A c ol l ec t i on of essays and r evi ew s on t he l i f e and w or k of

Rober t o Bol ao

For educational purposes only.
2


Rober t o Bol ao and The Savage Det ec t i ves
By Natasha Wimmer
In Mexico City in 1976, a twenty-three year-old with wild hair and aviator glasses stood up in the Librera
Gandhi, one of the bookstores that unwittingly supplied him with free books, and read a manifesto urging
his fellow poets to give up everything for literature, to follow the example of Rimbaud and hit the road.
The true poet, he said, should abandon the coffeehouse and take the part of the sharpshooters, the
lonesome cowboys . . . , the spat-upon supermarket shoppers in their massive individual collective
disjunctivesthe cunning, the lonely, the unnoticed and despised.
This manifesto, titled Leave It All Again, was the founding document of a movement called
infrarealism. The young man was Roberto Bolao. For the next two decades he would live by his words,
drifting from one menial day job to another and writing by night. But it was in the last years of his brief
life, when he published his novel The Savage Detectives, that he achieved the radical break that his
manifesto promised. In the words of the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, The Savage Detectives
marked the beginning of the end of the high priests of the Boom and all their local color. Since the
1970s, no single novel has had a greater effect on Latin American literature.
1

When The Savage Detectives appeared in 1998, Latin American novels could still be divided between
those openly indebted to the famous writers of the 1960sthe epoch known as the Boomand those
determined to reject their influence. The Boom, which for many North Americans is synonymous with
Gabriel Garca Mrquez, was, in fact, a great explosion of talent. Garca Mrquez is one of several major
writers who, as a group, could be said to have invented Latin American literature in the decades after
World War II: Mario Vargas Llosa, J ulio Cortzar, Carlos Fuentes, J uan Rulfo, J os Lezama Lima, and
others.
2
Before them each countrys literature was almost entirely self-contained, and each tended to be
strongly nationalistic. As the Chilean novelist J os Donoso remembers, it was difficult to find a book
published in Chile in a bookstore in Argentina.
3
All the new literature of larger interest seemed to be in
translation.
The Boom changed this, as writers inspired by Kafkas bureaucratic satires and Faulkners local sagas
looked more deeply into their own national psyches. The fabulist strain of modern fiction gave them a
way both to describe and to transcend their time and place: a continent where sudden technological
advances coexisted with entrenched poverty, authoritarian government, and a tradition of magical
thinking. Their work took various forms: Cortzars witty, urban puzzle-stories; Garca Mrquezs
chronicles of the rural fantastic; Vargas Llosas intricately structured tales of oppression and erotic
adventure. All of them, however, dealt at some level with the overlap of an imported modernity and an
older imaginary life.
Imitators of the Boom were (and are) legion, but Bolao and others of his generation tended to see them
as selling an exotic stereotypedictators, whores, patriarchs, and ghostsfor export only. The situation
in Latin America had changed. The dictators, for the most part, were gone. Capitalism, the World Bank,
and the international drug trade replaced caudillos, death squads, and political persecution as the new
faces of evil. The phantasms and terrors of the Boom generation had mutated into something more
diffuse, unmoored from the local.
Some young writers of the 1990s, such as the Mexicans J orge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, set their novels
in Europe or in imaginary European-seeming countries. Others, like the Chilean Alberto Fuguet,
borrowed heavily from North American writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and focused on upper-middle-
class Latin Americans lost in the shallows of North American pop culture. In general, these were
programmatic rebellions, and it showed. They lacked the new life, the freedom of imagination, and
needed to produce work that was urgent and active, rather than reactive.
3

Roberto Bolao was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, and spent his childhood in a series of Chilean
backwater towns: Los ngeles, Valparaso, Quilpu, Via del Mar, Cauquenes. His father, Len Bolao,
was a truck driver and amateur boxer; his mother, Victoria valos, taught math and statistics.
In later years, Bolao rarely talked about his childhood. According to his mother, he taught himself to
read when he was only three, and he wrote his first story when he was seven, about some chickens who,
to the consternation of the other barnyard animals, fall in love with a duck. One of his earliest literary
memories was of listening to his mother read aloud from Nerudas Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair.
In 1968, the family moved to Mexico City. Here, for Bolao, his youth began. He dropped out of school
to devote himself to reading and writing and adolescent rebellion, vocations that went hand in hand. He
stole books. He stalked writers he admired. He wrote masochistically, as he later put it, and took a sadistic
pleasure in his reading. These were crucial developments in an adolescence darkened by dyslexia, chronic
insomnia, and problems of a sexual nature.
4

It was poetry that excited Bolao most. No matter how much attention he later received for his novels and
stories, he never stopped writing poetry or thinking of fiction-writing as a lesser art.
5
Turning against the
lyrical effusions of Neruda, he mimicked the Chilean anti-poet Nicanor Parra born in 1914:
For half a century poetry was a solemn fools paradise. Until I came along with my rollercoaster.
Climb on, if you want. Though of course I cant be responsible if you get off bleeding from the mouth
and the nose.
6

Along with Parra, Bolao read the Latin American avant-garde poets of the twentieth century. Csar
Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Martn Adn, Oquendo de Amat, Pablo de Rokha, Gilberto Owen, Lpez
Velarde, Oliverio Girondoall were important to him. So were the French symbolists. In later life
Bolao would claim to have owned at least ten different copies of Baudelaires Les fleurs du mal. He had
a definite predilection for writers concerned with form, for the Baudelairean outsider who observes a
stricter, more classical rigor than any academician. This love of rigor led him to Alfonso Reyes, a
Mexican critic and classical scholar; to Borges; to J ulio Cortzar (the one member of the Boom to whom
he acknowledged a debt); and to the Argentinian fabulist Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Bolao also had a marked interest in erotic literature and the gothic. The first book he remembered
stealing was a slim volume by Pierre Lous, though whether Aphrodite or Les Chansons de Bilitis he
couldnt recall.
In 1973, when Bolao was twenty, he decided to go home to Chile, taking the long land route down the
Pacific coast. There he planned to take part in a peoples theater project. As luck would have it, he arrived
in Santiago just a few months before the Pinochet coup. On the night of the coup itself, he reported for
duty to a ragtag Communist cell and was assigned to stand guard in an empty street. Nothing happened to
him that night, but a few months later, when a bus he was riding was stopped at a checkpoint, his
Mexican accent drew the attention of the police and he was arrested.
Bolao spent eight days in prison before he was recognized by two of the guards, old schoolmates, who
arranged for his release. Years later, he would mock the legend of his political imprisonment (a few
German publications claimed he had spent six months in jail), but he took understandable pride in having
done his part against the Pinochet coup.
In the English-speaking world, it can be hard to grasp how deeply writing and radical politics have always
been intertwined in Latin America. For most of the twentieth century, to be a writer was to be a
revolutionaryor a reactionary. Writers who are known in the English-speaking world simply as great
novelists are more complicated figures at home: Neruda, politicized during the Spanish Civil War by the
assassination of his friend Federico Garca Lorca, became an inveterate supporter of Stalin. Nerudas
close friend, the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, was driven to write that Neruda and other
Communists began in good faith, but . . . saw themselves become entangled in a mesh of lies,
4

falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls.
7
Vargas Llosa fell out with Garca Mrquez
in what they described as a personal quarrel, exacerbated by the latters unrepentant support of Castro.
Typically, Bolao dismissed them both: Gabriel Garca Mrquez: a man thrilled to have known so many
presidents and archbishops; Mario Vargas Llosa: same thing, but more polished.
8
By the time Bolao
and his friends were in their teens, the Cuban revolution had ended in repression and misery; the Mexican
PRI, a revolutionary body turned ruling party, had been permanently discredited by the 1968 Tlatelolco
massacre of students in Mexico City; and guerrilla movements in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, and
Peru had failed, leading to vicious leftist infighting. Still, writers continued to be drawnas it were,
ineluctablyto the idea of revolution. Traveling in El Salvador, Bolao got to know some of the poet-
revolutionaries of the ERP (a Marxist-Leninist group advocating armed insurrection), who later
assassinated their own comrade, the poet Roque Dalton, in his sleep.
9
Bolaos account of a literary junket
to Managua in The Savage Detectives paints a bitterly funny picture of the aftermath of revolution in
another Central American country. As he put it in an interview, We fought for parties that, if they had
won, would have sent us immediately to forced labor camps; we fought and put all our generosity into an
ideal that had been dead for more than fifty years.
10

This extreme sensenot just of disillusionment, but of belatednessis key to Bolaos activities as an
infrarealist. Together with his best friend, Mario Santiago, the Chilean poet Bruno Montane, and their few
dozen followers, Bolao disrupted the readings of poets whom they held in contempt, shouting out their
own poems. The poets they chose to torment usually had one thing in common: they accepted money
from Mexicos PRI government, which made a policy of supporting (some might say paying off)
Mexicos top writers and thinkers. But there was another side to this provocation. For Bolao and the
others, rejecting a career in poetry was in fact a way of taking poetry as seriously as life itselfand vice
versa. If the author lived what he wrote in this spirit, Bolao liked to say, the reader would naturally feel
the urgency and live it too: If the poet is caught up in things, the reader will have to be caught up.
The effects of this belief can be felt in all of Bolaos work, but especially in The Savage Detectives,
which lovingly resuscitates the characters, the love affairs, the squabbles, the pettiest details of bohemian
Mexico City, around 1976. Bolao even catalogs the names of the streets where the very graffiti spoke to
him. He remembered once coming across something an enemy of the infrarealists had scrawled on a wall:
Go back to Santiago, Bolao, and take Santiago with you. (The first Santiago, of course, refers to the
capital of Chile and the second to Mario Santiago.) In a letter to Mario, dated not long before Mario was
struck and killed by a truck in 1998, Bolao writes from his home in Spain:
Ive got the windows open, its raining outside, a summer storm, lightning, thunder, the kind of weather
that puts you in a state of excitement, or melancholy. How is Mexico? How are the streets of Mexico, the
ghost of me, our invisible friends? Is Al Este del Paradiso still open or has it lapsed into the sleep of the
just? One of these nights, when my money situation improves, I may show up at your place. And if not, it
doesnt matter. The stretch we traveled together is already history in some sense, and it endures. I mean: I
suspect, sense, that its still alive, in the dark but alive and still defiantwho wouldve thought. Well, not
to get carried away. Im writing a novel in which youre called Ulises Lima. The title of the novel is The
Savage Detectives. With love. R.
11

Like Belano and Lima in The Savage Detectives, Bolao and Mario Santiago left Mexico City for Europe
in 1977, and the movement lost its leaders.
12
Santiago headed for Israel, and spent time in Paris, too.
Bolao ended up in Barcelona.
Two years after General Francos death, Barcelona was still filled with a sense of liberation, not just
political but sexual and artistic, too. Bolao had an apartment in the center of the old city, and Latin
American and Spanish friends would drop in, day or night. He worked as a dishwasher, waiter,
longshoreman, garbageman, seasonal laborer, and receptionist; he claimed his favorite job was as night
watchman at a campground outside the city. He was desperately poor, often sick; for a time he was
5

addicted to heroin.
13
Over the years he lost most of his teeth, leaving them behind like Hansel and
Gretels breadcrumbs in the countries he visited on his shoestring travels.
14

When Bolao reached his early thirties, he retreated. His rejection of the literary establishment had
become a kind of rage. The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was enormous, though only a little
greater than that I felt for marginal literature.
15
He left Barcelona for the small city of Girona and, soon
after that, moved to the even smaller seaside town of Blanes, some forty miles north of Barcelona, where
he supported himself with a little jewelry business. At noon he would go snorkeling near a breakwater
where it was still possible to see octopuses. At night, after settling his accounts in a fat notebook, he
would sprawl on the floor to write (he didnt have a desk).
In 1982, he married the Catalonian Carolina Lpez. Now Bolao was definitively settled. Blanes was in
some ways an odd home for him, a commuter town with a touristy stretch of beach and apartment towers,
a bland town (though it is one of the oldest settlements on the Costa Brava). Maybe that was part of what
he liked about it. It was a neutral place, full of visitors. He himself was no longer a visitor, but he wasnt a
local, either. In later years, he would write fondly about Blanes, even delivering the towns yearly address
in 1999, in which he salutes his first friends in Blanes, almost all drug addicts . . . Today most of them
are dead.
Bolaos son, Lautaro, was born in 1990 (later there would be a daughter, Alexandra), and it was then that
he decided to embark on a (marginally) more lucrative career: instead of writing poetry, he would write
fiction. In the early 1990s, he devoted himself to writing stories for regional literary competitions in
Spain, which awarded generous prizes. In 1993, he won several of these, and after that, he supported
himself entirely by writing.
It was in 1996 that Bolaos first major works were published: La literatura nazi en Amrica, a fake
encyclopedia of make-believe writers, and Distant Star, about a fascist poet and skywriter.
16
In these
books, Bolao finds his major subjects as a satirist: the allure that political extremism holds for writers
and the allure of literature itself, which functions in Bolaos work as a kind of last utopia. His gallery of
fascist writers stands in for any number of poets and novelists who cozied up to power and made their
peace with the systemwith the literary establishment, and with the platitudes of the left as well as of the
right.
These two novellas gained Bolano a following and Spains most prestigious publisher, J orge Herralde
(whose publishing house, Anagrama, brought out Distant Star and all of Bolaos subsequent work). But
with the publication of The Savage Detectives in 1998, Bolao became a cult figure. He received the
Premio Herralde and the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Rmulo
Gallegos; from critics he received the kind of acclaim that marks a shift in the landscape, acclaim for a
novel that readers have unwittingly been waiting for.
The story of two poets on an obscure quest, it is the most transparently personal of Bolaos works.
Arturo Belano, the protagonist, isof courseBolao, and Ulises Lima, Belanos sidekick, is Mario
Santiago. Their passion for poetry is Bolaos passion for poetry, and their years of wandering are
Bolaos years of wandering.
Bolao once described The Savage Detectives as his own answer to Huckleberry Finn. Like its precursor,
The Savage Detectives is about friendshipnot just between Belano and Lima, but between them and the
chorus of fellow-writers who help narrate the book. It is also, like Huckleberry Finn, a story of lost
innocence. Beginning in Mexico City, the novel travels to Paris, Israel, Vienna, and Barcelona, and, most
of all, through twenty years of irreversible experience and generalized disappointment. As Bolao said in
his acceptance speech for the Premio Rmulo Gallegos, All of Latin America is sown with the bones of
its forgotten youths. In The Savage Detectives, he brings those youths back to life.
Detective is a word of great significance for Bolaoor, more accurately, significances. First there is the
genre clich, the hard-boiled private eye, cool and resourceful. Then there is the metaphysical seeker
hidden within this worldly hero. But more than anything, it seems Bolao idolizes the detective as
someone who has seen more terrible sights than anyone else and never turns away, never flinches. He is a
6

witness, a watcher, someone who gets to the marrow, the literal bloody core. In a poem from the
collection Tres, he writes: I dreamed I was an old, sick detective, and I had been looking for lost people
for a long time. Sometimes I happened to look at myself in the mirror and I recognized Roberto Bolao.
By the time he published The Savage Detectives, Bolao was sick, and had been for some time. In 1992,
he had been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease, which meant that nearly all his fiction was written under
the threat of death. He had always lived simply, but now his existence became even more austere:
chamomile tea, endless cigarettes, incessant writing.
Bolao took seriously the idea of literary immortalitynever more than when he turned it into a joke.
Failed writers are frequent characters in his stories and novels; so are lost writers, whose legacy must be
preserved. In Photographs, the only published story in which Arturo Belano reappears, he comes upon a
kind of illustrated encyclopedia of forgotten French poets from the 1960s and 70s. As he looks at their
pictures and reads their biographies, remote and irrelevant now, he sees a line of birds on the horizon, an
electrocardiogram that flutters or spreads its wings in expectation of their death, of my death, thinks
Belano, and then he shuts his eyes for a long moment, as if hes thinking or crying with his eyes closed.
From the mid-1990s on, Bolao was determined at all costs to turn out a book a year, while laboring away
at 2666, the massive novel he firmly believed would be his magnum opus. He had clear ideas about the
different merits of the long work and the short work. The novel is an imperfect art. It may be the most
imperfect of all literary arts. And the more pages you write, the more possibility there is of revealing
imperfections . . . It isnt the same to build a house as it is to build a skyscraper. Often a house is cozier,
but to build a skyscraper you have to be very good.
17
The most perfect of Bolaos own small books, in his opinion, was By Night in Chile, which was
published by Anagrama in 2000. He was extremely proud of its intricate construction. He also thought it
was funny (At least while I was writing it I laughed like crazy). Short or long, all of Bolaos books are
part of a larger romanfleuve, or succession of linked works. The novella Amuleto, published two years
after The Savage Detectives, is essentially an expanded version of a long section of the latter novel; many
of the characters from the novels are also mirrored in the short stories (an excellent selection of which are
available in English in a collection titled Last Evenings on Earth).
18
Bolaos books are full of repeat
performances, correspondences, and resonances, representing not overlapping worlds but a single world
progressing through different incarnations. As in a dream, characters change shape or name or setting but
are somehow still the same. Real-life characters drift through stories and novels, as when the critic whom
Belano challenges to a duel in The Savage Detectives eventually becomes, in real life, under a slightly
different name, the executor of 2666. Life is not simply the raw material of fiction in Bolaos work;
instead, life and fiction seem to cross-pollinate.
Bolao also wrote criticism and reveled, following the success of The Savage Detectives, in the
excoriation of writers he didnt like and the anointment of writers he did. He loved making lists: worst
three writers in the Spanish language, best five, and so on. He repeatedly disparaged Isabel Allende.
19
He
called Paulo Coelho a kind of cross between Barbusse and Anatole France in the form of a Brazilian
soap-opera witch doctor.
20
He saw the 1980s as a particularly miserable decade for Latin American
literature, full of bad imitators of magic realism, like Laura Esquivel, or terrible quote unquote youth
writers, like Alberto Fuguet, or writers who write on historical subjects in the most criminal way.
21
In
some of his most exhilarating essays, his criticism verges on theater of the absurd: Listen: I dont have
anything against autobiographies, so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot
long when erect.
22

Evenor especiallywhen Bolao is most outrageous, his passion for literature is contagious, and
younger writers responded. The Spanish writer J avier Cercas made him a major character in his novel
Soldiers of Salamis (portraying him as a softlyspoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean who
offers Cercas sage writerly advice), and J orge Volpi gives him a cameo in El fin de la locura. Bolao
himself doled out cameos freely, of course, and it was a point of honor to be included in one of his novels.
7

Throughout his career, Bolao had a contentious relationship with the Chilean literary establishment,
which wasnt quite sure whether to consider him one of them or not. After the coup, he didnt return to
Chile until 1998, and he wasnt welcomed warmly in all quarters. He felt a permanent mistrust of Chile
and Chileans. He tells the story of another Chilean immigrant, who swore that when he got back to Chile
hed kiss the ground. Hed forgotten the terror, the injustice, the senselessness.
23
Any discussion of
exile made Bolao impatient (I dont believe in exile, especially not when the word exile is set beside
the word literature), but he was certainly conscious of being a foreigner everywhere he went, beginning
with Chile.
24
His homeland, he liked to say, was the Spanish language.
This lack of geographical roots was something else that divided him from the writers of the previous
generation. Even though many of them also lived in exile (Vargas Llosa in Paris, Madrid, and London;
Garca Mrquez in Mexico City), and even though they wrote for an international readership, their fiction
was grounded in specifically regional life. They were reinventing their national literatures; Bolao was
forging a new international, post-nationalist literature, the world as seen from the perspective of a global
drifterLatin American, to be sure, but also someone who watched late-night TV movies and read Philip
K. Dick; a world where September 11 meant the day of Pinochets coup in Chile, and also the day of the
attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. I lived through the Chilean September 11, suffered
through it, andsince I was twenty years oldenjoyed it, too. New Yorks September 11 caught me in
Milan with my wife and two children, and when I saw the explosion the first thing that came to mind
were the images we had in the eighties of World War III.
25

