentrarse en otros mundos, aunque parezca que los mexicanos solo escriben de violencia. Una especie de forzado duelo temático: narcoliteratura contra no-narcoliteratura.

“No puedo concebir un país cuya literatura esté ocupada por un solo tema: la crónica del narco. Sería extrañísimo, una especie de cárcel mental”, señala la escritora Verónica Murguía (México, 1960). “Vivir aquí equivale a pensar mucho en el narcotráfico, pero no necesariamente escribir de ello. Me parece normal que haya escritores que se ocupen de otros asuntos en otros registros”.

It does sound interesting although I don’t like fragments. Usually they read flat. And I’m not so sure I like the inclusion of Sandra Cisneros. Nothing against Cisneros, but I know who she is already.

In the same edition is a previously unpublished piece from Bolaño

Dos miradas sobre la vida de Roberto Bolaño: una personal y otra intelectual. Dos piezas rescatadas de su archivo y cedidas por sus herederos a la revista Granta en español en el número 13, dedicado a la otra literatura mexicana: la de la no violencia. Textos que sirven, al haber estado el escritor chileno tan vinculado a México, para conectar la literatura del pasado de aquel país con la del presente.

Guatemalan Writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa Profiled in El Páis

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El Páis has an excellent, must read profile about the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa (lately El Páis hasn´t seemed so must read). I hadn´t heard about him before but as someone who lived in Guatemala for a little bit his work sounds interesting. Bolaño mentioned him as an important author. A few of his books have been published in English.

Sentado en la cafetería de un hotel madrileño, Rey Rosa es a la vez parco, delicado y rotundo, como sus libros, escritos en una prosa sin materia grasa y que rara vez, es el caso, sobrepasan las 200 páginas. El suyo es un estilo sin adornos, pero no frío, en todo caso, “una enorme cámara frigorífica en donde las palabras saltan, vivas, renacidas”, según la descripción de Roberto Bolaño, que siempre señaló a su colega como uno de los grandes narradores de su generación. Títulos como Piedras encantadas, Caballeriza, El material humano o Los sordos han ido pintando poco a poco el mural de contrastes de la Guatemala actual, pero Rey Rosa insiste: ni plan ni tesis. “Hay quien divide a los escritores en dos: los que tratan de explicar algo y los que tratan de explicarse algo. Yo soy de la segunda clase. No sé más que el lector al que estoy hablando. Escarbo mientras escribo”.

[…]

¿Y qué puede hacer la literatura? “En mi caso, enterarse”, responde Rey Rosa. “No creo que la literatura tenga grandes efectos, pero sí puede desatar una reflexión. Un trabajo de ficción serio puede ser un instrumento de conocimiento, no sociológico ni etnológico, simplemente humano. El hecho de tratar de explicarse las cosas ya afecta. No soy optimista y no quiero decir que sea algo bueno, pero sí que la actitud de querer entender cambia la percepción de la realidad. Sobre todo desde el punto de vista de los que somos parte del sistema queramos o no, los que estamos bien, los que vivimos… Quien más quien menos, ahí estamos todos y somos una minoría: yo, los lectores de mis libros… a ellos sí que puedo incomodarles un poco. Eso es lo único que puedo hacer. Sugerir cierta autocrítica. En estos ejercicios narrativos míos hay una especie de autocrítica como clase”. Y añade entre risas: “Pertenezco a una clase bastante desagradable. Supongo que lo que marca la diferencia es decir: pertenezco a ella, pero no me siento cómodo”.

Natasha Wimmer Interview about Bolaño at Conversational Reading

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Conversational Reading has an interview with Natasha Wimmer about Roberto Bolaño’s latest book to be published in English, The Third Reich. It s a good interview, especially the parts about approaching a Bolaño novel.

