Roberto Bolano Overview

Bolano’s works are a wash of multiplicities. Art and literature are woven into crime and atrocity; literary culture is a whore to its own vainity; vanity is a strung out pimp in the middle of a thunderstorm; the story of person... [more]

Bolano’s works are a wash of multiplicities. Art and literature are woven into crime and atrocity; literary culture is a whore to its own vainity; vanity is a strung out pimp in the middle of a thunderstorm; the story of person a: poet, custodian, radical transvestite briefly intersects with and is markedly altered by the story of person b: detective trainee, orphan, hearer of ghosts but they barely noticed each other and that had made all the difference. The Chilean-born poet-novelist’s work represents a return to the ‘messy epics’ (as Bolano briefly puts it in this magnum opus, 2666) of Melville’s Moby Dick or, more recently, Thomas Pynchon. They sprawl both in their narrative precession and in the accumulations and revisions of detail. The novels often make abrupt shifts in style and perspective. Over the course of a few pages or chapters, one will find themselves reading something resembling a pulp detective of romance novel to kerouac-esq waxings and riffings on a scene to a David Lynch, Rodriguez, or Tarantino film (Lynch and Rodriguez both are referred to overtly in Bolano’s work) to pornography to noir to satire...one could go on. At the same time, Bolano’s prosody; the mechanics and deployment of his language (at least in translation) remains generally simple (in the honorific sense). A good illustration of these descriptions might be found in the final section of The Savage Detectives, his first major novel, wherein; a prostitute and three poets are driving through the Sonoran desert in a ‘68 Impala in order to flee a murderous pimp while trying to track down the last traces of an almost unknown avant-garde poet who disappeared into the Sonora in the nineteen twenties, leaving behind only a napkin with some sort of rebus on it and a rumor of involvement in Sonoran bullfighting to her would-be fugitive historians. One might imagine the possibilities and then find themselves proven wrong upon reading the book. Placing Bolano geographically is a bit difficult. Most accurately, one might simply call him a Latin American before, say, a Chilean (indeed, Bolano often referred to himself in this way). He was born in Chile, where he grew up and lived lived until moving to Mexico City in 1968. From there he moved back to Chile briefly and then on to El Salvador, back to Mexico City, and finally setting down in Spain; marrying, having children, and beginning to write novels in order to better support his family. When asked in an interview where he was from, he replied "A writer’s true homeland is his language.” He was a vagabond who understood that the complex and intricate interrelationships between people and their stories were beyond national identities. Writing and speaking of the dangers of Nationalism, Bolano is sometimes said to be an example of a ‘new internationalism’ which is developing in various literatures of the world. With the recent translation of Bolano's novels and novellas into English (his work began appearing in English with the New Direction’s publication of By Night in Chile trans. Chris Andrews in 2003, shortly before Belano’s death), his popularity has grown immensely. He seems to currently be occupying the “that latin-american author that everyone keeps talking about”shelf at Barnes and Noble, which was previously held by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. The primary difference between these two being that Bolono’s works are actually good. Marquez, and his soft-surrealist aesthetic is a frequent object of ridicule and criticism on Bolano’s part. His deep commitment to leftist political practice is also important to note in understanding his work. Bolano began working with various leftist groups in Mexico City, eventually returning to Chile in order to support Allende’s socialist government which failed after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Bolano was arrested on suspicion of dissidence during Pinochet’s brutal American-backed dictatorship, and then eventually spirited away, fled the country to fight with a trotskyite guerilla faction in El Salvador alongside the poet Rouqe Dalton and returning to Mexico to sow further seeds of political and artistic ferment. His witness of the disappearances, murders, and torture of the innocent during Pinochet’s regime made Bolano, both in his literature and in his life, an untiring, sharp, and relentless critic of those who would call themselves artists while remaining silent to, and even complicit in, the horrific and oppressive apparatus of power. [show less]