A creeping sense of conspiracy permeates 2666, the novel that occupied Bolao for the last years of his
life and was published in 2004, after his death. The book, a 1,200-page tome divided into five parts, is a
hugely ambitious undertaking. In it, the dread that flickers in Bolaos earlier fiction is concentrated, the
essence of evil made visible. If The Savage Detectives is a journey outward, then 2666 collapses in on
itself. The center of the bookits black holeis the city of Santa Teresa, a thinly disguised version of
Ciudad J urez, in the north of Mexico. In Santa Teresa, girls and women are being raped and murdered at
an astounding rate, and in the novels long middle section, Bolao chronicles these killings one by one,
zooming in mercilessly time and time again.
Winding around this dark center is the quintessential Bolao quest, the search for a lost writer. But this
time, it is the writer himself who takes center stage, his seekers eclipsed or ridiculed (they are four
European academics who scamper farcically about until they wind up in Santa Teresa). Benno von
Archimboldi is a curious character, a Kasper Hauser-like feral child who stumbles through World War II
and comes out the other side a writer, as reclusive as Pynchon but deeply European, a receptacle of the
violence of the twentieth century and a lightning rod of the apocalypse embodied in the date 2666. In
dozens of cryptic ways the charnel house of Santa Teresa is linked to the corruption and decadence of
twentieth century European history and culture. The abyss, a constant metaphorical presence in his work,
now takes on new meaning. It has become simply a burial pit, the literal receptacle for the bodies of an
endless procession of victims.
Speculation abounded after Bolaos death as to whether he had put off scheduling a liver transplant in
order to finish 2666. Whatever the case, he raced to finish the book, and in the harrowing lecture
Literature +illness =illness, he spoke about living with the knowledge of being gravely ill.
26
He almost
never talked to friends about his health, and rarely wrote about it. Writing about illness, especially if one
is gravely ill, can be torture. Writing about illness if one is not only gravely ill, but also a hypochondriac,
is an act of masochism or desperation.
27

In the course of the lecture, physical illness becomes associated with the malaise of modern man, and
Bolao quotes the stanza from Baudelaires long poem The Voyage, from which he took the epigraph
to 2666:
How sour the knowledge travellers bring away! The worlds monotonous and small; we see ourselves
today, tomorrow, yesterday, an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui!
8

A similar mistrust of traveland, by extension, of life as a questis expressed in a line from the
infrarealist manifesto: And the person will have to walk a thousand kilometers, but the road will swallow
him up at last. The journey is literally all-consuming. And yet, as Bolao goes on to say in Literature +
illness =illness, While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can
only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will
lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.
This, in any case, was Bolao at his most serious. He put it another way in the last interview before his
death, when he was asked what gave him hope. I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In
children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.
28
In J uly 2003, just after
discussing the plans for publication of 2666 with his editor, J orge Herralde, he was admitted to the
hospital with massive hemorrhaging. A few weeks later, he died.
Bolao, who had always been fastidious in his work habits, left the definitive versions of each of 2666s
five sections clearly labeled. Herralde commented on the care Bolao took and the deliberation that went
into even his most exuberant writing. The manuscripts were impeccable, very precisely crafted. I would
make suggestions: sometimes he would accept them, other times not. He was very stubborn (or very sure
of his work).
29
Bolaos short novels are tightly controlled models of precision. His two big books were
intended to be something else: works encompassing rough edges, loose ends, lapses, faults. Here, at last,
life bleeds fully into art and vice versa, allowing even for the final rupture of death, that great
inconsistency in the fabric of existence. Given that immortality can come only after death, Bolao
rehearsed its coming exhaustively. In a sense, The Savage Detectives is the story of two ghosts, men
lingering into the afterlife. Their persistence in the myths and memories of their friends mirrors Bolaos
own persistence in the minds of his readers.
Notes
1
Le Magazine Littraire, date TK.
2
Almost every country of Latin America was represented: Colombia (Garca Mrquez), Peru (Vargas Llosa), Chile
(Cortzar, Donoso), Mexico (Fuentes, Rulfo), Cuba (Lezama Lima), and so on.
3
J os Donoso, Historia personal
delboom (Alfaguara, 1972).
4
Literature +illness =illness, El gaucho insufrible (Anagrama, 2003).
5
Roberto Bolao: Si viviera en Chile, nadie me perdonara esta novela, interview with Melanie J osch, Primera
Lnea (December, 2000).
6
Roberto Bolao: Si viviera en Chile, nadie me perdonara esta novela, interview with Melanie J osch, Primera
Lnea (December, 2000).
7
Considering Solzhenitsyn, On Poets and Others (trans. by Michael Schmidt), Seaver Books, 1986.
8
Extranjero me siento en todas portes, interview with Alfonso Carvajal, El Tiempo (Colombia), J an. 3, 2003.
9
Entrevista a Roberto Bolao, interview in Lateral, no. 40 (April 1998).
10
Discurso de Caracas, Entre parntesis (Anagrama, 2004).

11
El pasado infrarrealista de Bolao, Matas Snchez, Proyecto Patrimonio (October 2005).
12
The movement, however, lives on (see www.infrarrealismo.com). Matas Snchez, cited above, records some of
the infrarealists mixed feelings about Bolaos success, identifying each with his or her fictional counterpart from
The Savage Detectives. J os Peguero: Im never going to be a novelist, he said . . . But the surprise is that he did
become a novelist. He was already a storyteller. Ive always said I preferred Robertos poetry to his prose.
Guadalupe Ochoa (Xchitl Garca in The Savage Detectives): Mario Santiago, Bruno, Piel Divina [Luscious
Skin], and J os, as it turned out, were more true to their pledge of marginality, of breaking with literary circles, of
turning their lives into a pome maudit. Only Roberto opted for recognition. J uan Esteban Harrington (J uan
Garca Madero in The Savage Detectives): To sum it up: Roberto painted a picture of a bleeding heart; Mario held
it in his hand.

13
Playa, Entre parntesis (Anagrama, 2004).
9

14
Literature +illness =illness, El gaucho insufrible (Anagrama, 2003).
15
Anarqua total: veintids aos despus, introduction to Amberes (Anagrama, 2002).
16
Anarqua total: veintids aos despus, introduction to Amberes (Anagrama, 2002).
17
Roberto Bolao: Si viviera en Chile, nadie me perdonara esta novela, interview with Melanie J osch, Primera
Lnea (December 2000).
18
The stories in Last Evenings on Earth are culled from Llamadas telefnicas (1997) and Putas asesinas (2001).
There are also two posthumous collections, El gaucho insufrible (2003) and El secreto del mal (2007).
19
In an interview with Mnica Maristain for Playboy, Maristain asked: Dont you think that if youd gotten drunk
with Isabel Allende and ngeles Mastretta youd have a different opinion of their books? Bolao replied: I dont
think so. First, because those ladies would never drink with someone like me. Second, because I dont drink
anymore. Third, because even at my drunkest moments I never lost a certain basic clarity, a sense of style and
rhythm, a horror of plagiarism, mediocrity, and silence.
20
Sobre la literatura, el Premio Nacional de Literatura y los raros consuelos del oficio, Entre parntesis
(Anagrama, 2004).
21
Roberto Bolao: Si viviera en Chile, nadie me perdonara esta novela, interview with Melanie J osch, Primera
Lnea (December 2000).
22
Derivas de la pesada, Entre parntesis (Anagrama, 2004).
23
Fragmentos de un regreso al pas natal, Entre parntesis (Anagrama, 2004).
24
Literatura y exilio, Entre parntesis (Anagrama, 2004).
25
Bolao baja el teln de la narrativa chilena, Rolando Gabrielli, Letralia (August 2003).
26
Literature +illness =illness, Los gauchos insufribles (Anagrama 2003).
27
Literature +illness =illness, ibid.
28
Literature +illness =illness, ibid.
29
J orge Herralde, Para Roberto Bolao (Alfadil, 2005).

Threepenny Review, Spring 2007
The Myst er i ous Chi l ean
Wendy Lesser
For an American reader, the strangest thing about Roberto Bolaos novels is the way they combine
politics and poetry. I dont just mean that he is a poet who writes about politics, though that happens to be
true (but not predictably true: his sharp tone will not be at all what you are expecting if you have read
earnest political poets like his compatriot Pablo Neruda). No, the strangeness comes from the fact that in
Bolaos novels, and to a certain extent in the short stories, virtually all the characters, whether good or
bad, pleasant or unpleasant, care passionately about both poetry and politics in ways that turn out to be
curiously connected.
Consider, for instance, By Night in Chile, the first of Bolaos books to be translated into English. Its
central character is a conservative priest, a pillar of the Catholic hierarchy in Chile, who is also, under a
pseudonym, one of the most famous and influential literary critics of his day. He dines with the great and
the near-great, travels through Europe to investigate falconry techniques among the priesthood, and
otherwise engages with the world, though sometimes he also holes up in his study reading St. Augustine,
Robert Burton, and the more obscure Greeks. Shortly after the 1973 coup, he is approached by two
mysterious men (their names spell hate and fear backwards) who ask him to teach a short course in
Marxism to some very private clientsnamely, Pinochet and a few of his generals. Midway through the
ten-week course, Pinochet takes the priest aside and boasts that he himself is really much more of an
intellectual and a much better writer than Salvador Allende ever was. During the same post-coup period,
10

the priest-critic also begins attending a private literary salon run by a well-to-do aspiring writer named
Mara Canales, whobecause the curfews have pretty much eliminated Chiles vibrant caf lifeis able
to attract a good number of poets, novelists, and journalists to her house. Yet even as her guests are
swilling her wine upstairs, her husband, a wholesome-seeming American secretly affiliated with the
regime, is torturing political prisoners in their basement.
Or take Distant Star, an earlier Bolao novel that was translated in 2004, a year after By Night in Chile.
Here the plot centers on a poet-aviator, Carlos Wieder, initially known as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. When we
first meet him, during the Allende presidency, he is attending the sessions of a weekly poetry workshop
whose other young participants include the talented and beautiful Garmendia sisters as well as the
unnamed narrator and his best friend, Bibiano ORyan. Later, after the coup, Alberto insinuates himself
into the Garmendia twins rural retreat and has them brutally killednot so much for political reasons,
we are led to feel, as out of some crazed combination of sexual self-loathing and poetic envy. Alberto
Ruiz-Tagle then transforms himself into Carlos Wieder, a darling of the Pinochet regime, a glamorous
aviator who sky-writes his version of the New Chilean Poetry. Among his publicly presented poems are
the opening lines of the Bible in Latin, the names of various dead young female poets, and a series of
ominous phrases such as Death is cleansing, Death is responsibility, and Death is Chile. Eventually
Wieder is forced into hiding (he turns out to be too crazy even for the generals), and those who remain
interested in his new antics and old crimes can only track him down through the work he publishes in
obscure literary magazines throughout the world.
A third Bolao novel, Amulet, came out in English this past J anuary, and it too features a poetry-obsessed
narrator (the mother of Mexican poetry, she calls herself, though she appears on the face of things to be
a half-mad and often homeless cleaning lady), whose memories revolve around the two weeks in
September of 1968 when Mexican soldiers were rounding up and killing university students. And then
there is The Savage Detectives, a loose, baggy monster of a novel that will be published in America this
spring. Written in a more meandering, multi-voiced fashion than the shorter books, and covering the
whole last quarter of the twentieth century, it focuses on a cluster of young and older Mexican poets, one
of whom comments: I cant help thinking that poets and politicians, especially in Mexico, are one and
the same, or at least Id say that they drink from the same trough.
Roberto Bolao acquired his fictional material the honest, old-fashioned waythat is, by living through
much of it himself. Born in Chile in 1953, he moved with his family to Mexico in 1968, the year of the
campus violence. He then went back to Chile as a twenty-year-old to help with Allendes socialist
revolution, but once again his timing was unfortunate: a month after he arrived, the military coup took
place. Bolao, like many other politically active young people of his generation, was thrown in jail;
unlike many of them, he was eventually released, at which point he moved, by way of Mexico City and
Paris, to Barcelona. Asked later in life whether he considered himself Chilean, Mexican, or Spanish, he
would admit only to a generalized Latin American.
Superficially, his plots may sound a bit like garden-variety Latin American magical realism, but Bolao
couldnt be farther from those roots. For one thing, he is wittily terse. Not for him the flowering
metaphors, the myths exploding over centuries, the volcanic sentences exuding local color and earthy
vitality. Most of his novels are less than two hundred pages long. (The two major exceptions are the six-
hundred-page Savage Detectives and the as-yet-untranslated 2666, which comes to eleven-hundred pages
in the Spanish edition.)
Both the novels and the stories-about half of which have so far been collected in an English-language
edition called Last Evenings on Earth frequently feature characters who sound a lot like Roberto
Bolao, or even are Bolao, sometimes in propria persona and sometimes thinly disguised as his alter
ego, Arturo Belano. In many of the short stories, he is further abbreviated to B (often portrayed in
conjunction with another letter, like A, a famous writer, or U, a fellow Chilean exile). This authorial
playfulness lends Borgesian overtones to his work, and certainly the Argentine master is one of his most
powerful and deeply acknowledged influences. But it is as if Borges had influenced J ohn Dos Passos, say,
or J oseph Conradsomeone whose overriding interest in the world as it is, in all its ugliness and horror,
dominates the otherwise playful aesthetic.
11

Bolaos weirdest novelistic inventions tend to come off as the flat truth, often because they are the truth.
The literary salon in By Night in Chile, for instance, will remind Chileans of the Townley affair, since
the character Mara Canales is so clearly modeled on a real-life 1970s saloniste who was married to an
American named Michael Townley, a man later exposed as one of the regimes secret torturers. Similarly,
the violent incidents at the center of Amulet (the shooting of Mexican students by soldiers) and Distant
Star (the murders of young poets by Pinochet henchmen) did indeed take place. Such events are an all-
too-realistic aspect of Latin Americas history, but it takes a realist of Bolaos peculiarly ironic turn of
mind to render these stories in a way that makes them neither pornographic nor piously instructive.
Irony, the heaviest weapon in the Latin American literary arsenal, becomes something much lighter and
more attenuated in Bolaos hands. His sentences simultaneously pierce and float, refusing to settle on a
single fixed emotion even as they skewer our sensibilities. (He has been excellently served, in this
respect, by his primary translator, Chris Andrews, who performs miracles in the preservation of tone.)
Here, for example, is a passage from Distant Star, in which the narrator and his fellow prisoner, the crazy
Norberto, are witnessing the aviators initial flights of poetry from the stadium in which they are being
held:
Did you enjoy that? asked Norberto. I shrugged. All I know is Ill never forget it, I said. Did
you see it was a Messerschmidt? If you say so, I believe you, I said. It was a Messerschmidt,
said Norberto, and I think it came from the other world. I slapped him on the back and said,
Of course it did. The line was beginning to move; we were going back into the gymnasium.
And it wrote in Latin, said Norberto. Yes, I said, but I didnt understand anything. I did, said
Norberto, I wasnt a master typesetter for nothing you know. It was about the beginning of the
world, about will, light and darkness. Lux is light. Tenebrae is darkness. Fiat is let there be.
Let there be light, get it? Sounds more like an Italian car to me, I said. Well, youre mistaken,
brother. And at the end he wished us all good luck. You think so? I said. Yes, all of us, every
one. A poet, I said. Polite, anyway, said Norberto.
That is our narrator in his reportorial mode, early on in the novel. Elsewhere we see him in a more
reflective vein, as he comments on the literary criticism that, many years later, his friend Bibiano wrote
about Carlos Wieder in a book called The Warlocks Return:
In the chapter devoted to Wieder (the longest in the book), entitled Exploring the Limits,
Bibiano relinquishes his generally measured and objective tone...as if the presence of the
aviator-poet had disturbed and disoriented him. Oddly, although he is quite at ease with
Argentine or Brazilian torturers and even makes fun of them, when faced with Wieder, he
becomes tense, accumulates adjectives ineptly and indulges in scatology, as if he were trying
not to blink, not to let his subject (Carlos Wieder the pilot, Ruiz-Tagle the autodidact)
disappear over the horizon. But everyone blinks in the end, even writers, especially writers,
and, as always, Wieder vanishes.
Perhaps the most improbable element is the very idea of a book like The Warlocks Return, described as
a highly readable study of fascist literary movements in South America from 1972 to 1989. It is only
when we examine the prefatory note at the front of Distant Star that we learn that Bolao himself claims
to be (and in fact is) the author of a novel called Nazi Literature in the Americas.
At some point in the process of devouring Roberto Bolaos fictions, every reader will long to know more
about the man himself. Whether this impulse comes sooner or later, it will already be too late: Bolao
died in 2003, at the age of fifty. A few biographical factsbasically the ones Ive given above, plus a
mention of his early deathare sparingly doled out on each of the book jackets. Sometimes, but not
always, the publishers summary offers liver failure as the cause of death.
Frustrated by this dearth of information, one may resort to scrutinizing the two extant author photos. The
more frequently used picture shows Bolao in his prime, a cigarette held to his lips, his other arm draped
casually over the back of his chair, round-rimmed glasses perched prominently in the center of a roundish
face, his curly hair the same dark shade as his jacket-covered T-shirta boulevardier, in short. The other,
rarer photo is obviously taken later, closer to the time of his death: the hair, though still dark, has receded
slightly, the cigarette is gone, and the face, now much thinner, looks vulnerable without its glasses. In
12

neither picture is he smiling, but there is a slight quirk to the lips, or perhaps a lift to the eyebrows, that
suggests a sharp sense of humor.
Bolao sort of smiled; he almost never smiled but he never seemed quite to be entirely serious either.
This sentence comes from a Spanish novel called Soldiers of Salamis, written by J avier Cercas, published
in Spain in 2001, and translated into English in 2004. Though he doesnt appear until the last third of the
book, Bolao is a major figure from that point onward, and he gives the plot its necessary push toward an
ending. Something about Cercass dogged pursuit of the facts (this is partly what his novel is about), and
something about the utter consistency between this portrayal and the person who comes through in
Bolaos own writings and interviews, persuades me that in Cercass fiction we are getting as true a
portrait of Bolao the man as we are ever likely to receive.
At the beginning of the novels final section, Cercas calls on Roberto Bolao to interview him for the
regional paper he works on. Bolao who lives with his wife and son in the coastal town of Blanes, not
far from Barcelonahas, after many years of poverty and obscurity, recently won a huge literary prize
and become something of a celebrity. Yet success seems not to have gone to his head. The first thing
Bolao says after answering the door is that he recognizes J avier Cercass name; he then rushes into the
back room and returns carrying Cercass two published novels.
You read them, the hapless Cercas comments with surprise, noting that both books look worn.
Of course, Bolao answers. I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street. He is
complimentary about the novels, and goes on to endear himself to Cercas by giving him a wonderful story
about a Spanish Civil War veteran that can be used to fill out Cercass own unfinished book. Bolaos
discriminating generosity toward other writers is evident throughout the encounter, as is his sardonic wit.
When Cercas asks him what it was like to live through Pinochets coup (a self-evidently stupid question,
since most of Bolaos fiction deals with the subject), Bolao pauses a moment and then answers, Like a
Marx Brothers movie, but with corpses.
Cercas describes Bolao at age forty-seven as having that unmistakable air of a hippy peddler that
afflicted so many Latin Americans of his generation exiled in Europe, but he has nothing to say about his
general physical health. Yet their meeting took place only three years before Bolaos death, and the liver
disease that was to kill him had been diagnosed in 1992, so Bolao had been living with the imminent
possibility of his own death for at least eight years at that point.
Not every member of the press was as reticent as Cercas. In the final interview Bolao gave, published a
week after his death in the Mexican edition of Playboy, the female interviewer peppered him with
questions about his illness. When did you learn that you were gravely ill? What things would you like to
do before you die? Have you ever considered suicide? Who would you like to meet in the afterlife? (I
dont believe in the afterlife, Bolao answered. If it turns out there is one, will I be surprised! I would
enroll in a course given by Pascal.)
If Cercas is a warm and bumbling interviewer, the Playboy woman is as cold and sharp as hard steel. She
presses Bolao to define his nationality, and when he fends her off with Latin American, she presses
harder. But what does fatherland mean to you? she asks, using the Spanish word patria. My only
fatherland is my two children, Lautaro and Alexandra, he insists, and then modifies his answer: And
perhaps, secondarily, certain moments, certain streets, certain faces or scenes or books that are inside me
and that someday I will forget, which is the best thing that can be done with a fatherland.
But the talk is not all of death and fatherland. Asked about his favorite writers, Bolao lists the ones we
might expect: Cervantes, Melville, Borges, Cortzar, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Perec, J arry, Breton... When
the interviewer wonders which world-famous figures he would have liked to resemble, he answers mainly
with fictional characters: Sherlock Holmes. Captain Nemo. J ulian Sorel, our father, Prince Myshkin, our
uncle, Alice, our teacher. Houdini, who is a mixture of Alice, Sorel, and Myshkin. The list is instructive,
and not just because of its internationalism. It gives method and antecedents to Bolaos own peculiar
vision, which is at once scrupulously logical and certifiably crazy, childlike and adult, fantastic and at the
same time completely realistic. He did not spring from nowhere, as he sometimes seems to have done, but
13