SE: It’s interesting that you read the novel’s lack of a strong climax as a positive thing, since I’ve seen a number of reviewers ding The Third Reich for not having that one culminating scene of horror that many of Bolaño’s other novels accustom you to expect. (For my own part, I liked the anti-climax, regarding it more as a failure of Udo’s transformation than of Bolaño’s imagination.) To tie this in to your reading of the book as a farce, do you think there’s a certain perception out there of what Bolaño represents and that a book like Third Reich will be judged in terms of what’s accepted “Bolaño” instead of simply on its own terms?NW: Yes, I do think that there is a certain expectation of what a Bolaño novel will be, and I worried from the beginning that critics wouldn’t appreciate The Third Reich. Mostly I thought they would have problems with it on a sentence level, because Bolaño’s prose is thinner and more transparent than usual, with fewer of the oblique-lyrical moments that so dominate a novel like By Night in Chile, for example. My sense of the book, though, is that it’s one giant oblique-lyrical moment, and that the pacing is what gives it its stylistic edge and distinctiveness. It’s a book that leaves you feeling off-balance without realizing quite why, because the effect develops so gradually. I like your interpretation of the anti-climax as a reflection of the failure of Udo’s transformation, although I do think that he’s changed—diminished, or somehow shrunken—by his loss of faith in gaming, absurd or creepy as that faith was.

An Alternate Bolaño in Exile – a Short Story from Álvaro Bisama

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Letras Libres has a short story from the Chilian author Álvaro Bisama in its July issue. It follow the life of an exile who returns to Chile in 1988 after a 14 year exile. The man is an artist (se dedica al arte, pinta, escribe, dibuja, esculpe, lo que quiere decir que no se dedica a nada / he dedicates himself to art, painting, writing, drawing, sculpture, which is to say he dedicates himself to nothing) who lives in Valparaiso. He spends his time going to bars, meeting women, reading, and studying an obscure book of poetry by a mysterious and obscure poet. He reads like a character from Bolaño or a version of  Bolaño as if he had returned to Chile. The exile tries to turn the book into a novel then a movie script, which is for this man, is a Sisyphean task. The poet is a strange man who believes in Lovecraft’s phantasms and is more interested in narrating stories about surrealist poets who eat them selves in acts straight from Dali. Crypta is told in a very plain style and one has the sense of gloominess that overhangs every thing. Isolation is everywhere, between the exile and the people he knows, and the exile and the reader, as much of what we know of the exile are his actions, not his thought. The exile’s life is as if the exile continues at home, and most of all becomes a form of exile that one never returns from.

I’m not sure if the story is enough to make me want to read more yet. But you can read some interview with him here and here.

Tiene treinta años y viene llegando del exilio. Es 1988 y desembarca en el puerto. No importa su nombre en esta historia que, si se mira bien, es solo una anécdota. Lo que dejó atrás es la memoria de una infancia donde existían otros colores, otros aromas. Se fue el 74, lo que recuerda –la memoria es una lejanía desolada– es el vértigo y un mundo que desapareció. Pero nada más. No le interesa recordar. Así que eso es todo, ese es el punto de partida. Así que recapitulemos: borrón y cuenta nueva al regreso, treinta años, 1988, el puerto. Eso basta para comenzar. A su llegada, no tiene un trabajo seguro. Vive en la casa de una pareja de amigos. Él es profesor y ella enfermera.

La casa queda en los altos del cerro que se eleva en el punto exacto donde alguna vez estuvo el barrio rojo de la ciudad. Sobre ese barrio rojo se escribieron novelas y se filmaron películas pero ahora ya no queda nada salvo eso: las películas y los libros. Pero la vista desde su balcón es impresionante. Cuando se levanta, puede ver la bahía al amanecer y la lentitud de los buques al entrar y salir de la rada. Hace durar los ahorros. Les paga un arriendo mínimo a sus amigos y se dedica al arte, pinta, escribe, dibuja, esculpe, lo que quiere decir que no se dedica a nada; simplemente deambula por el puerto, bebe en los bares, se escurre en la frágil bohemia de los fines de dictadura. A veces se acuesta con novias ocasionales, muchachas que le preguntan por su acento, sus viajes y con las cuales comparte algunas tardes. Él, se hace entender, es poeta y, por ende, lee mucho.