was instead nurtured and shaped, by his reading as much as by the incidents of his own eventful life. No
wonder his characters care equally about politics and poetry.
If I had to name a single quality that makes Roberto Bolaos fiction compelling, it would be his capacity
for stringent, hard-nosed sympathy. This is not the same as universal empathy or divinely inspired
forgiveness or any of that softheaded crap. Bolao is never blind to the crimes of humanity and of
particular humans; they are, after all, his major subject. But he is able to create fictional works that enter
equally into his own mind and the minds of others, even when those others are killers, or hypocrites, or
madmen, or literary critics. It is not that he utterly leaves behind notions of good and evil, but that he
makes them seem inadequate as categories.
Of one of the minor characters in Distant Star, Bolao comments that like a true North American he had
a firm and militant belief in the existence of evil, absolute evil. One knows the type. Still, if anything
ever justified such a belief, it would be the events recounted in Distant Star: the torture and murder of
innocents, the cruel satisfactions of power, the overall insanity of Pinochets Chile. Bolao, however,
disdains to rest on such easy distinctions. There is a continuum that links his monsters and killers, on the
one hand, and his writers and dreamers, on the other or, better yet, a mirror rather than a continuum,
with those on opposite sides twinned in the reflective surface.
Overtly and covertly, the idea of twins and other paired figures pervades Distant Star; and at the novels
end, when the Bolaoesque narrator is sitting in a caf in Blanes, reading Bruno Schulz, the image comes
home to roost:
Then Carlos Wieder came in and sat down by the front window, three tables away. For a
nauseating moment I could see myself almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin, looking
over his shoulder at the book he had opened... He was staring at the sea and smoking and
glancing at his book now and then. J ust like me, I realized with a fright, stubbing out my
cigarette and trying to merge into the pages of my book.
Sympathy is too paltry and flaccid a word for the state of mind this describes. It is a powerful and
unwilled form of identification, a Houdini-like vanishing act that allows Bolao to merge with his scariest
and most repellent creations as much as with his likable ones. This self-submersion is evident in both the
stories and the novels, but in the best stories which are also the stories that are warmest in feeling, like
Sensini and Mauricio The Eye SilvaBolao is more likely to pair himself with appealing
characters; it is only in the novels, with their greater room for distance, that he seems able to embrace the
monsters fully.
Nowhere in his work is this strategy clearer than in By Night in Chile, which he published in 2000,
shortly after winning all the awards for The Savage Detectives. This brief novel (which he had wanted to
call Storms of Shit, until his publishers talked him out of it) was better than the bulky prizewinner, he felt.
Why? For a simple reason, he told one interviewer. The novel is an imperfect art formperhaps, in
literature, the most imperfect of all. And the more pages there are, the more opportunity there is for those
imperfections to come to light. Bolaos characteristic wryness does not disguise the fact that he knew
he had accomplished something special in By Night in Chile.
The whole novel is a rant, or contemplation, or act of memory taking place in the mind of its main
character, Father Urrutia Lacroix, also known as the literary critic H. Ibacache (he is his own twin, in
other words, like all the other double-named villains in Bolaos work). Now on his deathbed, Father
Urrutia is recalling his experiences as a Chilean literary figure before and after the coup. He thinks back
on an encounter with Pablo Neruda; he remembers various figures of the left and (mostly) right; and he
recountsnot just once, but three timeshis glimpsed or imagined vision of the basement torture
chamber where Mara Canaless American husband interrogated suspects during her salons. All of this is
done in a vibrantly alive yet hushed voice that floats somewhere between willed stupidity and luminous
knowledge, between self-communion and self-justification, between exhilaration and despair.
That there is indeed a hidden connection between despair and exhilaration is made explicit by a character
in another novel, the female narrator of Amulet:
14

And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because
although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if
reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise,
silly girl, you and everyone else...
Amulet, which was written immediately before By Night in Chile, was like a dry run leading up to the
greater work. Bolao made two advances in the later novel: he put the narrative into the mouth of a
dislikable character, and he eliminated himself entirely from the book. There is no Arturo Belano in By
Night in Chile, as there was in both Amulet and The Savage Detectives; there is no Bolao figure of any
kind, unless we count that wizened young man of whom the priest seems so afraid but he could be
anybody, including Death. In By Night in Chile, the author has finally done exactly what he feared so
greatly in Distant Star: that is, merged bodily with his most despicable character. Without even the
separateness of vile Siamese twins, they have become a single person, a frightened and dying man
living off the memories of his Chilean past, dreading the annihilation of himself and all his writings.
There could be no character less like the real Roberto Bolao than Father Urrutia: a member of Opus Dei,
a smarmy literary careerist, a right-wing snob, a religious hypocrite, a worm in the service of Pinochet.
And yet for the duration of By Night in Chile we are horribly and, yes, exhilaratingly inside him.
It is rightly said of W. G. Sebald, a writer with whom Bolao is sometimes compared, that all his
characters are essentially versions of their author, and this, I think, is a flaw in his novelsparticularly
Austerlitz, which purports to be about someone else. A similar flaw afflicts an even greater writer, Franz
Kafka, whose strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure.
Roberto Bolao is an author who risks exactly this charge and then triumphs over it. Finally, it is not that
all his creations are projections of himself, but the opposite: in his novels, he becomes a mere figment of
his characters reality, a shadow in their dreams. Like the French surrealist poets he so admires, he
carefully sets up the trick mirrors, constructs all the cunning aesthetic parallels, assures us that he is
playing with usand then smashes the whole construction to bits. When the dust clears, all thats left (but
it is more than enough) is a moment of true feeling.
Wendy Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of seven books of nonfiction
and a novel. Her latest book is Room for Doubt, published in early 2007 by Pantheon.

Slate, 10 Sep 2007
The Great Novel Of Mexico City. - By Paul Berman
Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives came out a few months ago and received all kinds of
enthusiastic notices, and now that the parade of reviews has come and gone, I would like to bring up the
distant rear by banging one additional note on my own tardy bass drum. The Savage Detectives, as
everyone has heard by now, is a novel about the Mexico City arts-and-poetry scene in the years from the
1970s to the 1990sa story about rowdy young poets and their literary movement called visceral
realism, with dozens of characters, and nearly as many themes, and thousands of acute observations.
But the most striking trait is a forward-hurtling momentum that comes rushing out of the very first words.
The narrator of the opening section is a 17-year-old student in a poetry workshop, and he announces,
Ive been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I have accepted, of course. And the novel
whooshes onward, and velocity is felicity, and before you know it, 100 pages or so have slipped into the
past.
The reviews have already pointed out that in The Savage Detectives, as in his much shorter
novel Amulet,Bolao has offered up a fictional version of his own experienceshis adventures as a
Chilean student who came of age in Mexico City and helped found an avant-garde poetry movement in
the mid-1970s, and his movements pesky habit of mischievously persecuting its literary elders and rivals
and generally wreaking mayhem in the brio style of the surrealists of yore, or maybe in the style of the
revolutionary student left, post-1968. And The Savage Detectives, in its account of the visceral realist
leader Arturo Belano, hints at the real-life Bolaos poor health and sufferingsthe physical decline
15

that led to his early death in 2003. But you might be better off not knowing any of these autobiographical
details. A mythology has sprung up about Bolao, entirely of his own devising, and the mythology could
end up eclipsing his actual writings, which would be a shame. Anyway, the forward-rushing momentum
of The Savage Detectivesowes nothing at all to the real-life Mexico City personalities and misadventures
that people in the know are able to identify.
The sentences rush forward because of a peculiar and seductive tone in Bolaos voice on the pagethe
tone of someone who believes wholeheartedly in the grand importance of whatever he may happen to be
saying, and whose words, in their confident sincerity, seem to be racing onward for no other purpose than
to get out the message.
The Savage Detectives makes me wonder if something isnt distinctly Latin American about this kind of
momentum. A few years ago, Mario Vargas Llosa published an op-ed newspaper column about how he
had given up smoking thanks to some useful tips from Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and I came away thinking
that I and 1 million other newspaper readers might very well have gone on following Vargas Llosas
nicotine narrative through another 300 feuilleton installments, if only he had chosen to natter on. It was
because of that same confident mix of self-assured relaxation and electric high alert.
In other parts of the world, in regions distant from Latin Americaor so my wanton theorizing leads me
to supposethe pitiable champions of literature dwell under oppressive clouds of relentless doubt and
irony, and are nervously stimulated by a bleak suspicion that anything they write must surely be a lie, and
their own work is merely a game, and their avid readers dont really give a damn, and literatures last
remaining purpose is to arch an eyebrow. But not in Latin America. The Latin Americans compose their
narratives with a cheerful lan akin to that of the Victorian novelists. They do not think that literature is a
lie. They are madly in love with their own inexhaustibly lush and wealthy literary tradition, and they feel
a duty to push their tradition forward into the experimental future in the name of every decent hope of
mankind and of Latin America; and their piety toward the past and zeal for the future fill their voices with
the lovely and seductive vibrato of supreme self-confidence. I dont vouch for the universal explanatory
power of my own theory, and yet something like this does seem to account for The Savage Detectives.
The student narrator at the start of the novel is named J uan Garca Madero, and, having enlisted in the
visceral realist movement, he spends his every waking moment racing around Mexico City trying to
ingratiate himself with the leaders and fellow members of the movement; or else he devotes himself to
stealing books and reading them; or devotes himself to feats of athletic sex with his enthusiastic
girlfriends. In the next and largest section of the book, a few dozen people offer, as if speaking to an
anonymous historian, retrospective recollections of the visceral realist leaders, and how the leaders
departed Mexico on vagabond tours of Europe and Africa and Israel, and how life took many a grim turn
for the leaders and for everyone else. And in a final section, J uan Garca Madero resumes his breathless
teenage narrative, and he and the visceral realist leaders (with whom he has become close, at last) and one
of his goofy girlfriends flee in a car into the Mexican north, trying to escape the wrath of the girlfriends
scary pimp, and trying, at the same time, to track down a forgotten poet of long ago, whom the visceral
realists regard as their literary ancestor.
Whole crowds of minor characters and passersby shuttle through those many scenes, and yet nearly
everyone in those crowds, a few gangsters excepted, seems to share an unquestioning reverence for
Mexican poetrya sacred cause for which any sane person would gladly sacrifice his life. Not to mention
the insane people, who seem to bring out Bolaos keenest sympathies.
Even the bar waitresses go into orgasms over poetry. The teenage J uan Garca Maderos quest to join the
in-crowd leads him to hang out in bars, and the waitresses, learning of his poetic vocation, can barely wait
to strip off his clothes. Or maybe sex in The Savage Detectives has a life of its own. By Page 9, J uan
Garca Madero has lost himself in contemplation of the waitresses thighs; by Page 11, he has a colossal
hard-on while watching a rat; by Page 12, he masturbates to a poem; and by Page 13, one of the
waitresses has already dragged him to the backroom of the bar. A lot of slap-happy screwing goes on. I
didnt hit her, man, what happened was that Mara was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wants to
try the spanking thing, said Luscious Skin. Thats very Mara, said Pancho. `She takes her reading
16

seriously. And so on, until the visceral realists themselves pause to ask, amid their fervid poetry
discussions: What is pornography, anyway?
But even the sex talk in these early sections of The Savage Detectives conjures the passion for Latin
American literary tradition that generates so much of Bolaos marvelous energy. The visceral realists rail
against the grand old man of Mexican letters, who is the real-life poet Octavio Paz, our great enemy
though everyone knows that, deep in their eager hearts, the young poets venerate their elder, and pine for
his approval, and, in any case, have designed their own movement along lines that are roughly his own.
Paz, in real life, was a surrealist, and was keen on building up his own circle of writers and remaining
loyal to the insurrectionary impulse of the avant-garde; and The Savage Detectives visceral realists are
likewise the adepts of a Mexican surrealism, in a down-at-heels student version. Bolao himself, in
recounting these literary doings, slyly molds his story around a style that will be familiar to the readers of
Pazs circle in Mexicothe style of the writer and critic J uan Garca Ponce, a lesser member of the Paz
entourage, famous in Mexico, though maybe not in many other places, for his priapic mischief. In the
novels of the real-life J uan Garca Ponce, every innocent conversation seems to inspire the
conversationalists to doff their clothes; and in the adventures of Bolaos teenage narrator, J uan Garca
Madero, something similar does seem to occur. The more lubricious the opening section of the novel
appears to be, the greater is its witty homage to the surrealist circle of Octavio Paz, the god of Mexican
literature.
The entire novel, not just in its opening section, follows a similar strategy, more or lessthe strategy of
quietly paying homage to one or another aspect of modern Latin American literature in the course of
describing characters who are noisily paying homage to the whole of Latin American literature. The
middle section of the novel adopts the hard-boiled style of the testimonial poets like Ernesto Cardenal,
the Nicaraguan leftist and poet (whose own work is openly discussed), or the jumpy, fragmented style of
the Mexican oral historian (to use the proper phrase) Elena Poniatowski, who composes books by
stringing together what appear to be tape-recorded verbatim quotations from a huge number of witnesses
to this or that event. And then Bolao takes these homages one step further and scrambles the
chronological order of his fragmented testimonies, and sets some of his testimonial or oral history
scenes in Paris, where the visceral realist leaders do some hanging outand, in this fashion, Bolao also
nods in reverential homage to J ulio Cortzar, the Argentinean novelist, who scrambled chronologically
his own scenes of Latin Americans footloose in Paris.
The energy in The Savage Detectives does begin to droop as the novel goes on, for all the brilliance of
one scene or another. The sprawling novel out-sprawls itself, and this becomes hard to miss in the final
section, when J uan Garca Madero resumes his narrative of life on the run. The poets discover the
forgotten writer whom they take to be their literary ancestoran elderly lady who had played a role
generations ago in the kind of surrealist poetry movement that Paz used to command. The visceral realists
even dig up a poem or two by this forgotten old poet, and the poems turn out to be, in proper surrealist
fashion, a series of enigmatic nonverbal squiggles on the pagewhich makes for one more joke in The
Savage Detectives, since the nonsensical squiggles end up being the only visceral realist poem that gets
properly quoted in the course of a novel about poets. And this section, too, in its final scenes, touches on
something deep and moving in the Latin American tradition.
The elderly author of the enigmatic squiggles turns out to have lived out her days in a remote rural corner
of the far-away Mexican north, on a dismal road called Calle Rubn Daro, which Bolao describes as so
wretched as to resemble a death threat. Rubn Daro is scarcely known outside of the Spanish-speaking
world. Yet in Latin America every last reader has learned in school that Daro, the Nicaraguanmodernista,
was the founding father of modern Latin American literature back in the late 19
th
century. He was the first
Latin American to dominate the world of Spanish-language writing, the poet who, more than anyone else,
steered Latin American high culture into a cult of the avant-garde, which meant an orientation to Paris in
long-ago times, and more recently an orientation toward Mexico City, since who needs Paris? Its
amazing how often Rubn Daros name pops up in novels by our Latin American contemporariesin
Vargas Llosas The Feast of the Goat, or in Garca Marquzs The Autumn of the Patriarch, or how often
the elegant Daro himself appears as a character in novels and stories: by Sergio Ramrez, Carmen
Boullosa, and so forth. His name pops up in Bolaos Chile By Night and again inAmulet, and probably in
17

other of Bolaos writings, too. And here, at the conclusion of The Savage Detectives, on the scary poor-
peoples road in the far-away Mexican sticks, Daros august name hits a wry and tragic note, and Bolao
weeps over the dream of a utopian-bedazzled literature, and over the preposterous gap between his dream
and the realities of hardship and defeat.
The pathos of The Savage Detectives lies in that single contrastthe pathos of the ardent young poets
who cavort like satyrs and nymphs in the sacred wood of high poetry and, then again, have to drag their
way around the hardscrabble streets of Mexico City, and sometimes die all too soon, as Rubn Daro did
at age 49, and Roberto Bolao did at age 50, in both cases of liver failure.
But I dont mean to bring my drum-banging on Bolaos behalf to a gloomy thud of a conclusion. The
Savage Detectives sings a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it
inspires, and there is no reason to suppose that, in spite of every prediction, these particular grandeurs and
passions have reached their appointed end. Bolaos friend Carmen Boullosa in The Nation and Francisco
Goldman in the New York Review of Books have both insisted lately that Bolao wrote a further novel, not
yet translated into English, that is stronger, or at least more prodigious, even, than The Savage Detectives.
Even now, three years after his death, posthumous new books by Bolao continue to come out in Spain
stories, prose fragments, and poems. Chris Andrews has translated into English a number of Bolaos
works in the past and has done a good job of it; and Natasha Wimmer, who has brought The Savage
Detectives into English, has likewise done well. In The Savage Detectives, Wimmer has
written Nicsinstead of Nicas (meaning, Nicaraguans), and pro-Somozans instead of Somocistas (meaning,
the followers of Nicaraguas Somoza dictatorship). But these are tiny gaffes that could be corrected in a
future printing, and they count as nothing when weighed in the balance against Wimmers ability to come
up with an inspired and masterful sentence, redolent of Bolaos impudent enthusiasm, such as, Hes
going to disemfuckingbowell me, which is, from a translating point of view, magisterial.
Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University, is the author of Power and the Idealists and
has written for Slate on Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes, Enrique Krauze, Ral Rivero, and Che
Guevara.

http://altarpiece.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-infrarealist-manifesto-english.html
Fi r st I nf r ar eal i st Mani f est o, Engl i sh
Inspired by Roberto Bolaos novel The Savage Detectives, and disappointed that I couldnt find one pre-
existing, I have attempted a translation of the First Infrarealist Manifesto into English. The original can
be found here.
ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN
first infrarealist manifesto
It is four light-hours to the end of the solar system; to the nearest star, four light-years. A
disproportionate ocean of void. But are we really sure that it is only a void? We only know that in this
space there are no bright stars; if they existed, would they be visible? And if there existed bodies neither
bright nor dark? Could it not happen on the celestial maps, just as on those of the earth, that the star-cities
are indicated and the star-villages omitted?
-Soviet science fiction writers scratched their faces at midnight.
-The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian boys).
-Peguero and Boris alone in a lower class room predicting the miracle behind the door.
-Free Money
*
18

Who has traversed the city and for music has only had the whistles of his fellows, his own words
ofamazement and rage?
The handsome type who didnt know
that a girls orgasm is clitoral
(Look, its not only in the museums that theres shit) (A process of individual museification) (Certainly
all that has been mentioned, revealed) (Fear of discovering) (Fear of the imbalances not foreseen).
*
Our next of kin:
the snipers, the lone plainsmen who devastate the Chinese cafes of Latin America, the butchers in
supermarkets, in their tremendous individual-collective dilemma; the impotence of action and
investigation (on the individual level or clouded in aesthetic contradictions) of the poetic act.
*
Tiny bright stars eternally winking at us from a place in the universe called The labyrinths.
-Dancing-Club of misery.
-Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground.
-He sucks it, you suck it, we suck it. [In Spanish as in English, the verb can be used literally or informally
in a derogatory sense.]
-And Horror
*
Curtains of water, cement, or tin separate a cultural mechanism, which itself serves as both conscience
and as the ass of the ruling class, from a living cultural event, scrubbed clean, in constant death and birth,
ignorant of most of history and the fine arts (quotidian creator of its own insane istory and its amazing
fyne artz), body that suddenly tests new sensations on itself, product of an epoch in which we approach at
200 kmph the toilet or the revolution.
New forms, rare forms, as old Bertolt said, half curious and half smiling.
*
Sensations dont arise out of nothing (obviousness of obviousnesses), but from a conditioned reality, in a
thousand ways, as a constant flow.
-Complex reality makes us seasick!
So, it is possible that in part this is a birth and in part we are in the front row for the death throes. Forms
of life and forms of death pass by the retina daily. Their collision constantly gives rise to infrarealist
forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION
*
Put the whole city in the insane asylum. Sweet sister, howling tanks, hermaphrodite songs, diamond
deserts, we only live once and every day the visions are bulkier and more slippery. Sweet sister, lifts
to Monte Albn. Tighten your belts because the corpses have been watered. A scene of subtraction.
*
And the good bourgeois culture? And academia and the incendiaries? And the vanguards and the
rearguards? And certain conceptions of love, good scenery, the precise and multinational Colt?
Like I told Saint-J ust in a dream I had once: Even the heads of aristocrats cant use us as weapons.
*
-A good part of the world is being born and another good part dying, and we all know that we all have to
live or we all have to die: in this there is no middle road.
19

Chirico says: thought must move away from all that which is called logic and good sense, must move
away from all human problems, in such a way that things appear under a new aspect, as if illuminated by
a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We are going to fill our heads
with all human problems, such that things begin to move inside themselves, an extraordinary vision of
man.
-The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird.
-The infrarealists propose indigenousness to the world: a crazy and timid Indian.
-A new lyricism, which is starting to rise Latin America, supports itself in ways that never fail to amaze
us. The way in to matter is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a
hero revealing heroes. Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breathing and heat. The shotgun experience,
structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions.
If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.
erotic books without spelling
*
The THOUSAND DISMEMBERED VANGUARDS OF THE SIXTIES precede us
The 99 open flowers like a smashed-open head
The massacre, the new concentration camps
The White underground rivers, the violet winds
These are hard times for poetry, some say, drinking tea, listening to music in their apartments, talking
(listening) to the old masters. These are difficult times for man, we say, turning to the barricades after a
full days work of shit and tear gas, discovering / creating music even in our apartments, largely
overlooking cemeteries-that-spread, where they [sic] despairingly drink a cup of tea or get drunk on pure
rage or the inertia of old masters.
HORA ZERO precedes us
((Raise baboons and the hags will bite you)) [Sp: Cra zambos y te picarn los callos]
Still we are in the quaternary era. Are we still in the quaternary era?
Pepito Tequila kisses Lisa Undergrounds phosphorescent nipples and watches her leave for a beach on
which black pyramids sprout.
*
I repeat:
the poet is a hero revealing heroes, like the fallen red tree that announces the start of the forest.
-The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved with betrayals or pathetic survivals.
-And it is the individual who will be able to walk a thousand kilometers but eventually the road will eat
him.
-Our ethic is Revolution, our aesthetic is Life: one-single-thing.
*
For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat
doesnt have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand
party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is
like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.
*
J ourney of the poem through the seasons of rioting: poetry producing poets producing poems producing
poetry. Not an electric alley / the poet with arms separate from the body / the poem slowly displacing his
Vision of his Revolution. The alley is a complex point. We are going to invent in order to discover its
20

contradiction, its invisible forms of refusing, until it is explained. J ourney of the act of writing
through zones not at all favorable to the act of writing.
Rimbaud, come home!
Subverting the everyday reality of modern poetry. The confinements that lead a circular reality to the
poem. A good reference: the madman Kurt Schwitters. Lanke trr gll, o, upa kupa arggg, runs the official
line, phonetic investigators codifying the howl. The bridges of Noba Express are anti-codification: let him
shout, let him shout (please dont take out pencil or paper, dont record him, shout with him if you want
to participate), so let him shout, in order to see what face he makes when he finishes, what other
incredible things we experience.
Our bridges to ignored stations. The poem interrelating reality and unreality.
*
Convulsively
*
What can I demand of current Latin American painting? What can I demand of the theatre?
More revealing and expressive is stopping in a demolished park because of the smog and seeing people
crossing the avenues in groups (which contract and expand), when so many motorists, like the
pedestrians, urgently approach their hovels, and its the hour when the murderers come out and the
victims follow them.
What stories do the painters really tell me?
Interesting void, fixed form and color, at best the parody of movement. Canvases that will only serve as
bright posters in the rooms of engineers and doctors who collect.
The painter is made comfortable in a society that is every day more painter than he is himself, and that
is where he is found unarmed and registered as a clown.
If a painting by X is encountered in some street by Mara, this painting acquires the standing of an
amusing and informative thing; [in] a sitting room its as decorative as the iron armchairs of the bourgeois
/ a question of the retina? / yes and no / but it would be better to find ( and unfortunately to systematize
for a time) the explosive factor, class-conscious, one hundred percent concerned with work, in
juxtaposition to the value of work that precedes it and conditions it.
-The painter abandons the studio and ANY status quo and fills his head with wonders / or sets out to play
chess like Duchamp / A painting that shows how to paint it again / And a painting of poverty, free or
cheap enough, unfinished, of participation, of questioning the participation, of unlimited physical and
spiritual extension.
Latin Americas best painting is the one that has even unconscious levels, the game, the party, the
experiment that gives us a real vision of what we are and reveals to us what we can do will be Latin
Americas best painting is the one that we paint with greens and reds and blues on our faces, to recognize
ourselves in the incessant creation of the tribe.
*
Try to abandon everything every day.
Architects, abandon the construction of stages inside and extend your hands (or clench them, depending
on the place) toward this space outside. A wall and a ceiling become useful when they are not only used
for sleeping or avoiding rain but when they establish, starting, for example, at the everyday act of sleep,
conscious bridges between man and his creations, or the momentary impossibility of them.
For architecture and sculpture the infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed.
*

The true imagination is the one that dynamites, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other
21

imaginations. In poetry and in what is, the way in to matter still has to be the way in to
adventure.Creating the tools for everyday subversion. The subjective seasons of being human, with their
beautiful trees, giant and obscene, like laboratories of experimentation. Establishing, seeing signs of
parallel situations and as harrowing as a great scratch on the chest, on the face. Unending analogy of the
face. There are so many of them that when newcomers appear we dont even count, although we are
creating them / looking into a mirror. Nights of torment. Perception is opened up by means of an ethic-
aesthetic taken to the extreme.

*
Galaxies of love appear in the palms of our hands.
-Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)
-Burn your garbage and start to love until you get down to the priceless poems
-We dont want synthetic paintings, but enormous synthetic sunsets
-Horses running 500 kilometers per hour
-Squirrles of fire jumping through trees of fire
-A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill

*
The risk is always somewhere else. The true poet is the one who is always letting go of himself.Never too
much time in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners in perpetual
chains.
*
Fusion and explosion of two shores: creation like audacious graffiti and opened by a crazy kid.
Nothing mechanical. The scales of of amazement. Someone, maybe Hieronymus Bosch, breaks the
aquarium of love. Free money. Sweet sister. Libidinous visions like corpses. Little boys cutting the meat
of kisses until December.
*
At two in the morning, after having been at Maras house, we listen (Mario Santiago and some of us) to
laughter that came out of the penthouse of a 9 story building. They didnt stop, they laughed and laughed
while we slept below propped up in various phone booths. It was enough for the moment in that only
Mario went on paying attention to to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something similar and
Daro Galicia had told us that the police are always vigilant). We made telephone calls but the coins were
made of water. The laughter continued. After we left that district Mario told me that really no one had
been laughing, it was recorded laughter and upstairs there, in the penthouse, a small group, or perhaps a
single homosexual, had been listening in silence to his records and had made us listen.
-The death of the swan, the last song of the swan, the last song of the black swan, ARE NOT in the
Bolshoi but in the pain and the unbearable beauty of the streets.
-A rainbow that begins in a cinema of bad death and that ends in a factory on strike.
-That amnesia never kisses us on the mouth. That it never kisses us.
-We dreamt of utopia and we wake up screaming.
-A poor lonely cowherd who goes back home, that is the wonder.

*
Making new sensations appear Subverting the everyday
O.K.
22

ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN
HIT THE ROAD

Roberto Bolao, Mxico, 1976


Why Bol ao Mat t er s
By Garth Risk Hallberg posted at 4:21 am on August 22, 2007
I.
Every so often, one feels the great gears of canonization creaking into motion. A long critical essay in The
New Republic or the New York Review will direct our attention to an overlooked contemporary poet, or
beg our reconsideration of a novelist too long out-of-print. A month later, another such essay will appear
in another venue, along with a note announcing the imminent appearance of so-and-sos collected verse,
or the retranslation of the magnum opus of such-and-such. An excerpt follows in The New Yorker. The
blogs are abuzz. And then, on the front page of the Sunday Book Review, the Times finally catches on.
Okay, this feels a little unfair, a little dyspepticand a little too specific to the media centers of the East
and West Coasts. Since my college years in the Midwest, Ive admired the efforts undertaken by presses
like Dalkey, New Directions, New York Review Books, and Archipelago on behalf of world literature.
And without the coordinated advocacy of critics (Susan Sontag was a marvel in this respect, as in so
many others) I might not have copped to Leonid Tspykin, Witold Gombrowicz, Leonard Michaels The
list goes on and on.
But at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns sets in. If I made time for every overlooked author
recommended in the back pages of Harpers lately a veritable house organ for the redoubtable FSG
Id read little else. Among other things, literary greatness requires, as William H. Gass has argued,
passing tests of time. I may have to wait a few more decades to see if posterity accords Orhan Pamuks
work, for example, the high regard in which present critics hold it. Of if my misgivings about Snow hold
water.
All of which is to say that when I finished Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives this summer and
walked out of my apartment onto the blazing street, humming as though zapped by business end of a live-
wire, wanting to climb to the top of the nearest bridge and shout to passersby that they must stop
everything and read this book, I felt, despite the relative frequency with which we (myself included)
throw around terms like genius and masterpiece, that I had just been in the presence of the real thing.
And that that was a rare and precious gift.
II.
In Bolaos work, emotions tango terror and fascination go cheek by jowl, laughter rubs elbows with
pathos but an undercurrent of exuberance remains constant, a stylistic signature. Which is remarkable,
given the sinister plots that entangle his characters. The Savage Detectives begins (and ends) as the diary
of one J uan Garcia Madero, a seventeen-year-old aspiring poet living in Mexico City. Two slightly older
poets maudits, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano adopt him as a kind of mascot for their literary circle, the
visceral realists. Maderos first diary entry reads, in its entirety: Ive been cordially invited to join the
visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
No initiation ceremony? Two months and 150 pages later, Madero will find himself in the backseat of a
Chevy Impala with a prostitute named Lupe, fleeing a murderous pimp. Up front, Ulises and Arturo set a
23

course for the Sonora desert, where they seek a vanished poet of the 1930s, one Cesarea Tinajero. This is
madness! Yet we feel, in the surging rhythms of the prose (translated by Natasha Wimmer), young
Maderos eager acceptance of his fate.
I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that
Id always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a
shot or something that sounded like a shot. Theyre shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned
around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the
world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impalas window. Its
firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts house, the thugs
Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of
the city.
In the space of a few sentences, J uan Garcia Madero has earned his wings. He has learned to see the
sadness of the whoremonger, to find the gunfire in the fireworks and vice versa. He has become, in the
fullest sense of the word, a poet.
Bolaos preoccupation with poetry may strike the Norteamericano reader, circa 2007, as odd. Who even
reads that stuff anymore? We are far more accustomed to authors who hang their narratives on nuclear
war, crime syndicates, cattle drives But the long middle section of The Savage Detectives, wherein 52
narrators track Arturo and Ulises through the 20 years that follow their fateful journey north, exposes
academic definitions of poetry as far too narrow. For Bolao, as for the Beats, the poem is a way of
finding beauty even (or especially) in insalubrious circumstances. Poetry is a synonym for youth, for
vitality, for faith in ones own ability to change the world. Poetry is innocence hungering for experience,
and vice versa. It is a way of being in the world.
That is to say, poetry signifies as much to Bolao as the whiteness of the whale did to Melville. It
functions in The Savage Detectives as Moby-Dick did in the book that bore his name. In his aesthetic
innovations narrative fragmentation, riffs on real historical figures, enjambment of high and low culture
Bolao resembles a number of other forward-looking novelists. But I can think of no other
contemporary writer for whom symbolic preoccupations burn so brightly. Scenes, objects, and characters
scintillate with political, ethical, and aesthetic significance. Poetic significance. It is the lunatic density of
Bolaos symbolism that marks him as truly avant-garde and also as a vital addition to the mainstream.
For some time now, Ive pictured the American avant-garde as a painter stuck in a corner, surrounded by
its own slow-drying handiwork. When an artist strikes out in search of the new, she dreams of the rioting
audience of Stravinskys Rites of Spring, of customs agents confiscating pallets of books deemed
obscene. And yet, in a culture where dissonance and obscenity are the norm, how is the artist to provoke
any reaction at all?
The situation is seen most clearly in the world of visual art, where, with the regularity of changing
hemlines, proclamations of the Rebirth of Painting alternate with controversies about religious icons
rendered in various forms of bodily excretion. One can, Alex P. Keaton-like, react against the excesses of
the father by turning toward the conservative. Or one can push farther, ever farther, celebrating the
celebrity, marketing the market, outgrossing the gross-out. The most important work being done, at least
theoretically, involves a compromise: some genetic splicing of Old Mastery with the shallow holography
of mass culture. Think J eff Wall. Think J ohn Currin and Cindy Sherman.
At least these folks are still considered leaders in their field. In American literature, experimentalism is
kept like a domesticated animal. For twenty-two hours a day, it sleeps under the kitchen table.
Occasionally, when we get bored, we trot it out and put it through its tricks to remind ourselves that, hey,
were as hip as the next guy. But an avant-garde novel is never going to change the way we see the world.
Well, The Savage Detectives blew my pessimism all to hell. Aiming to usurp the throne of literature from
Octavio Paz (and, later, Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Roberto Bolao produced something unselfconsciously
yet distinctly his own.
24

Nothing more or less than the sum of the stories told about them, Bolaos visceral realists come alive in
a new way. Not only do we see Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano from every possible angle; we see them
from impossible angles as well. Among the novels 52 +1 voices, conflicting accounts proliferate: The
visceral realists are geniuses. They are hacks. They are liars. They are saints. The author refuses to render
a verdict. And yet his narrators arent wholly unreliable: in each version of Ulises and Arturo, we
recognize something ineffable and unchanging. However plastic or fantastic, they are always somehow
themselves. As we are always somehow ourselves. Among other things, then, The Savage Detectives is a
treatise on human nature.
III.
To borrow from Sir Mix-A-Lot: I like big books, and I cannot lie. Bolaos shorter novel, Amulet revisits
one of The Savage Detectives narrators, a poor Uruguayan named Auxilio Lacoutre. When, in the riotous
year of 1968, the Mexican army invades the sovereign campus of the national university, Auxilio refuses
to be evacuated. For twelve days, she hides in a womens bathroom, subsisting on tapwater and scribbling
poems on sheets of toilet-paper. In her disorientation, she drifts into the past And, bizarrely, into the
future, where her resistance like Ulises and Arturos exploits will become the stuff of legend. As a
character sketch, Amulet is vivid and hallucinatory, but I found the proliferation of subplots and hazy
chronology hard to track. I much preferred the version of Auxilios rebellion that appears in The Savage
Detectives. Like the tales told by that novels other 52 voices, Auxilios gains meaning and urgency
through its connection to a larger narrative arc.
Of course, much of Bolaos fiction is part of a single galaxy, like Faulkners Yoknapatawpha. Several
short stories, for example, are narrated by a figure who shares biographical circumstances with Arturo
Belano (which is to say, with Bolano himself). And Caesarea Tinajero, at the end The Savage Detectives,
hints darkly at events that will unfold in 2666.
Still, for the novitiate looking for a quick introduction to Bolanos world, the best place to start may be
Last Evenings on Earth, a collection of stories rendered into English, like Amulet, by Chris Andrews. Its
all here in miniature: the romantic fatalism, the rich irony, the soupcon of the supernatural, the political
depredations, the enigmatic yet incredibly real characters. A story like Gomez Palacio, in which,
simultaneously, nothing much happens and everything does, presents a vision as idiosyncratic, and as
existentially important, as Kafkas. Each writer seems to have sprung fully formed from the void.
Which makes Bolaos own story seem all the more implausible. Broke, addicted, and unknown as of the
late 80s, the former poet kicked heroin and took up fiction writing to support his growing family a
quixotic pursuit if ever there was one. Bolao would enter his short stories in Spains many regional
writing contests, often winning multiple prizes with the same piece (camouflaged under a variety of
titles). By 1999, the massive Savage Detectives had won the Romulo Gallegos prize Spanish-language
literatures most prestigious award. Upon learning that his liver was failing, Bolao raced to finish the
even-more-massive manuscript for 2666, his literary legacy to the world, and his financial legacy to his
wife and children. Whether 2666 can equal or surpass The Savage Detectives remains to be seen (among
English-speaking audiences, at least; Wimmers translation will be released next year). It seems certain,
however, that Bolaos place among the dozen or so great novelists of the last quarter-century is secure
Or anyway, thats how it looks to this correspondent.
Vagabonds
Roberto Bolao and his fractured masterpiece.
by Daniel Zalewski The New Yorker, March 26, 2007
And then I never saw him again: this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-
born writer Roberto Bolao, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolaos ten
novels and three story collectionsall completed in his torrential final decade, before he succumbed to a
chronic liver ailment that he suspected would seal his fatecharacters go through life in a state of
25

agitated migration. They sever friendships, quit jobs, abandon apartments without giving notice, skip the
return flight home, assume new identities, flee combustive love affairs, cut off ties to everyone they have
ever known, head off into the desert, simply disappear. Relationships, in Bolaos world, tend to be
febrile but fleeting, yielding memories suffused by the afterglow of emotion; his narratives are often the
testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind. Its no coincidence that Bolaos most heartbreaking
creationthe rebellious, doomed poet at the heart of his 1998 masterwork, The Savage Detectives,
which Farrar, Straus has just published in translationis named Ulises.
Bolao, who was born in Santiago in 1953 (the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died, as he noted in
an essay), led a life that was itself marked by uprootedness. His fathers job was to roam: he was a truck
driver. His mother was a teacher. When Bolao was a child, he and his family shuttled between towns in
Chile, and then, in 1968, they moved to Mexico City. Bolao found the dislocation exhilarating: his new
home, he later recalled, was a vast, almost imaginary place where freedom and metamorphosis were a
daily spectacle. By this time, he had developed an appetite for literature so ravenous that it practically
outstripped that of his idol, the Argentine writer J orge Luis Borges. Like Borges, Bolao consumed
everything from arcane poetry to dime-store fiction. Unlike Borges, he stole most of his books.
Bolao, who was dyslexic, didnt enjoy the classroom, and he dropped out of high school, devoting
himself to poetry. During the late sixties, mass demonstrations erupted frequently on Mexico Citys
streets, and Bolao revelled in the political ferment. He became a Trotskyist and travelled to El Salvador,
where he befriended leftist poets who carried guns alongside their notebooks.
In the summer of 1973, he went back to Santiago, hoping to join a leftist revolution that had taken hold in
Chile, with the election of a Socialist government. That September, Augusto Pinochet launched his coup.
Bolao became a spy for the resistance. He was a feeble conspiratorcharged with transmitting messages
between dissidents, he felt pathetically conspicuous as he bicycled along Santiagos emptied-out streets
but the experience thrilled him. I recall the days after the coup as rich ones, full of energy, full of
eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen, he once wrote. (Photographs of him from
this period show a handsome but malnourished-looking hippie: his wavy black hair was untended, and his
delicate eyes were not yet dominated by the ovoid glasses that he adopted in middle age.)
Soon after the coup, Bolao was stopped at a highway checkpoint. His accent had mutated during his
years abroad, and the police booked him as a foreign terrorist. Bolao was detained for eight days, and
perhaps would have been killedPinochets regime murdered many dissident writerswere it not for a
bizarre reversal of the kind that animates his fiction. One day, a prison guard walked up to Bolao and
said, Dont you remember me? Im your buddy. The two men had briefly attended high school together;
Bolao was promptly released. After four more months in Chilea whirl of black humor,
friendshipand the danger of deathBolao realized that he had written only one poem, and that it
wasnt any good.
He returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a caf on Calle BucareliMexico Citys Left BankBolao met
Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or
so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolao christened the infrarealistas. The groups
aesthetic, Bolao later said, was French Surrealism fused with Dadaism, Mexican style. They published
iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own
poems at readings given by their enemies in Latin Americas cultural establishmentin particular,
Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexicos first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican
writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her fear, before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might
be lurking in the audience: They were the terror of the literary world.
Bolaos fury toward the literary mainstreamdeeply felt and bordering on puerileendured even after
his own work became canonical. (At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolao
died, he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation.) Bolao is
notorious in Spanish-speaking countries for having proclaimed that magic realism stinks. He derided
Gabriel Garca Mrquez as a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and
Archbishops; he called Isabel Allende a scribbler whose attempts at literature range from kitsch to the
pathetic. (Allende, interviewed in 2003, dismissed Bolao as an extremely unpleasant man, adding,
26