Aquello es falso pero no demasiado, lee mucho pero no es poeta. Alguna vez lo publicaron en una antología sueca de escritores en el exilio. Como todos los de la antología era una copia triste de Nicanor Parra. Pero da lo mismo. Lo que importa: una de las muchachas con las que se acuesta le presta un libro.

Bolaño’s Between Parentheses Reviewed at Bookslut

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In a more refreshing piece, Jesse Tangen-Mills reviews Bolaño’s Between Parentheses at Bookslut. The review seemed a little different, perhaps a little Bolañoesque, and sometimes can make yet another review about the man interesting.

I avoid writing about Bolaño when I can. Not because he isn’t cool anymore or maybe he is, but because someone else will write about him and they will claim some sort of special relationship with him, and I, like a jealous boyfriend, will disagree. How could they? Why do these essays feel so personal? When I look at the copy of this book I smell black tobacco — back when everyone still smoked there — and that reminds me of waking up and drinking, and the possibility of chance insight when surrounded by drunken erudition. It reminds me of looking for answers, it reminds me of being lost and it reminds me that no one will really care.

If Bolaño hates one thing — and in fact he hates many things — it´s artifice. Bolaño´s honesty, one that almost enters the confessional — traits perhaps he snagged after years of writing poetry — and the authentically banal. For example, in “Literature + Sickness = Sickness,” a documentary about an artist he happens to catch on TV — the sort of thing that always seems to be on in Spain late at night — the sort of banal everyday thing we all do, is juxtaposed with terminal illness, an anecdote from the like of Kafka, and Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking. Everything fits and never seems forced. Sean Penn is to Kafka is to the artist is to the gay man in a Mexican prison. In short, they are all fucked and therefore want to fuck.

Among my favorite literary tirades in the book — much like the conversation about the gayest poet in the Spanish language in The Savage Detectives — is that of the most morbid suicide, already taking into account the long tradition of homosexual suicide in Latin America (although unfortunately it continues to happen everywhere), and wryly describes the way in which each of the poets gruesomely ended their life faced with appalling repression. This is Bolaño unfettered by narrative tropes like writing a novel in first person entries, or describing thousands of murders of woman — honestly, the moments when he seems most stale. Bolaño most succeeds when he — as he recognizes Nicanor Parra doing — defies his own manifestos.

Roberto Bolaño Essay at the NYRB

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The NYRB as an essay from Roberto Bolaño about stealing books. It is from his forthcoming collection of essays out in May. Via Conversational Reading

From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine—or shone—with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed.

Review of Bolaño’s Newest Book Los sinsabores del verdadero policía en El Pais

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El Pais has a review of Roberto Bolaño’s latest book to appear in Spanish, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía en El Pais.

El secreto de su fortuna está sin embargo en la economía narrativa, el don de fabulador y la exploración de personajes con las raíces en la memoria y la literatura. La aptitud de Bolaño es extraordinaria para contar relevantemente, es decir, para hacer de la rutina o la nimiedad narración poderosa, cargada de sentido y de crecimiento interior: esta cursilería quiere significar la densidad moral que van ganando los personajes cuando el lector entrecruza la información sobre los personajes principales -la madre de Rosa, Rosa, los jóvenes estudiantes catalanes, el policía que vigila al profesor-. Muchas de estas páginas están entre las mejores de Bolaño, espléndidas y suntuosas sin sobredosis ni enmismamiento brujuleante. Y algunas de ellas son autorretratos desde el desvalimiento o la desnudez expuesta, como si a través de los personajes hallase el modo de hablar verdadero. Lo que enseñaba este profesor de literatura era que “los escritores se instalaban en el alma de los lectores como en una prisión mullida, pero que después esa prisión se ensanchaba o explotaba. Que todo sistema de escritura es una traición (…) Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo”. Esta novela es un gran torbellino ordenado ante el espejo.