Death does not make you a nicer person.) Bolaos obstreperousness was sometimes a posemuch like
his preference for being photographed in a black leather jacket, sternly sucking on a cigarettebut his
self-described gratuitous attacks had salutary effects. He helped liberate Latin-American writing from
the debased imitations of magic realism that followed the global conquest of Garca Mrquezs 1967
novel One Hundred Years of Solitudeall those clairvoyant seoritas and intercourse-inspiring
molesand restablished the primacy of such cosmopolitan experimentalists as Borges and J ulio
Cortzar. (For Bolao, Cortzars moody novel Hopscotch was the Beginning and the End, precisely
because it has neither a beginning nor an end.) Of course, some calculation lay behind his position. There
was one living Latin-American novelist whose avid bookishness and formal cleverness made him the
obvious heir to the modernist tradition: Roberto Bolao.
Bolaos fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and The Savage
Detectives hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bolao legend. The novel, which has
been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, Manhattan Transfer-
like collage featuring more than fifty narrators, but its first hundred pages are anchored by a single,
exuberant voicethat of J uan Garca Madero, a seventeen-year-old Mexican orphan who, in 1975,
abandons his college studies in Mexico City for a group of poet renegades known as the visceral
realists.
Maderos narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: Depressed all day, but writing
and reading like a steam engine; Im reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues. Not since
Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Maderos entrance into the poetry
underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liottas fledgling mobster in GoodFellas. The
visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his tenement room, a little library has already
begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by
trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldnt be purer. We
were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed, Madero proclaims.
The visceral realists are led by Ulises Lima, a confrontational Mexican described by others as a ticking
bomb, and Arturo Belano, a flinty Chilean expatriate who was briefly imprisoned by the Pinochet
regime. They literally burst in on Maderos world, interrupting an antiseptic poetry workshop that he
attends. (With Madero and Belano, Bolao, a lover of literary jokes, has managed to squeeze two versions
of himself into the same novel.) Lima harangues the professor, and then pulls some smudged, crumpled
sheets from his jacket pocket, reading what Madero calls the best poem Id ever heard. Madero,
emboldened, hurls insults of his own; after class, Lima and Belano usher him to a grisly bar on Calle
Bucareli where moll-like waitresses offer blow jobs to aspiring writers, for a price (Id like you to write
me a poem). Madero makes the mobster metaphor explicit: I worried that Belano and Lima were so
busy talking to every freak that came up to our table that theyd forgotten all about me, but as day began
to dawn, they asked me to join the gang. They didnt say group or movement, they said gang. I liked
that. There is an element of parody here: Bolao appreciates that there is something ridiculous about
tough guys who quote Raymond Queneau. Yet, by grafting the tropes of gangster films onto the world of
poetry, Bolao captures the outlaw spirit that pervades every avant-garde movement.
Although the diaries form a kind of bildungsroman, Bolao never presents Maderos verse, as, say, J ames
J oyce does with Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The omission is pointed:
Bolao wants to focus on the art of living. Maderos entries have the offhand beauty of raw enthusiasm,
particularly when taking account of his rambunctious sex life. Madero loses his virginity to Mara Font
a feral poet with hands like the talons of a falconand goes on a tear from there. He writes of one
partner, She arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and
bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells. Of another: She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I
tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good. In Bolaos work, vitality is
poetry.
As Madero enters the inner circle of visceral realism, he discovers that the movement has a secret history.
Lima and Belano have borrowed the groups name from an equally uncompromising group of poets from
the nineteen-twenties; one member, Cesrea Tinajero, particularly fascinates them. Tinajeros verse was
27

greatly admired by her compatriots, but it cannot be found in libraries. She seems to have vanished
decades ago in the Sonora Desert, north of the city. Lima and Belano suspect that she is still alive. J ust as
the J apanese novelist Haruki Murakami structures his dreamlike narratives around the search for a
vanished girl, Bolaos fiction repeatedly features a noirish hunt for a missing writer. For Bolao, whose
protagonists are usually poets, the detective plot adds bounce to stories that might otherwise seem
leadenly preoccupied with literary matters. The technique echoes that of Borges, whose oracular ficciones
abound with private eyes.
Maderos romp through Mexico City ends as Bolao stories often dosuddenly. A house where the poets
gather for a New Years Eve party is laid siege to. An armed pimp and his henchman park outside in a
Camaro, demanding the return of Lupe, a prostituteand a friend of Mara Fontswho has tendered her
resignation from whoring. The poets decide to resolve the standoff by peeling out of the driveway in a
friends car; they will go to the Sonora Desert, in search of Tinajero. In the first sections final diary entry,
Madero presents a giddy action sequence worthy of Starsky & Hutch: I saw the two thugs get out of
the Camaro and I saw them coming at me.I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and
that she was opening the door. I realized that Id always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close
the door Ulises stepped on the gas. Poets with their pedal to the metal: Vroom! Novelists have been
smashing high and low together for a century, but Bolao does it with the force of a supercollider.
While living in Mexico, Bolao published two poetry collections, but, in 1977, a failed romance drove
him to go abroad. If I had stayed in Mexico I would have hanged myself, he said. The infrarealists
wilted without him. He spent a year travelling in France, Spain, and North Africa, then settled briefly in
Barcelona, taking part in the great sexual explosion that convulsed Spain after the death of General
Franco. Worried that the citys allures were distracting him from poetry, he began a long, itinerant tour of
the Mediterranean coast, taking on an absurd variety of jobs: grape harvester, dockworker, campground
watchman, trinket-shop proprietor. In his spare time, he wrote lush, sentimental poems about his Mexican
friends. Around this time, he printed up a visiting card identifying himself as Roberto Bolao, Poet and
Vagabond. His wanderings punished his body; he later joked that he left behind a trail of teeth, like
Hansel and Gretels bread crumbs. It didnt help that he was becoming addicted to heroin.
The second part of The Savage Detectives offers a melancholy gloss on Bolaos nomadic period.
Bolao, having cut off Maderos headlong narrativethe hunt for Cesrea Tinajero does not resume for
four hundred pagesbrings his story to a standstill. In the manner of Faulkners hazy oratorio As I Lay
Dying, he introduces a disorienting array of new narrators: four dozen eyewitnesses, from the United
States to Austria to Israel, who report on the wanderings of Lima and of Belano since 1975. (The reason
for their exile is a mystery: something terrible seems to have happened in the Sonora Desert.) These
accounts, each preceded by a journalistic dateline, resemble extended interviewsand reading them feels
like combing through the unedited footage of a documentary. With so many overlapping perspectives, the
resulting portraits of Lima and Belano have a Cubist ambiguity. Are the visceral realists ardent visionaries
or drugged-out miscreants? It depends on whos talking. After being immersed in the mind of an acolyte
like Madero, readers may be startled by a judgment offered by an ex-girlfriend of Belanos: The whole
visceral realism thing wasthe demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially
cheap and meaningless. Of Belano, she says, Deep down the guy was a creep. This is a devilish game
to play with an alter ego; Bolao could have titled this novel Self-Portrait in Fifty-three Convex
Mirrors.
Meanwhile, he gets to inhabit a wild range of narrative voices: a pompous Galician lawyer who calls
Belano a third-rate J ulien Sorel; a foulmouthed gringa who refers to one visceral realist as a
hemorrhoid-licking old bastard. One of the most riveting speakers is Auxilio Lacouture, a garrulous
Uruguayan woman who begins with a proclamation: Im the mother of Mexican poetry. I know all the
poets and all the poets know me. Lacouture, having known Belano since he was a teen-ager, gives the
novels most detailed account of his imprisonment in Chile; in her view, his efforts against the Pinochet
regime were noble but tainted him, as he returned to Mexico a preening radical who looked down on his
old friends as if he were Dante and hed just returned from hell. We also get a weirdly parallel tale of
her own travails. Like Belano, who stumbled into the resistance movement against Pinochet, Lacouture
was inadvertently trapped by history. In 1968, the National Autonomous University, in Mexico City
28

where Lacouture did various odd jobswas overtaken by riot police. Ignoring megaphoned commands to
evacuate the campus, Lacouture hid in a bathroom stall, terrified, for several days. (A compulsive poet,
she scribbled fresh verse on toilet paper.) She presents her actions as bold protest:
I lifted my feet like a Renoir ballerina, my underwear dangling around my skinny
ankles.And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew I had to resist. So I sat on the tiled
floor of the womens bathroom and in the last rays of light I read three more poems by Pedro
Garfias and then I closed the book and closed my eyes and said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture,
citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, stand your ground.
The incident swallows her up, defining her life: The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the
winds of 68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a
woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated. Her monologue edges toward madness.
To witness Lacoutures full breakdown, the reader must turn to Amulet, a slim novel anchored by the
same bathroom-stall revelation, which Bolao published in 1999. (More than once, Bolao generated
entire novels from episodes in earlier ones.) In the end, the fleshed-out portrait of Lacouture in
AmuletNew Directions recently published a translationis less potent than the hypnotic ten-page
cadenza in Detectives, which is enriched by its connection to other tales of political confusion.
The most haunting figure in The Savage Detectives is Ulises Lima. Upon leaving Mexico, the once
fearless poet becomes an aimless shadowy figure, a goddamn robot; in this novel, exile offers not
opportunity but enervation. When his forlorn odyssey is complete, Limahaving published nothing, his
poems scrawled in the margins of booksreturns home. He finally comes face to face with the despised
Octavio Paz, who sits next to him on a park bench. The enemy, at last, within reach! But its soon
humiliatingly clear that Paz has no idea who he is. Lima politely shakes Pazs hand, his fire extinguished.
Near the end of this middle section, a visceral realist proclaims, The search for a place to live and a place
to work was the common fate of all mankind. Ulises never finds one. Neither did the man he was based
on: as Bolao notes in an essay, his old friend Mario Santiago died in a mysterious car crash the same
year that The Savage Detectives was published. When an ambulance came to pick up his body,
Bolao recalled, nobody knew who he was and he spent several days in the morgue without anyone
claiming him. Santiagos one poetry collection, The Swans Howl, is no longer in print.
The sense of creative atrophy that permeates The Savage Detectives was belied by Bolaos own life:
his literary output accelerated and deepened the closer he got to death. In the mid-eighties, he settled in
Blanes, a tourist town on Spains Costa Brava. He stopped using heroin. (A moving essay recounts his
detoxification: he got his methadone dose at noon and spent the rest of the day lying on the beach,
crying.) He married Carolina Lpez, a Catalonian. In 1990, the couple had a son, Lautaro, named after the
Mapuche leader who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile; they later had a daughter, Alexandra.
Fatherhood changed Bolao. Determined to make a proper living, he largely abandoned poetry, shifting to
prose. In interviews, Bolao never dwelled on the bitterness that must have attended this decision, but the
tragic thrust of The Savage Detectives suggests that he never forgave the world for making him
abandon his first love.
Bolao began submitting short stories to state-sponsored contests around Spain; when a story won prize
money, he would retitle it and submit it to another competition, which it would also win. (Similar
mischief is detailed in his darkly witty story Sensini.) When he was thirty-eight, Bolao learned that his
liver was severely compromised, and he began writing with unrelenting concentration; starting in 1996,
he published one or more books a year. Despite his declining health, he could write for forty-eight hours
at a stretch before collapsing. Such was his intensity, friends have recalled, that he sometimes missed
medical appointments.
Compared with the sprawling Savage Detectives, most of Bolaos novels are impressively distilled
performances; seven are under two hundred pages. Two of his best short works, By Night in Chile
(2000) and Distant Star (1996), have also been published by New Directions. By Night in Chile may
be Bolaos most searing monologue: a Chilean priest, on his deathbed, attempts to justify a shameful
past. In order to escape his impoverished background, he reveals, he joined Opus Dei, and eventually
29

served as a tutor for General Pinochet. (Theres a nauseating scene in which Pinochet coerces the priest
into praising his writerly gifts: Ive published countless articles in journalson all sorts of topics, but
always of course related to military matters.) Distant Star handles similar themes, but is more surreal
in tone. An ambitious Chilean poet, Carlos Wieder, comes up with a scheme for getting ahead in the
Pinochet regime. He becomes a pilot in the Chilean Air Force and turns the publication of verse into a
hideous military spectacleby skywriting his latest stanzas over the Andes. Wieders poems are
incoherent, but the state applauds them as patriotic emblems of the New Chilean Poetry. A literary crime,
in Bolaos world, is the equivalent of a political crime, and Wieder, inevitably, turns out to be a
murderer: two superior poets become victims of his jealousy and his knife. Wieder vanishes into exile
when Pinochet falls, and, as with The Savage Detectives, this disappearance inspires a search: the
narrator, a friend of the murdered poets, pieces together clues and hunts Wieder down.
Bolaos first novels attracted critical praise but few readers; the 1998 publication of The Savage
Detectives made him instantly famous. It aroused the same level of excitement in Latin America that
One Hundred Years of Solitude had, three decades earlier, and won the Rmulo Gallegos Prize, the
Spanish-language equivalent of the Booker Prize. Although Bolao claimed to be embarrassed by his
renown, he couldnt resist sharing his causticand machoopinions in interviews and essays. (In the
late nineties, he began writing a column for a Spanish newspaper.) Not since Norman Mailer had a
novelist chest-thumped so entertainingly. Literature, he declared, is the product of a strange rain of
blood, sweat, semen, and tears. When asked by the Mexican edition of Playboy to name his favorite
things, he cited the literature of Borges and making love. He said that the Nobel Prize was typically
won by jerks. Bolao played up his hippie past, claiming to have lived for years on a diet of rice.
Despite the diaspora evoked in The Savage Detectives, he rejected the idea that his work was a
literature of exile. He wrote, For a true writer, his only homeland is the bookstore. He still considered
himself primarily a poet: I blush less when I reread my poems.
Growing increasingly ill, he worked for five years on his final, hugely ambitious project: 2666,
conceived as five discrete but linked narratives. In J une, 2003, he confessed to a Spanish publication,
Im not capable of doing the work that finishing 2666 requires. There are more than a thousand pages
that I have to correctits a labor worthy of a nineteenth-century miner. For now, Im going to do less
taxing work. I will correct the novel after I have my liver operation.I am third on the list to receive a
transplant. He died a month later.
In the days before his death, Bolao asked his editor to publish the five sections of 2666 individually, in
order to secure a sizable inheritance for his children. After consultation with Bolaos wife, the publisher
issued it as a single volume. (The book, which is eleven hundred pages long, is currently being translated
by Wimmer.) 2666 has hundreds of characters, but in a sense its protagonist is Santa Teresa, a town in
the Sonora Desert where impoverished Mexicans labor in maquiladoras, the low-wage factories that have
proliferated in the era of globalization. Santa Teresa is modelled on Ciudad J urez, where, since 1993, the
corpses of more than four hundred young womenmany of them mutilatedhave been found in garbage
containers or vacant lots. (Almost none of these crimes have been solved.) In the novel, a parallel
massacre has taken place. The plot of 2666 is byzantinein a variation on The Savage Detectives, it
hinges on the hunt for a reclusive Prussian novelist who, admirers believe, has hidden himself in the
Sonora Desert. But, at its core, 2666 is a testament to the unredressed evil of the murders. The fourth
section, The Part About the Crimes, offers a sickeningly comprehensive account of the killings, written
in the frigid tone of a forensic report. This litany is interspliced with accounts of corrupt police officials,
one of whom jokes, Women are like laws, they were made to be violated. More than three hundred
pages long, it may be the grimmest sequence in contemporary fiction.
In one of several poems that Roberto Bolao wrote about Mario Santiago, he speaks of the dream of our
youth / the most valiant dream of all. The third and final section of The Savage Detectivesin which
Maderos diaries seamlessly resume, on New Years Day, 1976has the feel of a dream. After the slow
climb of the middle section, Bolao rewards the reader with an exhilarating rush of storytelling. Lima and
Belano turn out to be natural sleuths: clues about Tinajeros past are uncovered as they motor from one
dusty pueblo to another. People fall in love; a second car chase ends in a climactic shoot-out. The
Technicolor glory of the books opening is restored. At the same time, the brilliance of the novels
30

temporal shuffling becomes clear: now that the reader knows how woeful the lives of the poets will
become, their adventure in the Sonora Desert is freighted with dreadful poignancy. Maderos diaries are
not the beginning of something; they are the end.
Bolao called The Savage Detectives a love letter to his generation, but it feels more like a lament, a
chronicle of dissipated potential. The novels fetishization of lost youth verges on romanticism; a friend
of Tinajeros intones, What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away
from us. Outside the Madero diaries, there is only one moment in The Savage Detectives that
documents a prolonged surge of passion. Late in the second section, Belano takes up residency in Spain.
He becomes so peeved by a local book critic that a letter to the editor seems insufficient: he proposes a
duel. Belano asks a friend to be his second, and the frienda moribund fellow who is narrating this
taleis galvanized. I felt as if someone had given me a shot in the arm, the friend writes. First the
pinprick, then the liquid going not into my veins but my muscles, an icy liquid that made me shiver. The
proposition seemed crazy and unwarranted.But then I thought that life (or the spectre of life) is
constantly challenging us for acts we never committed, and sometimes for acts that weve never thought
of committing. Belano and the critic obtain swords and agree to meet at a properly atmospheric spot: a
wind-whipped beach north of Barcelona. But in Bolaos ever-darkening universe, a tragic trajectory
cannot so easily be reversed. The ensuing swordplay is hopelessly ridiculous, the folly of men going at
it like stupid children. The decisive blow has been struck by the author.
The duel sequence has the heightened dolorousness of Bolaos best short stories. When The Savage
Detectives was published, Ignacio Echevarra, Spains most prominent literary critic, praised it as the
kind of novel that Borges could have written. He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction
is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaos novel emerges from a branching tree of
stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of
male ego? Bolao fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly
cerebral frame. Its a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism.

New York Review of Books, 19 J uly 2007
The Gr eat Bol ao
By Francisco Goldman
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolao, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 577 pp., $27.00
Distant Star by Roberto Bolao, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions, 149 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolao, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions, 219 pp., $13.95 (paper)
2666 by Roberto Bolao. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1,125 pp. (to be published in English translation by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year)
1.
A writers patria or country, as someone said, is his language. That sounds pretty demagogic, but I
completely agree with him. That is from Roberto Bolaos acceptance speech for the 1999 Rmulo
Gallegos Prize, an award given by the government of Venezuela for the best Spanish-language novel of
the year in Latin America or Spain. Bolao won the prize for The Savage Detectives, his sprawling,
exuberant account of two Latin American poets over twenty-some years, which made him a literary
celebrity and established him as one of the most talented and inventive novelists writing in Spanish.
Bolao was routinely asked in interviews whether he considered himself Chilean, having been born in
Santiago in 1953, or Spanish, having lived in Spain the last two decades of his life, until his death in
2003, or Mexican, having lived in Mexico City for ten years in between. One time he answered, Im
Latin American. Other times he would say that the Spanish language was his country.
31

Although I also know, he continued in his acceptance speech,
that its true that a writers country isnt his language or isnt only his language. There can
be many countries, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and obviously that passport is
the quality of the writing. Which doesnt mean just to write well, because anybody can do
that, but to write marvelously well, though not even that, because anybody can do that too.
Then what is writing of quality? Well, what its always been: to know how to thrust your
head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is
basically a dangerous calling.
The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant
themes of Bolaos writings and also of his life, as he defiantly and even improbably chose to live it. By
the end of that life, Bolao had written three story collections and ten novels. The last of these
novels, 2666, was not quite finished when he died of liver failure in 2003, which did not prevent many
readers and critics from considering it his masterwork. It is an often shockingly raunchy and violent tour
de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novels narrative velocity, polyphonic
range, inventiveness, and bravery) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in
Ciudad J urez, in the Sonora desert of Mexico near the Texas border. (2666 is currently being translated
into English and is due to be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)
Yet the writer with whom Spanish-language critics have often compared Bolao is the Argentine J orge
Luis Borges, renowned for his singular bookishness, and for the metaphysical playfulness, erudition, and
brevity of his entirely asexual writings. With those comparisons critics have wanted, partly, to emphasize
their sense of Bolaos significance, for Borges is probably the only Latin American writer of the past
century whose greatness seems uncontested by anybody, though the more you read Bolao, the more
interesting and appropriate the comparison between the two writers becomes. Bolao revered Borges (I
could live under a table reading Borges). He would have been happy, Bolao told an interviewer, to have
led a life like Borgessrelatively sedentary, devoted to literature and a small circle of like-minded
friends, a happy life. But Bolao lived most of his life in another manner. My life, he said, has been
infinitely more savage than Borgess.
Bolao was born in Santiago, Chile, but spent his childhood in a provincial town south of the capital. His
father was a truck driver and boxer, his mother a schoolteacher; in 1968, in search of a new start, they
moved to Mexico City along with Roberto and his sister. That was the year government troops occupied
the vast campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and massacred hundreds of
student protesters at the Tlatelolco Plaza. But Mexico City seemed to the adolescent Bolao like a planet
apart, the city where everything was possible. Within a year of arriving, hed decided to be a poet and
dropped out of school; later he would blame gaps in his subsequent self-education on the layout of the
shelving in bookstores that prevented him from shoplifting certain books.
In 1973, aged nineteen, a self-described Trotskyite, Bolao set out for Chile, where the Socialist Salvador
Allende had been elected president. He mostly traveled by bus, a journey comparable to the one
sentimentally depicted in the recent movie about the young Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, except
Bolao traveled through a continent much influenced by Guevaras now mythologized life and death. In
El Salvador, Bolao stayed with future leftist FMLN guerrilla leaders, the same men, authentic criminals
who called themselves poets, who two years later would murder the leftist poet and free spirit Roque
Dalton in his sleep. Bolao arrived in Chile not long before September 11, 1973, when the Chilean
military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende, who died, probably by suicide, during the
coup. Supporters of the Allende government and many young innocents were arrested; thousands were
disappeared. Bolao spent eight days in prison until, recognized by two guards who were former
schoolmates, he was freed.
He returned to Mexico City and, as he put it, dedicated myself to writing with my aura of a war veteran.
In 1974, the poet Mario Santiago brought a group of friends whod been expelled from an UNAM poetry
workshoptheyd tried to force the resignation of a poet-professor unwilling, or unable, to teach Spanish
Golden Age poetry of the sixteenth century and classical poetic formsto visit his friend Roberto
Bolao, who lived in an apartment in the center of town. (Mario Santiago would be the model, in The
32

Savage Detectives, for Ulises Lima, best friend of Bolaos fictional alter ego, Arturo Belano.) At that
meeting Bolao came up with the idea of forming a poetry movement against the official culture, which
he named the Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia. The Infrarealists obvious heroes were the Beats,
Dadaists, maudits such as Rimbaud and Lautramont (the two absolute adolescent poets), and also more
obscure figures, such as their adored Sophie Podolski, a Belgian poet whod committed suicide in 1974
at age twenty.
Their declared enemy was the poet and intellectual Octavio Paz, in their eyes the representative of
Mexicos official culture, the politically powerful gatekeeper to the Mexican literary establishment.
Infrarealists interrupted Pazs public readings with shouts and once, supposedly, threw wine on his shirt.
Bolaos Infrarealist manifesto is one of his earliest writings available to readers.1Titled Djenlo Todo,
Nuevamente (meaning, Leave Everything Behind, Again, after a poem by Andr Breton), the
manifesto is a free-associative, exuberant verbal torrentDancing-club of Misery. Pepito Tequila
sobbing his love for Lisa Underground. Rimbaud, come home! Rather than prescribing any particular
aesthetic principles or commitments, it urges infrarrealistas to leave their narrow bookish circles, see the
world, and find their rebel poetry in their own uncompromising lives. Some of its exhortations, such as
the twice-repeated The poem is a journey, and the poet is a hero who reveals heroes, seem especially
striking in light of Bolaos mature novels, which would repeatedly describe the fateful journeys of poets.
In at least three of those novels, Distant Star, The Savage Detectives, and 2666, the central plot would
involve a literal search by detective poets (or literary types) for mysterious or vanished poet-writers,
some of them heroes, some villains.
In Mexico City in 1976, Bolao published his first book, a twenty-two-page collection of
poetry, Reinventando el Amor. A year later he moved to Spain, settling for a time in Barcelona. Soon
after, Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoiris de fuego (Naked Boys under the Rainbow of Fire), his
anthology of eleven young Latin American poets, including himself and Santiago, was published in
Mexico. A short novel, co-written with Antoni G. Porta, Consejos de un discpulo de Morrison a un
fantico de Joyce (A [J im] Morrison Fans Advice to a J oyce Fan), won a minor prize in 1984. Then, for
the next decade, Bolao the writer virtually disappeared. Throughout those years, he supported himself in
a variety of low-wage jobs, among them working as the night watchman in a campground just outside
Barcelona; eventually he settled in Blanes, a small seaside town north of Barcelona.
Bolao always considered himself, above all, a poet. But in 1990, when he and his companion, Carolina
Lpez, had a son, Lautaro, Bolao realized that he was now responsible for a family. He was
impoverished, a South American foreigner; as a poet he could hardly have been more obscure. Bolao
made the improbable decision to support his new family by becoming a fiction writer. On the advice of a
friend, he found a clever, if barely workable, way of doing soentering provincial literary contests. In
1993 his short novel La Pista de Hielo (The Ice Rink) won such a prize. La Pista de Hielo involves the
discovery of a mysterious naked corpse, which turns out to belong to a poet.
A year later the short novel Monsieur Pain, whose main character looks after the great Peruvian poet
Cesar Vallejo on his Paris deathbed, won a prize sponsored by the city of Toledo. His next novel was La
Literatura Nazi en America, an encyclopediain the spirit of Borgess Universal History of Infamy
of imaginary ultra-rightist South and North American writers.2 J orge Herralde, owner-editor of the
prestigious publishing house Anagrama, was interested in publishing it, but as Bolao was too poor to
own a telephone, Herralde was unable to contact him until the novel had already been sold, for a pittance,
to another publisher, which soon let it go out of print.
But Anagrama published Bolaos next novel, Distant Star, in 1996, and went on to publish at least one
of his books every year for the rest of his life: two story collections, four short novels, and a book of
essays and reviews. During those last five years Bolao also worked steadily on the monumental 2666.
From 1993 on he knew he was gravely ill, suffering from several medical conditions including the liver
ailment that caused his death in 2003.
33

2.
Latin America is the insane asylum of Europe. Maybe, originally, it was thought that Latin
America would be Europes hospital, or Europes grain bin. But now its the insane asylum.
A savage, impoverished, violent insane asylum, where, despite its chaos and corruption, if
you open your eyes wide, you can see the shadow of the Louvre.
Roberto Bolao, Bolao por s mismo
3

According to the narrator of Mauricio (The Eye) Silva, one of Bolaos stories collected in Last
Evenings on Earth, violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in
Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allendes death.
But the story that The Eye, a homosexual photographer, reveals to the narrator, his fellow Chilean exile in
Europe, is a ludicrous one: on a trip to India The Eye rescued two young boys, one a eunuch, from a
brothel and ran away with them to another village where he diligently tried to raise them until, after a year
and a half, both died of disease.
When the story ends, with The Eye sobbing away, its difficult to grasp the connectionasserted by both
The Eye and the narratorto the violence that will not let us be. The lot of Latin Americans born in the
Fifties, and to those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight. Its as if
Bolao is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile. Yet the storys mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely
grief leaves you with an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal
truthfulness.
The story is written in the unadorned voice typical of Bolaos shorter fictions, direct and intimate but
also detached. That voice is perfectly evoked early in the novel Distant Star, when the narrator reflects
about a friend, I guess he talked the way we all do now, those of us who are still alive (he talked as if he
were living inside a cloud). Chris Andrews, who translates the Bolao books that New Directions
publishes, always gives a convincing rendering of that voice.
In his novel The Savage Detectives, Bolao offers another instructive story about his generation: this
one, told by Arturo Belano to a friend of his, is about two writers he has known: a Peruvian and a Cuban,
a poet and a storyteller, who believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin
American writer born in the fifties. Both enjoyed early literary success, but the same thing happened to
them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the
Fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. The Peruvian, while
living in Paris, fell in with Peruvian Maoists, and because hed always been a playful and irresponsible
Maoist, found himself writing pages of revolting propaganda; despite his youthful folly, he was still a
good poet, occasionally very good. When he returned to Peru to live cheaply and write, he was
denounced as a revisionist or a traitorous dog by the Shining Path guerrillas, while the police
considered him one of the guerrillas ideologues. Either side might kill him. To make a long story short:
the Peruvian came unglued.
The gay Cuban writer was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution. He lost
his job, was barred from publishing in Cuba, imprisoned, and after years of suffering, made it to the
United States, where he contracted AIDS and died. (He is clearly modeled on the Cuban writer Reinaldo
Arenas.) Sometimes he would sit at a window of his New York apartment and think about what he could
have done and what, in the end, he did. His last days were days of loneliness, suffering, and rage at what
he had lost forever.
His generations journey to disillusionment provided Bolao with a surprisingly original subject, at least
within contemporary Latin American literature.
With Bolao we are far from the way that the most famous generation of Latin American novelists and
poetsGabriel Garca Mrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and others
understood the long-standing and dreadful Latin American problem of literature and politics. During
Latin Americas violent decades of cold war upheaval, those older writers often used the pulpits of their
34

fame to champion one side or another. Yet in their novels and, with the exception of Neruda, in their
poems, they attempted a nondidactic art that transcended immediate political realities. The young
Garca Mrquez, in a 1960 essay asking Why are all the novels about la violencia so bad?, had
admonished writers for writing too directly about violent acts, and for forgetting that a novel is not found
in the deadbut in the living, sweating ice in their hiding places.
In Garca Mrquezs writings, wrote Vargas Llosa in 1971, the social and political theme, although
essential to those fictionsappears in an oblique manner.^
4
Such a novelist, wrote Vargas Llosa,
declares war on mundane reality and attempts to supplant it: To write novels is an act of rebellion against
reality. Every novel is a secret deicide, is a symbolic assassin of reality.
5

Bolao did write about political violence directly, though in a way that couldnt have been further from
the literature of denunciation that Garca Mrquez condemned. He even claimed that violence
functioned in his writings in an accidental way, which is how violence functions everywhere.
Distant Star tells the story of Carlos Wieder, an assassin not of reality, but of young female poets.
Wieder, a mediocre poet himself, is enrolled in a poetry workshop along with the unnamed narrator and
other students, including the gifted twin sisters Veronica and Angelica Garmendia. When Pinochets coup
occurs, the students scatter and disappear (some forever). Wieder tracks the Garmendias to a family
country house, where they spend a night reciting poetry and talking, as the narrator imagines it, about the
leftist intellectual and poet Enrique Lihn and civil poetry, and here if the twins were more attentive
they would have seen an ironic glint in [Wieders] eye (civil poetry, Ill give you civil poetry). In the
middle of the night, Wieder murders the sleeping aunt in her bed; minutes later four men arrive at the
house in a car and Wieder lets them in. We are left to imagine on our own precisely what the men do in
the house, but the outcome is clear:
And the bodies will never be found; but no, one body, just one, will appear years later in a mass grave, the
body of Angelica Garmendia, my adorable, my incomparable Angelica, but only hers, as if to prove that
Carlos Wieder is a man and not a god.
Wieder works for the Pinochet regime as an air force pilot (he collaborates with Pinochets death squads
on some of his murders, but its not entirely clear to what extent they are part of his official duties). In the
air force he finds a way to revive his career as a poet: he skywrites his poems over the Andes. He is
hailed, particularly by supporters of the new regime, as the eras major poet for his gnomic verse in the
sky. (Death is responsibility. Death is love.) Later Wieder vanishes, and the narrator, now in
Spain, tries to follow his elusive trail across decades.
An exiled Chilean detective enters the story, hired by a mysterious benefactor. The detective pays the
narrator, with his knowledge of poetry, to look for signs of Wieder in obscure literary magazines with
names like Hibernia and Mr. Pete. Or might Wieder belong to the Parisian sect of barbaric writers, who
commune with the works of Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and other great French writers by defecating and
masturbating on their books? In one of the literary magazines the narrator finds an essay proposing that
literature should be written by non-literary people. The corresponding revolution in writingwould,
in a sense, abolish literature itself, and he reflects, something told me this particular champion of
barbaric writing was Carlos Wieder.
Wieder incarnates the solipsism of the mediocre or failed artist who vengefully hates his art and its
practitioners. Bolao had included an earlier version of Wieders character in Nazi Literature in America.
The literary Nazisfascists and ultra-right sympathizers and zealots, most from South America, a few
from North Americaportrayed in that book are a gallery of self-deluded mediocrities, snobs,
opportunists, narcissists, and criminals, none with the talent of a Cline. AboutNazi Literature in the
Americas, Bolao told an interviewer that its focus is on the world of the ultra right, but much of the
time, in reality, Im talking about the left. When Im talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in
reality Im talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in
general.
But if literary people are so often despicable and mediocre, why should we love literature, or ever think of
it as heroic?
35

The Savage Detectives provides Bolaos answer. The first of his Mexican novels, it is as expansive as his
two Chilean novels of literature and evil (Distant Star and By Night in Chile) are slender. Bolaos
friends often joked that he wouldnt allow anybody to say anything good about Chile, or bad about
Mexico. As his friend Carmen Boullosa has observed, he regarded Chile as the inferno of his youth, and
Mexico as the paradise (though later, in his last book, the inferno came to Mexico too). Yet he never
returned to Mexico after leaving it in 1977. From a great distance, wrote another friend, the Mexican
writer J uan Villoro, he had constructed a country of memory, of spectral exactitude.
6

This is the way The Savage Detectives begins, in the year 1975:
November 2
Ive been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no
initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
November 3
Im not really sure what visceral realism is.
J uan Garca Madero, the seventeen-year-old narrator of the diary that makes up the novels 124-page first
section, titled Mexicans Lost in Mexico, is an orphan who lives with his middle-class aunt and uncle, a
law student enrolled in a poetry workshop at the university. He knows what a rispetto is (an Italian form
of verse composed of eight lines with eleven syllables each), but the workshop teacher does not. (The
only Mexican poet who knows things like that by heart is Octavio Paz (our great enemy), writes Garca
Madero, the others are clueless, or at least thats what Ulises Lima told me minutes after I joined the
visceral realists.7 ) In class, Garca Madero challenges the teachers knowledge of poetic forms. The
professor responds, Dont give me this crap. In the original Spanish, he snarls, No me vengas con
chingaderas, Garca Madero. (Almost literally, stop fucking around with me, but also dont be such
a fucking smartass, though chingar is such a common and versatile Mexican verb that few would be
shocked to hear a professor use it in a classroom; behind the irate complaint, you also hear his chagrin.)
The Savage Detectives is not only Bolaos spectral recreation of the Mexico City of his youth, but also
makes uncanny use of the citys exuberantly baroque vernacular, a mix of traditional slang and that of
several subcultures (adolescent, low-life, hipster- druggy, snippy upper-class bohemians, and so on).
Throughout the multi-voiced epic of The Savage Detectives, the gifted translator Natasha Wimmer is
almost always up to the task, but it must also be said that it is probably impossible to make Mexican
Spanish sound like Mexican English. (They have chingaderas and we have crap.)
The Savage Detectives is Roberto Bolaos double self-portrait of the poet as a young man. The Chilean
Arturo Belanowho with his friend Ulises Lima leads the visceral realist poetshas already had a
revelation of the trinity of youth, love and death; the book will follow him through his years in Spain,
up to 1996, when, already seriously ill, he disappears into war-torn Africa, apparently in search of a
Rimbaud-like oblivion, or even death. But the narrator Garca Madero is the poet in his moment of
adolescent rebellion and excitement, who believes that the poets life, the only life worth living, will be
one of limitless adventure and epiphany. He drops out of school, leaves home, assembles an ever-growing
library of shoplifted books, and soon there is no turning back from his journey of discovery: of poetry and
poets, of the city (I drift from place to place like a piece of flotsam), and, most of all, of love and sex,
for Garca Maderos awakening sexual energies seem inexhaustible, promising as much possibility and
danger as the city itself.
At the end of the books first section, on New Years Eve, Garca Madero, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima,
and a waifish imp of a prostitute known as Lupe leave Mexico City in a white Impala, fleeing Lupes
jealous, violent pimp. They are headed to the Sonoran desert in search of the object of Lima and Belanos
obsession: a long-forgotten, never more than obscure poet named Cesrea Tinajera, one of the original
stridentistsan actual Mexican poetry movement of the 1920s, though Tinajeras character is fictional
and an inspiration to the visceral realists.
36

In the novels four-hundred-page second section, titled The Savage Detectives, thirty-eight characters,
from a total of fifteen cities and eight different countries, speak as if to an invisible detective who has
been determinedly hunting Belano and Lima for twenty years. Characters recount the intersection of their
own lives with the visceral realists and digress into their own stories. The narrative doesnt proceed
chronologically, but repeatedly returns to one long nightwhen night sinks into night, though never all
of a sudden, the white-footed Mexico City nightduring which Belano and Lima visit Amadeo, an old,
impoverished stridentist poet who seems to be the last man alive with clear memories of Cesrea Tinajera
in her Mexico City youth: he possesses a copy of the fifty-year-old poetry magazine in which she
published her only known poem. Amadeo is amazed and delighted to have been found by the two boys,
and to be able to spend a long night talking about poetry, reliving his youth, and drinkingthey polish off
a rare bottle, perhaps the last left in Mexico, of a mezcal with a talismanic name. Ah, what a shame they
dont make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, says Amadeo, what a shame that times passes, dont you
think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.
In The Savage Detectives Bolao shows how time punishes us for the rebellious dreams of youth,
bringing disappointment, painfully modest accomplishments, broken loves, illness, even violent death
and, simply, the end of youth. But for readers no longer young, the novel also conjures youth in all its
hilariousness and overwrought drama, and reminds us of the purity of young peoples faithabove all in
poetry. It can also make a reader care deeply about the characters, almost like a parent, wanting happiness
for them, fretting when it eludes them, and finally forced to accept that they will live out their destinies on
their own.
No character in a novel is really despicable or even dislikable when brought to life with skill, energy, and
wit. Bolaos hilariously drawn upper-class aesthetic snobs and pedants, for example, are very
recognizable Mexico City types. Even the delightfully odd behavior of the character Octavio Paz, in the
one episode dedicated to him, seems fondly written. In contrast to the awed Garca Madero, many of the
characters in the novels middle section who recall their encounters with Belano and Lima are quick to
scorn them, calling them cut-rate surrealists and fake Marxists, and, not too unjustly given what occurs
in several fraught sexual encounters, limp dicks. I cant think of another male writer in any language
who creates very different female characters more convincingly or sensitively than Bolao does, for all
his earthiness. Belano and Lima pursue romantic relationships, for example, with several Mexico City
J ewish women, who, while recognizably J ewish, are also as Mexican as any other of the characters, which
should come as no surprise, but may to those English-language readers who like to insist on strictly racial
definitions of Latin American identity.
The vibrancy of Bolaos women suggests another aspect of his originality, at least in the context of Latin
American fiction. When J ulio Cortzar, in Hopscotch, portrayed young Latin Americans in Paris, one
implication was that Paris was where they had to go to find personal freedom and an interesting and
modern way of life. Bolao has frequently acknowledged a debt to Cortzars novel, but the Mexico City
of The Savage Detectives, for all its local character and danger, has more in common, at least in the
manner that the books comparatively sophisticated and bohemian young characters inhabit it, with cities
like New York or Paris than with any traditional Latin American setting. The novel depicts Mexico City
during the very years, ironically, that the rest of the world was discoveringOne Hundred Years of
Solitude in translation, a book whose global success had the consequences, which its author could never
have foreseen, of creating folksy stereotypes of Latin American life and the association of Latin American
literature almost exclusively with magic realism that has endured for nearly forty years.
8

One reason that Mexico City was paradise to Bolao was that it was relatively removed from the political
violence convulsing much of Latin America in those years. Mexico had its traumatic 1968, and its culture
was certainly affected, but, as it always seems to following calamities, the country had quickly recovered
its peculiar equilibrium. (When the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when
the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico, says a character in Savage Detectives.)
This is wonderfully dramatized when a group of Mexican leftist writers travel to Sandinista Nicaragua on
a junket. They might as well be revolutionary tourists from an American universitythough much
heavier drinkers than most gringo radicals. Ulises Lima, an accidental participant, slips away from the
hotel that is the groups boozy bubble and spends two years, about which we learn nothing, wandering
37

war-convulsed Central America, until one day, by then nearly forgotten by everybody, he reappears in
Mexico City.
Ulises Limas name evokes Bolaos love of J oyce and also of J os Lezama Lima, often regarded as the
Spanish languages J oyce, and seems to confirm Bolaos intentions to create, with The Savage
Detectives, a contemporary epic. (When Spains most influential critic, Ingnacio Echevarra, observed
that The Savage Detectives was the kind of novel Borges could have consented to write, he was surely
referring, at least partly, to that novels reinvention of classical epic.
9
) But Bolao also said that he wrote
his novel so that he and Mario Santiago could laugh over it together. In 1998, the year the book came out,
Santiago was struck by a car in Mexico City and died before he could read it.
Bolao has written an admiring essay on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of his favorite books,
and the streets of Mexico City are Garca Maderos Mississippi. Many characters take long walks through
the city that give stretches of the book its tempo of endless afternoons and nights of youth when you can
walk and walk and dont really have to be anywhere. In the end the territory ahead into which Garca
Madero escapes is the Sonoran desert.
The novels fifty-page final section, again narrated by Garca Madero, takes us back to the 1970s, where
we last left him and his poet friends in the desert fleeing Lupes pimp. In the books final pages, Garca
Madera and Lupe have just parted ways with Belano and Lima. They have found the object of their
detective search, Cesrea Tinajera, only to inadvertently cause her death: she gets shot in a violent lonely-
desert-road confrontation with the murderous pimp and his corrupt policeman sidekick, who have been
relentlessly pursuing Lupe. So all Bolaos themes have converged: the poets search for the elusive idol,
or for the myth of poetry itself; the interrelationship of poetry and crime; the violence that Latin
Americans born in the Fifties cant get away from; the trinity of youth, love, and death. We already know,
by then, what will happen to Belano and Lima.
But what about Lupe and Garca Madero? None of the characters in the books long middle section
mentions or seems to remember seventeen-year-old J uan Garca Madero. Early in the novel, in the rowdy
lowlife cantina where the visceral realists hang out, Brgida, the waitress who has given Garca Madero
his first sexual experience but who subsequently loses him to another waitress, the desperately loving
Rosario, delivers a prophecy. She tells Garca Madero that youre going to die young, J uan, and that
youre going to do Rosario wrong. By this point in the novel, the second prediction has already come
true. But she has also told Garca Madero that he needs a good woman who will stand by him, and in
Lupita he seems to have found one. The novel ends with the couple stranded in the desert, which is either
an image of nowhere or of infinite paths stretching toward the horizon.
In one of his interviews, Bolao made a distinction between celebrated authors whose works inspired
imitators and a writer like Borges, whose fictions, he said, opened paths of literary experimentation for
other writers to explore. The Savage Detectives, in a different sense, opens new paths too, some of them
pointing north, toward the US border and the primary setting of Bolaos next novel, 2666. That setting is
the fictional city of Santa Teresa, where many young women are murdered and where a mysterious
novelist and German World War II veteran, Benno von Archimboldi, might be hiding. The multiple story
lines of 2666 are borne along by narrators who seem also to represent various of its literary influences,
from European avant-garde to critical theory to pulp fiction, and who converge on the city of Santa Teresa
as if propelled toward some final unifying epiphany. It seems appropriate that 2666s abrupt end leaves us
just short of whatever that epiphany might have been, resulting in another open-ended ending, in paths to
retrace and resume, leaving everything behind again.
1 It can be read in Spanish on the Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia Web site, www.infrarrealismo.com,
which has been in existence since 2005.
2 Nazi Literature in the Americas will be published in the US in early 2008 by New Directions.
3 Bolao wrote out all his responses in interviews, which have been collected in one volume, Bolao por s
mismo (Santiago: Universidad Diego Portales, 2006).
38

5 The Boom era writers produced formidable novels that described political violence more directly, but
typically these were historical novels, such as Vargas Llosa's ferocious The War of the End of the World,
which Bolao admired, or the famous "dictator" novels.
6 From the prologue to Bolao por s mismo.
7 As intentionally juvenile as the visceral realists' hostile fixation with Paz can seem, Bolaofor whom
Nicanor Parra was the greatest contemporary poetdid not admire his poetry, though he did say that he
considered Paz's prose superior to Carlos Fuentes's.
8 In the essay "Los mitos de Ctulhu," included in the posthumous collection El gaucho insufrible (Barcelona:
Anagrama, 2003), Bolao argued that no serious writers, not Borges, Bioy, Cortzar, Rulfo, Onetti, among
others, or even "that duet of old machos, Garca Mrquez and Vargas Llosa," wrote "Latin American
literature," a stereotypical and fraudulent product now churned out by a long line of commercially
promoted Garca Mrquez imitators.
9 In his 1967 Norton lectures at Harvard, Borges said, "I think the epic will come back to us. I believe that the
poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think
of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil." See Aura
Estrada's essay "Borges, Bolao and the Return of the Epic" at www.WordsWithoutBorders.org.