Mario Vargas Llosa on Roberto Bolaño – Video

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Moleskin Literario tipped me off to this interview with Vargas Llosa talking about Bolaño. It is interesting to see his take on Bolaño who he likes quite a bit, especially the Savage Detectives and Nazi Literature in America. If you are a Bolaño afficinado you probably know everything he talks about. However, he said enough to get me over my reservations about Nazi Literature in America one of these days. The video is in Spanish with Italian subtitles.

New Bolaño Novel To Be Published In Spain

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El Pais is reporting that an unfinished novel the Bolano left on his computer when he died will be published sometime in the future. The details about when it is to be published are sketchy. What is known  is that the book can be thought of as a precursor to 2666, and includes profiles of well know characters such as Von Archimboldi and Amalfitano. One person who has seen the work says it is of high quality, although I would prefer more information before I take his word for it.

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía permite seguir toda su literatura a través de un juego de voces, aseguran los que han tenido acceso al texto. Los seguidores de Bolaño encontrarán en estas páginas temas recurrentes como el destino, el exilio, el amor o la literatura. Una parte, posiblemente el 50% del texto, se encontraba en el ordenador; el resto había sido pasado a máquina de escribir con correcciones del autor anotadas en los bordes. Roberto Bolaño empezó a publicar tan tarde y la muerte le alcanzó tan rápido que no llegó a ver editado 2666, publicado un año después de su fallecimiento.

[…]

Jorge Herralde, que ayer participaba en las jornadas que sobre la obra de Bolaño tienen lugar esta semana en Casa de América de Madrid, aseguró que prefería no hacer demasiadas declaraciones hasta que la obra llegue a las librerías, aunque no eludió emitir un juicio que, a buen seguro, pondrá los dientes largos a los seguidores del escritor chileno: “La calidad de este nuevo libro es prodigiosa y sin lugar a dudas está a la altura de 2666″. Junto al mercado en español, el libro se lanzará en inglés, francés, italiano y alemán. El contrato se cerró hace un año pero las negociaciones con Andrew Wylie (El Chacal), agente de Bolaño, de cara a su publicación en español han sido tensas y se han prolongado durante meses.

The Roberto Bolaño Syllabus at the Millions Updated With His Latest Published Books

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For Bolaño fans the Millions has updated their Syllabus, really a run down of what novels are the best and which ones are reading first. I’m not sure I agree with them on some choices, but at least you have a list in one place. It looks like there will be a couple more books of his coming out too.

Though the great Roberto Bolaño fever of 2008 appears to have moderated somewhat, this year saw new Bolaño titles pop up in American bookstores with the frequency of periodicals. We’ve probably passed that point in the hype cycle – and in Bolaño’s own back catalogue – where we might look for critical consensus: in January, reviewers seemed hesitant to gainsay Monsieur Pain; by autumn, The Return was getting a decidedly mixed reception. (In between, no one except our own Emily St. John Mandel seemed to know what to do with Antwerp.) So where was a Bolañophile to turn first?

We first tried to answer this question with our original Bolaño syllabus. With the aim of offering continued guidance to newcomers and enthusiasts alike, we’ve updated it below to take into account the two most recent novels and the thirteen stories in The Return. The Insufferable Gaucho will be added shortly. We continue to feel, hype notwithstanding, that this is one of the most important authors to emerge in the last decade, and we’ll try to stay on top of the work yet to appear: an essay collection, a book of poetry, and The Sorrows of the Real Policeman (a.k.a. the “sixth part of 2666.”)

Neruda, Huerta, and Bolano – An Investigation of Influences

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John Herbert Cunningham has a long and detailed examination of the late poetry of Neruda, and an Cunningham’s thoughts on its influences on the poetry of David Huerta and Roberto Bolano that was written at the same time. It is an one of those few articles where the writer has the luxury of making his case mostly with the art form, instead of summaries. Even if you don’t like his conclusions, you can at least read large sections of poetry from each of these authors.