Wi ndow s I nt o t he Ni ght
By Marcela Valdes
This article appeared in the March 31, 2008 edition of The Nation.
Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolao dropped out of high school shortly after he
decided to become a poet at age 15. The year was 1968, a time as wild in Mexico City, where Bolao and
his parents were living, as it was in the United States--but much more dangerous. There, student protests,
rock n roll and sexual liberation were the pursuits not only of poets but also of activists and leftist
guerrillas, and the Mexican government greeted them with a dirty war. Four unlucky students died at Kent
State in 1970; some 300 were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Yet for Bolao, whod just
arrived from a small country town in Chile, the atmosphere of the big city was intoxicating. Years later he
recalled that the capital had seemed to him like the Frontier, that vast, nonexistent territory where
freedom and metamorphosis are the spectacles of every day.
Bolaos own transformation began with a five-year period of isolation. Rather than join the party, he
shut himself in his bedroom to consume book after book after book. The poet J aime Quezada, who came
to visit the family when Bolao was 18, recalls that the young writer was living like a hermit. He didnt
come out of his bed-living-dining-room, Quezada has said, except to go to the toilet or to comment out
loud, pulling on his hair, about some passage in the book he was reading.
Young and broke, Bolao stocked his shelves by shoplifting from bookstores all over Mexico City. His
captures included volumes by Pierre Lous, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Pepys, Alphonse Daudet, J uan
Rulfo, Amado Nervo and Vachel Lindsay. But the book that changed his life was Albert Camuss The
Fall, in which a lawyer who hangs out at an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City resigns himself to a life
of calculated hypocrisy. Bolao explains in his essay Whos the Brave One? that after reading it, he
was possessed by a desire to read everything, which, in my simplicity, was the same as wanting to or
intending to discover the mechanism of chance that had led Camuss character to accept his atrocious
fate. Bolaos library was his own private Frontier.
Unlike many passionate young readers--who knock off two books a week when theyre in high school but
slow down to three or four a year once adulthood hems them in--Bolao kept reading all his life. Most
authors, Bolaos editor J orge Herralde observed in his book For Roberto Bolao (2006), bury
themselves in their own work, losing sight of the larger field. But Bolao loved reading the works of his
contemporaries--and he loved talking about what he was reading with his friends. According to Herralde,
he was that rare and beautiful animal: an insatiable reader. This lifelong compulsion, and its fleeting
gratifications, formed the foundation of Bolaos critical rulings, many of which can be found in his
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posthumous collection Entre parntesis: Ensayos, artculos y discursos (1998-2003) (Between
Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches).
The collection, edited by Spanish literary critic Ignacio Echevarra--one of Bolaos best friends--was
published by Anagrama in 2004, and it has yet to be brought into English. This is a shame, and not only
because Bolaos judgments are often a delight to read. In the United States, Bolao is best known for his
fiction: the eerie stories of Last Evenings on Earth, the short novels Distant Star and By Night in Chile,
the tragicomic colossus The Savage Detectives. But in the Spanish-speaking world, Bolao is also
renowned for his erudition. The onomastic index at the end of Between Parentheses contains 600 names,
most of which represent a book, or a series of books, that Bolao had read. The Cs, which number sixty-
two, are especially rich. There one finds not only such Golden Age masters as Miguel de Cervantes and
Caldern de la Barca but also philosophical novelists Camus and Elias Canetti, as well as North American
novelists Michael Chabon, Douglas Coupland and Raymond Chandler.
Its no exaggeration to say that Bolao has become a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American
letters. His influence on the younger generation of writers is considerable, and it derives as much from his
fierce, lapidary opinions as it does from his fictions style and imagination. The Spanish writer J avier
Cercas made Bolao a character in his novel Soldiers of Salamis, as did J orge Volpi in his novel El fin de
la locura (An End of Madness). Six weeks before his death, Bolao was unanimously declared to be the
most important novelist of his generation by a meeting of Latin American writers in Seville. As novelist
Rodrigo Fresn has written, Bolao was one of those rare hinge-writers who make a new generation
through the simple pleasure of shaking up certain self-satisfied forms, structures content to have achieved
the easy and false immortality of the fossilized.
In the introduction to Between Parentheses, Echevarra asserts that the volume isnt meant to be
exhaustive. Nonetheless, its an immense miscellany, including among its 125 items almost every one of
the semi-weekly columns Bolao published in the Chilean newspaper Las ltimas Noticias and the
Catalan paper Diari di Girona--some eighty-six works. This is too much for the newcomer to Bolao, for
whom a selection of the better pieces would do. But for those interested in deciphering Bolaos many
influences, his values and his biography, and certainly for anyone whose appetite for reading is as
insatiable as Bolaos, the collection is a treasure chest: filled with straw and dust but also with odd
glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold.
Bolaos career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he turned 45 and published The Savage
Detectives, his fifth novel. The reason for this late start is simple. Bolao rose from obscurity to celebrity
with the speed of a meteor; before the appearance of The Savage Detectives, which dazzled readers in
Spain and Latin America, no magazine or newspaper was particularly interested in his opinions. Writing
essays and delivering speeches, however, were soon revealed to be two of Bolaos great vocations--and
he pursued them fervently. The entire contents of Between Parentheses, a book of 366 tightly spaced
pages, were produced by Bolao within the last five years of his life, at a time when he was also writing
poetry, publishing a book of fiction each year and grappling with the liver disease that would eventually
kill him on J uly 14, 2003.
Twain was always ready to die, Bolao said of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, whose Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn he adored (in 1999 he published the prologue to one of its Spanish editions). Thats
the only way to understand his humor. Something similar might be said of Bolao. Diagnosed with a
chronic liver problem in 1992, he wrote all of his major works while serving a virtual death sentence. In
several of his essays he refers to the fact that he cant drink alcohol anymore, that just one drink could kill
him, a change he must have felt keenly since, reading between the lines, it appears that heavy drinking
and a heroin addiction may be what demolished his liver in the first place. Bolao kicked dope in 1988,
an experience he describes in Beach--a five-page essay composed of a single, harrowing sentence. A
fragment of it reads: thoughtlessly, I would get an urge to cry, and Id get into the water and swim, and
when I had already gotten myself pretty far from shore Id look up at the sun and it would seem strange to
me that it was there, so big and so different from us... In this way he almost drowned himself twice.
Brave may well be the adjective that recurs most often in Between Parentheses, and bravery was indeed
something of an obsession for Bolao. The figure of bravery is multiple and changing, he wrote in the
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starkly titled Bravery. For my generation bravery is linked with Billy the Kid, who risked his life for
money, and with Che Guevara, who risked his for generosity, with Rimbaud, who walked alone at night,
and with Violeta Parra, who opened windows into the night. Soldiers and poets, he liked to believe, were
the bravest people on earth. He once joked that if he had to rob a bank, hed choose five true poets as
his accomplices.
Of course, courage is hardly an unusual fascination for an author. Writers love to glorify the difficulties of
their line of work. They speak of wrestling with ideas and facing down blank pages, of battling with ham-
fisted editors and triumphing over tin-eared readers. What makes Bolaos preoccupation rare is that he
associated bravery with failure, not triumph. Why choose to rob a bank with five poets? No one else in
the world, he explained, faces disaster with greater dignity and clarity.
For him, the supreme writer on the topic was not Homer or Virgil but Archilochus of Paros, the ancient
Greek poet who earned his bread as an itinerant mercenary and rhapsode. The earliest Greek writer of
personal lyric verse, Archilochus is famous for penning a nonchalant poem recounting how he threw off
his shield in battle in order to flee and save his skin--an action considered disgraceful for a soldier at that,
and any, time. He was equally cynical about success. Remembering one victory, Archilochus scoffs:
So were one thousand, those of us who gave death to the seven
bodies laid out there, which we reached by running
He knew war as a sorry necessity, not as a place for heroic feats, Bolao observes, and his willingness
to face death over and over again with no public glory appears to be what captured Bolaos admiration.
Having spent most of his life on the down and out, hustling at one day job after another while he wrote
his verse, Bolao had an intense appreciation for the courage it takes to keep fighting when there are no
laurels in sight. In fact, he devoted the entire final portion of his essay Exiles to citing passages from
Archilochus poetry. The longest quotation is a verse that appears to have meant as much to Bolao as
Rudyard Kiplings If meant to another generation of men:
Heart, Heart, if youre beset by invincible
griefs, rise!, withstand contrary-wise
offering up your chest, and against the tricks
of the enemy steel yourself firmly. And should you come out
victorious, dissemble, heart, dont boast,
nor, defeated, should you debase yourself crying
at home. Dont let them matter too much
your joy in success, your sorrow in failure.
Understand that in life alternation rules.
An essay, Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is the movement of a free mind at play, and like many of the
stronger pieces in Between Parentheses, Exiles moves through a complex, impressionistic structure
thats held together by personal associations: sometimes images, sometimes numbers and other times
words. One of the most moving pieces in the collection is Bolaos acceptance speech for the Rmulo
Gallegos Prize, which he partly organized around the number eleven: he won the eleventh Rmulo
Gallegos Prize; his childhood soccer jersey was number eleven; there may be a plaque commemorating
Rmulo Gallegos at eleven on a street in Barcelona; the eleventh of September 1973 was the day of the
coup dtat in Chile.
In these essays we hear Bolaos real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his
fiction. Its tone is angry and declamatory as often as its conversational and intimate. And its most tender
notes sound when Bolao is writing about his friends and family and Blanes, the small coastal town in
Spain where he eventually made his home. Bolao had a talent for vignettes and for small locketlike
portraits. His columns about daily life can be as sweet as seaside watercolors: I like to contemplate the
beach, he explains in Civilization. There in that triumphant amalgamation of semi-nude bodies,
lovely and ugly, fat and thin, perfect and imperfect, the air brings us a magnificent smell, the smell of
suntan lotion.
41

But put before a large audience, Bolao liked to play the boy who reveals the emperor has no clothes. A
typical gambit was to introduce an irritant where others might employ a joke. Asked to talk about
literature and exile in Vienna, for example, he opens by declaring that he doesnt believe in exile,
then launches into a long anecdote recounting how badly the Austrians treated his best friend, Mario
Santiago, when he came to visit Vienna in 1978 or 79.
Having discharged that bile, however, Bolao goes on to say quite a bit about literature and exile, or
rather about why he believes that no real writer could ever be exiled from his country. A real writers
only nation is his library, he explains. To drive his point home, he treats his audience to a close reading
of a poem by the Chilean physicist Nicanor Parra, whom Bolao considered the best living poet in
Spanish. The poem grapples with a party-game question: who are Chiles four greatest poets? Among the
possible answers: Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo de Rokha, Nicanor Parra,
J orge Teillier and Enrique Lihn. Parras answer matches the absurdity of the conundrum:
The four great poets of Chile
Are three:
Alonso de Ercilla and Rubn Dario.
As Bolao explains, Ercilla was a Spanish soldier who fought in Chiles colonial wars. His epic poem La
Araucana recounts the battles between the conquistadors and the Mapuche Indians. It is a foundational
work of Chilean literature, which Ercilla wrote while he lived in Castile. The second poet, Dario, is the
father of Modernist poetry in Spanish. He was born in Nicaragua and lived in Chile only briefly, near the
end of the nineteenth century. In short, Parras poem asserts that the greatest poets of Chile, the ones who
have most influenced its literature, arent Chilean at all.
Bolao hated nationalist tendencies of any sort, and he loved cerebral jokes, but theres another part of
Parras poem that delighted him--and that, more generally, provoked him to admire Parra as a sort of
hero. The poem, Bolao remarks, is like an explosive artifact put there so that we Chileans open our eyes
and leave off our nonsense, its a poem that inquires into...the fourth dimension of civic conscience, and
although at first glance it looks like a joke, and moreover it is a joke, a second look reveals it to be a
declaration of human rights. An explosive joke that inquires into the readers conscience? This sounds
like the method behind much of Bolaos fiction, which regularly satirized the moral failings of historical
figures. At least four of his novels are actually romans clef.
For those on the receiving end, such explosions are rarely pleasant. They can cause collateral damage as
well, which is why bomb throwers tend to light the fuse well behind the targets back. Bolao, however,
clearly modeled his public persona on Parras call-a-spade-a-spade, take-no-prisoners approach. The
whole Parra family, he writes in another essay, has put into practice one of the highest ambitions of
poetry of all time: to fuck the publics patience. The last words of his profile Eight Seconds with
Nicanor Parra are THE TIME TO SIMMER DOWN WILL NEVER COME.
Such a declaration--IN ALL CAPS, no less--made when Bolao was 48, can be interpreted either as
uncompromising integrity or rancid intransigence. Id vote for an uneasy combination of both. Bolaos
commitment to a moral code was genuine, but he always had a romantic attitude toward adolescence--his
essays are permeated with a nostalgia for lost youth--and his irritants sometimes smack of solipsism. Had
his only idols been Parra and Archilochus, his fiction might well have been insufferable.
In fact, their influence was tempered by Bolaos passion for two other writers--J ulio Cortzar and J orge
Luis Borges. Cortzars thumbprints can be seen all over The Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on
Earth, with their puzzlelike structures and multinational characters. Asked by journalist Mnica Maristain
whether one of his stories was modeled on Cortzars Taken House, Bolao replied no, but what more
could I want than for it to seem like one of Cortzars?
Of the two men, however, Borges held the greater sway. Borges is, or should be, the center of our
canon, Bolao wrote shortly before his death, and his best, most provocative, examination of the blind
Argentine can be found in the sweeping essay Wayward Drifts (2002). When Borges dies, the essay
declares, everything [in Argentine literature] suddenly ends. Its as if Merlin had died...Apollonian
intelligence gives up its place to Dionysian desperation.
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The problem with most contemporary Argentine literature, Bolao thought, is that its anti-Borgesian.
Rejecting the cerebral, playful purity of Borgess work, it gives itself over to two lamentable trends:
commercialism and heaviness, a word he employs with both its 1970s sense (intense) and its more
standard meanings: dense, excessive, mentally oppressive. Commercialism repulses Bolao for obvious
reasons: it measures achievement through sales and propagates itself through plagiarism--an offense
Bolao ranked among the worst of all sins. His relation to heaviness was more complicated.
Bolao enjoyed the work of heavy writers like Roberto Arlt and Ricardo Piglia, but all writers he really
loved--including Kafka--fight against darkness with humor. (If youre beset by invincible griefs, rise!)
Like many others, Bolao admired Borgess rigorous structures and his uncanny inventions, but he also
took a bat to the idea of Borges as a sober brainiac. He championed the comic detective stories Borges
wrote with Adolfo Bioy Casares under the pseudonyms H. Bustos Domecq and B. Suarez Lynch.
Without a doubt, they write the best comic fiction in Latin America, Bolao asserts, an accomplishment
he found all the more precious because the tradition of comic writing in Latin America is so threadbare.
Elsewhere Between Parentheses suggests that it was Borges who moved Bolao from Dionysus to
Apollos side. In The Book That Survives, Bolao recalls that the first book he bought after he moved
from Mexico City to Europe at 24 was the complete poems of J orge Luis Borges. Almost thirty years
later, he still remembered the completely irrational joy he felt at holding the volume in his hands. I
bought it in Madrid in 1977, he writes, and, though Borgess poetry wasnt unknown to me, that same
night I read it until eight in the morning, as if the reading of those verses were the only reading possible
for me, the only reading that could effectively distance me from a life that was, until then, immoderate.
For Bolao, life until then had consisted mostly of leading a group of young Mexican poets known as the
Infrarealists. At 23, he wrote the manifesto for the group, which specialized in publicly harassing poets
who accepted money from Mexicos PRI government. In contrast to such ostentatious rebellion stood
Borges, whose works and life pointed the way to a quieter, more radical form of literary revolution. The
title of Bolaos short biographical essay on Borges, The Brave Librarian, tries to imbue the writer with
some Archilochian glamour, but the matter-of-fact tone of the text surrenders to the plainness of the facts:
Borges wanted to be a poet. He worked in a library for years. In a city full of writers, he made few literary
friends. Like Bolao, he turned to fiction only in his 30s, after it had become clear that his poetry would
never be a great success. He spent his youth in obscurity and was gifted with fame in middle age. Like
Bolao, he loved detective fiction, outlaws, wrinkles in space and time. His reading was insatiable.