Wharton’s Fighting France Now in Spanish; or Why More Books Aren’t Translated

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First of all, I love Edith Wharton’s work. However, Fighting France and A Son at the Front, her novels about World War I, are not really the best of her work. What is so annoying and marvelous at the same time is how the non-English speaking world is willing to translate so much more than we do. Perhaps she has the reputation of the current literary superstar Roberto Bolaño, but I doubt it. So to translate a lesser of her works seems to have a genuine respect.  It is just so exasperating that we English speakers do return the favor.

You can read a review of it in Spanish at the Revista de Letras.

PJ Harvey Designed Zoetrope in June

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PJ Harvey is the guest designer for Zoetrope‘s Summer issue. I’m not sure what kind of artist she is but I love her music too much (I’ve seen her 5 times) not to be tempted, although I don’t think the artistic math works here: great musician = great painter. I wish there was going to be something musical in the magazine, too. Oh, and there is some Bolano, too.

Jorge Volpi on Bolaño and American Literary Reaction

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Three Percent continues its serialization of Jorge Volpi’s comments on Latin American literature.  In this section he takes American critics to task for building up a Bolaño myth much like that of Jack Kerouac so they could sell the story of a rebel. In contrast, the Spanish language press has looked at Bolaño more in terms of his way of attacking and rebuilding literary ideas.

In general, Volpi has taken the line that American critics have exoticized the Latin America as a dark world of corruption and political intrigue, or a  one of superstitious peasants. The criticisms are fair and show both a miopia on the part of some critics who wish to put some certain literature in well defined categories, and a drive of the market to produce more of what sold so well before. It is the plea of an artist for freedom, which also means that while he says there is no Latin American Literature, there are some links between authors, not necessarily in theme, or style, or history, or whatever element you would like to focus on, but a more general closeness of experience. They have lived lives that have more inter connections than those on other continents and so it gives the writing not a similarity, but a fraternity. And even in opposition to one’s fraternity, fraternity can still shape one’s self.

Beyond the discussion of Bolaño’s supposed heroin use, none of the critics of his books in the Spanish language made a point of focusing on his life, ”rebel, exile, addict”. (If this were not enough, during his last decade Bolaño never lived ”in the urgency of poverty”, but the modest life of the suburban middle class, a life infinitely more placid than the other Latin American immigrants in Cataluña). Without a doubt, the relation between the life and works possesses greater enchantment in the United States than in any other part of the world, but the emphasis on his supposed or real penury have played a key role in interpreting (and, obviously, selling) his books. The American literary world has been obliged to construct a radical rebel from a simple misunderstanding: confusing a first person narrator with its author. Bolaño, who during the last years of his life had a more or less normal life, not full of luxuries, but clothed by an almost simultaneous recognition from the publication of his first books (Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star in 1997 and The Savage Detectives in 1998), has been transformed into one of those furious writers who, facing down the scorn of his contemporaries and through a fierce individual fight, manage to convert themselves into tragic artists, posthumous heroes: a new example of the myth of the self-made man. Bolaño, thus, as the last revolutionary or the heir of Salinger or the Beats: it is not coincidental that the other Latin American figure exalted to his in the United States is the sugarcoated Che Guevara by Benicio del Toro and Steven Soderbergh. Both of them have become, in their American versions, bastions of fierceness and defiance, prophets equipped with a blind faith in their respective causes—in one case art and in the other politics—ideal models for the intimidated and disbelieving society of the United States under George Bush.

Although no one has dared point it out, the reasons for Bolaño’s ascent are not that different from those that governed García Márquez’s rise forty years ago: for the developed world, both have been mirrors of a necessary exoticism. The step from magical realism to the reaction of visceral realism sounds, all of the sudden, almost foreseeable: in both cases ”the political” has been the key to drawing the attention of the meek American readers, no matter that the left-wing compromise of one has nothing to do with the acid post-political criticism of the other; and last, both have been received as a breath of fresh air—in other words, of savagery—before the contemporary lack of will power.

A New Unpublished Bolaño Short Story

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60Watts, a relatively new Spanish language literary journal, has published an as yet unpublished short story by Roberto Bolaño, El contorno del ojo (The Contour of the Eye). The story was presented at a literary contest in Valencia in the 80’s so Bolaño could earn some money. Perhaps it is good. I haven’t had time to read it, not translate anything from it.

You can read the story at 60Watts and read a short article in La Vanguardia, all in Spanish.

Alberto Fuguet: from Film to Literature, the Hybrid Case of a Writer

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La Jornada has an interview with the Chilean Author  Alberto Fuguet is a younger author who as a proponent of Mc Hondo has looked to turn away from the over saturated magical realism that came to define Latin American Literature. His book Shorts is available in English and is a mix of story telling methods, some leaning towards the cinematic and the interview makes it obvious that it is one of his focuses. He does have a new book out:

At the beginning of the year he published a new book in most of Latin America and Spain, a novel “mounted”by Fuguet, My Body Es a Cell, which is an autobiography of Andrés Caicedo, a Columbian cult writer whose book has continued to be the best selling book in Columbia.

A inicios del año, salió en la mayoría de los países de América Latina y España, la novela “montada” por Fuguet, Mi cuerpo es una celda, autobiografía de Andrés Caicedo, escritor colombiano de culto, cuyo libro se ha mantenido como el mejor vendido en ese país sudamericano

The interview covers several themes. First, he talks about hos he wished he could direct films instead of write, yet he isn’t interested in being a screen writer either. He has created a website for hosting independent videos. He has also made several short films.

Second, he talks about what he sees the role of the blog and the new media. It is refreshing for an author not to see it as just another means  of publicity, or a half way step to print.

I think that there are people in the virtual world who are very shy and unknown who write very personal things in their blogs; the people who are less shy use the virtual as a type of trampoline to eventually publish on paper. I am sure that there is a Kafka, a Pavesse, and people like that hidden on the web and that we are going to discover them latter. My idea of a blog is to help myself, to help others, as breaking the circle of books, in my case I see that my books come from the same planet.

Creo que lo que hay virtual es de gente muy tímida y muy desconocida, que escribe en sus blogs cosas muy personales; la gente que es menos tímida lo usa como una especie de trampolín para eventualmente llegar al papel. Estoy seguro de que hay un Kafka, un Pavesse, y hay gente así escondida en la red y que vamos a descubrirlo después. Mi idea del blog es apoyarme, apoyar a otros, como romper el círculo de los libros, en mi caso yo veo que mis libros vienen como del mismo planeta.

Finally, he talks about Rulfo and Bolaño.

Rulfo is super global writer, super preliminary, who seems very interesting to me. In general I have voices and companions that interest me. In the future perhaps one should find that not all of the world is Latin American. I am interested in everything hybrid, like chronicles; in Andrés Caicedo, the Argentine Fabián Casas, or what the small presses are doing.

I think that Blaño is a hybrid writer, but one that has the respect of intellectuals. He is very pop, has a much more mixed world…Rather than writing about a nostalgic Argentine exiled to Paris, he wrote about Mexicans or Spaniards. He dared to with other passports. He took on voices that were not his and transformed them.

Rulfo es un escritor súper global, súper liminar, me parece muy interesante. En general tengo voces y compañeros de ruta que me interesan. En el futuro habría que analizar que no todo el mundo es latinoamericano. Estoy interesado en todo lo híbrido, como crónicas; en Andrés Caicedo, en el argentino Fabián Casas, o en lo que se está haciendo en las editoriales pequeñas.

Siento que Bolaño es un escritor bien híbrido, pero que logró tener respeto intelectual; es súper pop, tiene un mundo mucho más mestizo […] Más que escribir de un argentino exiliado nostálgico en París, él escribía sobre mexicanos o españoles, se atrevía escribir con otros pasaportes. Logró meterse en voces que no eran las suyas y las transformó.