I n t he Sonor a
Benjamin Kunkel
Roberto Bolao was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age
of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native country five years later.
In his short story Dance Card, which accords with the known facts of his life and does not present itself
as fiction, Bolao indicates that he hardly distinguished as a young man if he ever did between his
politics and his love of poetry: I reached Chile in August 1973. I wanted to help build socialism. The first
book of poems I bought was Parras Obra Gruesa (Construction Work). He then bought another book by
Nicanor Parra, the anti-rhetorical Chilean poet whose work Bolao preferred to that of the more
celebrated Pablo Neruda a preference, it seems clear, for Parras plain-spokenness over Nerudas florid
multiplication of metaphor and, in his telling, this was practically all the work towards socialism Bolao
accomplished before his arrest, following Pinochets coup of September 1973, as a foreign terrorist.
Bolao was imprisoned for several days, and then released by a pair of policemen who recognized him as
an old schoolmate. He remained in Chile for several months he would recall a time of black humour,
friendship and the danger of death and then left his country for good. Back in Mexico, Bolao founded
with some friends what might be described as a punk-Surrealist poetry movement called infrarrealismo.
The groups manifesto, written by Bolao, took its title from a poem by Breton; and what seems most
43

important about it, in the light of Bolaos mature work, is the traditional Surrealist refusal to separate art
from revolution, or from life at large.
From the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, Bolao led a vagabond life in Europe, mostly Spain, writing
poetry and, it seems, not much fiction. (There is a short cowritten novel from 1984.) He also developed a
heroin habit and, in the process, as he later learned, a compromised liver. A few years after getting clean,
Bolao at last settled down; by 1991 he was a married man and a father, with a fixed address in Blanes,
on the Costa Brava. Goaded by the need to support a family and the knowledge that his failing health
might not grant him much time, Bolao kept up through his last dozen years a heroic productivity: seven
novels, three collections of stories, and many essays and poems. He died, aged 50, in J uly 2003, awaiting
a liver transplant, having drafted but not yet revised his enormous final novel, 2666. Not long before his
death, Bolao had been acclaimed, at a literary conference in Seville, as the leading Latin American
writer of his generation, a status that with each new translation he has come more and more to enjoy in
the English-speaking world as well.
Bolaos desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk
they entailed, the movement he founded, his poverty, exile and addiction, his death in his prime: the
combination of these elements is foreign to the increasingly professionalised career of the contemporary
writer. Bolaos dishevelled, wandering characters are, more profoundly than they are left-wing, anti-
bourgeois, which is to say disdainful of comfort, security and success: an attitude more than a politics, but
the attitude is deeply felt. Even to write marvellously well, Bolao declared, was not enough; the
quality of the writing depended on the authors understanding that literature is basically a dangerous
calling.
But Bolao would not be so strange or significant a writer if he had not found a way of handling his
dangerous calling with simultaneous reverence and irony. And calling is the word: there is never any
question in Bolao of another vocation. He is a writer for whom what Nietzsche said about music would
seem to go without saying about literature: without it, life would be a mistake. But there is also an
important sense as Bolao demonstrates again and again in which both he and his narrators are
without literature, in the desolate way that a religious person might find himself without God. Part of this
is simply that these stories and novels narrated almost exclusively by and about poets dont contain (with
one notable exception) any examples of the poets verse, and Bolao often invites us to doubt how much
a poet writes or how well. But its not just that his fiction about poets excludes their poetry; his fiction
excludes many of the familiar components of fiction. Sponsored and sustained by devotion to literature,
these books nevertheless abstain from what we think of as literary writing. In Bolaos fiction, it is as if
but only as if literature were what he was writing about, but not what he was doing.
The Savage Detectives (first published in Spain in 1998) joins three other Bolao novels available in
English, and a collection of short stories. Each of the three shorter novels novellas, really is a
distraught monologue delivered by a poet interested to the point of obsession in the lives of other poets of
his or, in Amulet, her acquaintance. Likewise, all the stories in Last Evenings on Earth are told by writers,
usually about other writers, most often poets. The Savage Detectives begins and ends with the diary
entries of a young Mexican poet recently inducted into the school of visceral realists; in between these
bookending sections stretches a vast oral history assembled from the testimony of those who knew or met
the young poets mentors, the fugitive poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. And the witnesses called to
testify are mostly writers, critics or other literary types.
The poets are a varied group, but it is possible to divide them into heroes (or anti-heroes) and villains. The
great studies of villains and the books for which Bolao first became known in English are the
novellas Distant Star (1996) and By Night in Chile (2000), and together these portraits of Fascist writers
offer a sort of negative rationale for Bolaos own aesthetic. Where his villains taste in writing is for
whats literary, well-ordered and highly finished, Bolao will opt in his own work for being plain-
spoken, unstylised and inconclusive. Distant Star concerns the sole poet in Bolao whose work we are
able to read, since Carlos Wieder, a former poetry workshop acquaintance of the narrator, is also a
lieutenant in the Chilean air force who, following Pinochets seizure of power, takes to the air and sky-
writes gnomic but identifiably fascistic verse (Death is friendship . . . Death is Chile . . . Death is
44

cleansing . . .) for all to see. The pilot-poets other important work uses death, in a literal sense, as a
medium: Wieder has disappeared a number of fellow Chileans, and one night at a party stages an
exhibition of grisly photographs taken of his mostly female victims: In general the unnamed narrator
is summarising the testimony of an eye-witness the photos were of poor quality, although they made an
extremely vivid impression on all who saw them. The order in which they were exhibited was not
haphazard: there was a progression, an argument, a story (literal and allegorical), a plan.
The story of Carlos Wieder has its own potent, even crude aspect of allegory: fascism as the aesthetic
revenge of failed artists. But this is also a work of the imagination in which the imagination disclaims its
power. The narrator spends years meditating on the crimes of his former poetry workshop acquaintance,
and finally helps a detective to track Wieder to an apartment building in Spain; but two pages from the
end of his account his imagination still draws a blank when it comes to the man: I tried to think of
Wieder. I tried to imagine him alone in his flat, an anonymous dwelling, as I pictured it, on the fourth
floor of an empty eight-floor building, watching television or sitting in an armchair, drinking, as
Romeros shadow glided steadily towards him. I tried to imagine Carlos Wieder, but I couldnt. The
successful hunting of the Fascist poet supplies no relief, no insight, no closure; it does not prompt a
peroration or a homily. The book just ends, as if the narrator has simply told us what little he knows. And
surely there is a moral component to this narrative modesty when Wieder himself had been pleased to
arrange his corpses so carefully.
By Night in Chile is another novella about and this time narrated by a literary man of the right. No
short discussion can do justice to a book regarded by many as Bolaos greatest, but its worth noting that
this most eloquent of Bolaos novellas, and the only one that appears to follow a symbolic pattern, is the
death-bed confession of a Chilean priest, poet, literary critic and member of Opus Dei who
accommodated himself to the Pinochet regime. Father Lacroixs literary bent is made to seem suspect
early on, when he recalls being asked by some peasants whether he liked the bread they had offered him:
Its good, I said, very tasty, very flavoursome, a treat for the palate, veritable ambrosia, pride of our
agriculture, hearty staple of our hard-working farm-folk, mmm, nice. Like Carlos Wieder, Father Lacroix
has a notion of clean and orderly beauty that is aligned with cruelty; one of his chief services to the
Church is to deploy a trained hawk against the pigeons befouling Europes cathedrals. Bolao is plainly
sympathetic to this frightened old man caught between self-justification and remorse, but gives him his
comeuppance all the same: And then the storm of shit begins.
On the other side the side of revolution, disorder and failure are Bolaos (anti-)heroes. From the first
paragraph of the story Enrique Martn the title refers, naturally, to a fictional poet its possible to
understand a great deal about them and their creator:
A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except
that its not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on
the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but
that way lie ruin, madness and death.
You can see how much stoicism (A poet can endure anything) and how much grief (ruin, madness and
death) go into his literary tribalism: his poets are tough, and their broken lives are sad. The sadness and
toughness often come from their belonging to an impoverished diaspora of left-wing South American
writers scattered by that regions descent, in the 1970s, into several vernacular imitations of Fascism. But
the bond uniting Bolaos people is not always especially political; it can simply be, as in The Savage
Detectives, that they grew up together in Mexico City, sleeping around, talking poetry, nursing rivalries
and smoking pot. Bolaos work has a marked generational inflection: We grew up with this conviction,
he says about the idea that a poet can endure anything.
Enrique Martn is narrated by Bolaos main alter ego, Arturo Belano, one of the two main characters in
The Savage Detectives, just as many of the other short stories concern the life of B, and shadow the
authors own life. The device of the names is just the beginning of the verit effect. The conversational
tone and seemingly unrehearsed quality of Bolaos prose, with its inefficiencies and puzzled self-
revisions (Which amounts to saying . . . Except that its not true . . . Really endure . . . The opening
assertion is true, but . . . ), give his writing the rhythm and mood of testimony, as opposed to crafted
45

literature. This approach, which produces a documentary rather than a fictional impression, extends to
Bolaos mode of characterisation: Enrique Martn is not, any more than his other people, a well-
rounded or three-dimensional character. We dont know how he looks or talks, learn his history in any
great detail, or gain special insight into his psychology.
We do learn this much: a writer of bad poetry in both Spanish and Catalan, Enrique Martn, over the
course of several years, excludes the narrator from an anthology of young poets, stirs up in this way some
resentment, the existence of which he seems never to suspect, appears meanwhile to become involved
with a UFO cult, suffers a nervous breakdown, sends the narrator several cryptically numerological
postcards, deposits a box of manuscripts at the narrators house for safekeeping, and then, one night,
hangs himself. The motivation for Martns suicide, like the narrators motivation in telling the story, is
never made clear.
This flat and lurid story is like an account that anyone might give of an acquaintances fate: certain
curious details retain their vividness (Enrique confessing that he would like to have a child. The
experience of childbirth, those were his words); much has been forgotten (I think he was writing from
Madrid, but Im not sure any more); much was never known (why Martn had to travel to Cartagena and
Mlaga for work); and the tale is studded with apparent irrelevancies (I went to live on the outskirts of a
village near Girona with five cats and a dog). You dont feel that Enrique Martn is a robust character
inhabiting a well-made story; you feel whether or not any real-life original ever existed something
perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and
that instead of having a story he had a life. The life was just a mess, and then it ended.
Bolaos narrators refer constantly to what they dont know and cant remember, something else that
gives the impression that his fiction is anything but. Its as criminologists tell us: admissions of ignorance
suggest honesty, and a man who is telling the truth doesnt make special exertions on behalf of
verisimilitude. (A complementary rule of thumb, known to readers of research-heavy contemporary
novels, is that an abundance of verifying data often undermines the authority of a tale.) Nor is there any
lyricism in Enrique Martn, as if any fanciness would be an indulgence, a distraction, or worse.
Here is a writer, then, who writes as if literature were all that mattered, and at the same time writes in a
distinctly unliterary way. When the narrator of Amulet says a chill ran down my spine, or when Arturo
Belano refers to his quarrel with Enrique Martn as ancient history, this reflects something plain and
merely serviceable in the Spanish as well. To be sure, in the novellas (and more rarely in the stories and
The Savage Detectives) there is sometimes a hallucinatory or phantasmagoric element carried over from
Bolaos as yet untranslated poetry. But this imagery seems to emerge from a narrators ragged mental
state, rather than from a poets bag of metaphors.
Belano speaks of Martns poetry only with pity and contempt; and he reveals that, when shown Martns
articles on UFOs for a magazine specialising in the paranormal, he was no more diplomatic: I told him
he should learn how to write. I asked him if they had editors at the magazine. There can be little hope,
then, for the literary value of the bundle of manuscripts Martn leaves at the narrators house, and
choosing a hostile acquaintance as the guardian of his work is one more sign that he is not well. After
Martns suicide, the narrator opens the package of manuscripts: There were no maps or coded messages
on any of them, just poems, mainly in the style of Miguel Hernndez, but there were also some imitations
of and here some other poets are named. For the first time, Martns writing is referred to without
scorn, if yet without praise; despite its derivativeness, the narrator credits it with being poetry and its
author with being a poet.
Go back to the storys opening paragraph, about a poets ability to endure anything, including ruin,
madness and death. Ruin can be endured in a sense, and madness too, but death? Your soul might
endure, but Bolaos people are not believers of that kind. Your reputation might endure, but then few if
any of Bolaos writer characters and certainly not the main characters of The Savage Detectives seem
to have produced poems destined to last. Enrique Martns is not a name that will survive (except, that is,
as the title to the story). So what might endure of a poet, if not his soul, work or reputation? Or always a
possibility with this author is Bolao merely being ironic when he vaunts the special status of poets?
46

The Savage Detectives is made up of three sections. The first 120-odd pages consist of the teenage poet
J uan Garca Maderos diary for November and December 1975, and record his ecstatic initiation into the
worlds of poetry and sex. Much of the action takes place in the chaotic household of Quim Font, a
mentally crumbling Spanish architect (presumably an exile from Francos regime) who is the father of
two lovely poet daughters and the designer of the only two issues of the visceral realist journal Lee
Harvey Oswald. If this title makes the never defined visceral realist project sound at once silly, dangerous
and borderline senseless, it suits the atmosphere of the Font household after the architect has taken in,
evidently without consulting his wife, a prostitute by the name of Lupe.
The ridiculous and the harrowing are always close in Bolao, and before long Lupes pimp and his goons
have laid siege to the architects house. The impasse ends when Quim bribes the young visceral realist
chieftains Belano and Ulises Lima to spirit Lupe away to the Sonora Desert in his Ford Impala. The poet-
diarist gets mixed up in the escape I saw my right fist (the only one I had free since my books were in
my other hand) hurtling into the pimps body and piles into the getaway car; the pimp gives chase in
his Camaro; and, with this scene of danger and farce, a self-contained narrative of beautifully
concentrated high spirits comes to an end.
In the novels third and final section, the diary picks up where it left off 1 J anuary 1976 with the poets
and the whore fleeing the pimp into the Sonora, and beginning their quest for the vanished Mexican poet
Cesrea Tinajero, of whose work hardly a trace remains. The teenagers mood of exaltation of great
gifts and great appetite gorging themselves on life and words is the same in both sections, but the tone
sounds quite different after the novels central portion of almost four hundred pages, covering the years
from 1976 to 1996, which is itself called The Savage Detectives and might equally have been called,
like the middle section of To the Lighthouse, Time Passes.
J ust as the first and third sections of The Savage Detectives employ the casual, sub-literary form of the
private diary, the middle section uses another informal documentary medium: oral history. Instead of a
single diarist, we now have 38 narrators, many from Mexico City, others from various European and
American countries, all of them the sometime friends, former lovers or passing acquaintances of Belano
and/or Lima. These many narrators (their words date-lined with time and location) recount to the best of
their knowledge and recollection what happened to Belano and Lima after their adventure in the Sonora,
as the two wandered countries and continents. One of the most moving voices belongs to the
institutionalised Quim Font, who as in some surrealist country-and-western song lost his Ford along
with his mind.
Belano and Lima do not figure among the narrators, nor do the dozens of stories about them combine
stereoscopically to define the exact shape and volume of the poets characters. Belano is often sardonic
and arrogant, Lima tends to be quiet and passive, but this much anyone could tell in five minutes. And
there is conflicting evidence to be entered, unsynthesised, into the record: the aloof and superior Belano
treats with utmost tenderness a woman afflicted by an embarrassing gynaecological problem, while the
lamb-like Lima is not above mugging people in Vienna. In the end, Belano will be glimpsed disappearing
like a superannuated Rimbaud into an African jungle. Lima will wind up speaking politely to his old bte
noire Octavio Paz with what Pazs assistant (one of the narrators) recalls as the saddest voice I would
ever hear. Evidently neither poet amounted to much; as a painter acquaintance (another narrator) says,
they werent writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I dont think they were poets either. They sold
drugs. Bolao never reveals a line of either mans verse.
The narrators are naturally more concerned with their own love affairs, break-ups, travels, illnesses and
careers than with contributing any footnotes in invisible ink to Mexican literary history. The reader is
immersed in the stream of one life and then another, moved by Quim Fonts madness, then by the
Mexican poet Luis Rosados grief over the loss of his lover the poet Luscious Skin, then by the pluck of a
Catalan female bodybuilder (a one-time roommate of Belanos), and then by something else entirely, as
an old or new narrator takes up the story. Not that there really is a story, or any thematic convergence. If
anything unites the crowd of narrators, it is their air of disconnection, as when Mara Font describes the
end of one of her love affairs: One day, though, we talked about everything that was or wasnt happening
between us, and after that we stopped seeing each other. She has just related the disbanding of the
47

visceral realists in the same tone; and the narrators stories often have this same quality of termination
without completeness.
If lyric poetry is marked by its figural and epigrammatic concentration, the impossibly diffuse Savage
Detectives is a kind of anti-poem, refusing any form of summation. Even on the rare occasions when a
narrator permits himself a general statement or unifying image, the clarity swiftly erodes. Near the end of
the second section, a journalist friend of a Spanish literary critic recalls watching the critic and Belano
threaten each other with swords on a beach at sunset, after Belano had, absurdly, challenged the critic to a
duel:
In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that wed all gone crazy. But then that moment of
lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I
realised that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives . . . It wasnt proof of
our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But thats not it. Thats
not it. We [the witnesses of the duel] were still and they were in motion and the sand on the
beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we
were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle,
the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing. My memory has always been mediocre, no better
than a reporter needs to do his job.
One person who never shows up in the reminiscences, except when the recording angel behind the oral
history asks unavailing questions, is the teenage poet Garca Madero. This is because, heartbreakingly, no
one remembers or has heard of him. So by the time we get to the third section, we understand that the
half-forgotten poets Belano and Lima took with them on their quest for the all-but-forgotten poet Cesrea
Tinajero a poet whose name was written on even swifter flowing water. In this way The Savage
Detectives partakes, paradoxically, of the general oblivion it describes, since oral histories of
undistinguished and out-of-print poets are not assembled in the first place, any more than the diaries of
mute inglorious Miltons from Mexico City are ever published. Moreover, because the narrators accounts
of their own lives as they briefly criss-crossed Belanos and Limas truly resemble oral testimony rather
than essays, stories or poems, these accounts would appear (but only appear) to possess no particular
literary value worth preserving. No novel I have read is so movingly and appallingly lifelike in its
unthematised accumulation of time and grief, and in its unco-ordinated march towards oblivion.
Its something close to a miracle that Bolao can produce such intense narrative interest in a book made
up of centrifugal monologues spinning away from two absentee main characters, and the diary entries of
its most peripheral figure. And yet, in spite of the books apparent (and often real) formlessness, a large
part of its distinction is its virtually unprecedented achievement in multiply-voiced narration. The
confessional or first-person novel done in multiple voices was an important Modernist mode, a logical
extension of the tendency towards authorial self-effacement that we associate with Flaubert. English
speakers will think of The Nighttown section of Ulysses, Dos Passoss USA, The Waves, and probably
the most successful several of Faulkners novels. The mode is extremely challenging, and several
pitfalls opened even beneath Faulkner: the novelist may rely excessively on cognitive eccentricity,
especially mental illness, to differentiate his narrators (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying), or else
may invest the narrators more or less equally, and therefore implausibly, with his own voice (Absalom,
Absalom!). Another challenge, if the narrators come from diverse social backgrounds, derives from the
authors inevitably unequal familiarity with these. (Monica Alis Alentejo Blue is a recent example of the
difficulty of pulling off an oratorio novel.)
Bolaos wanderings acquainted him with several Spanish vernaculars and much local slang, just as his
literary career brought him into contact with well-spoken people and his poverty into contact with the
poor. But in The Savage Detectives he doesnt overdo the local colour, which his superb translator
Natasha Wimmer in any case wisely ignores. The narrators are individuated above all through our sense
of the helpless particularity of their fates; and to the extent that they sound alike, this is explained and
excused by their common situation (testifying for an oral history) and the flattening effect of speech in
any language. Above all, Bolao overcomes the problem of getting so many voices to comment on the
same events, or sing to the same music, by letting each voice persist in its natural egocentricity. True, the
48

reader is liable to protest, somewhere before page 200, that this book isnt about anything. Later on, its
possible to recognise, with admiration, that Bolao has found a way to keep the novel alive and freshly
growing in the Sonora of modern scepticism our scepticism, that is, as to what can finally be known or
said of any life, and whose life is worth being represented, or considered representative, in the first place.
But this triumph in the face of scepticism is the triumph of a strange belief. No one can fail to see that in
Bolao poetry functions much like a religion: as a promise of the meaning of earthly existence, as well as
of dignity, fellowship and redemption. And yet if Bolao and his more autobiographical narrators believe,
religiously, in the value of poetry, they also appear somehow to believe in salvation by faith, rather than
by works such as the faith Martn evidently kept by remaining true to his vocation in spite of his
manifest lack of talent. This desperate and even delusional persistence wins from Belano a measure of
respect, and Bolaos justification for having arranged The Savage Detectives around several poets who
left behind them only hazy memories, and little if any durable verse, would likewise seem to be that
Lima, Garca Madero and the self-same Belano lived with poetic desperation and sincerity, no matter
what poetry they wrote or failed to write. Pilgrims rather than saints, they lived towards literature, without
ever quite reaching that condition.
The religious analogy is not a fanciful one, as can be seen from a passage in the episodic prose poem Un
paseo por la literatura (written in 1994), which sometimes explicitly prefigures The Savage Detectives:
Half-done we remain, neither cooked nor raw, lost in the vastness of this endless trash heap,
wandering and getting ourselves wrong, killing and begging pardon, manic-depressive
characters in your dream, Father, your limitless dream that we have unravelled a thousand
times and more than a thousand times again, Latin American detectives lost in a labyrinth of
crystal and mud . . . lost in the misery of your utopian dream, Father, lost in the variety of
your voices and abysses, manic-depressives in the uncontainable room in Hell where you
cook up your J okes.
But from the same passage it is equally clear, if it wasnt already, that Bolaos piety is not to be
distinguished from his irony. Is it a noble, properly quixotic folly to address ones life to such a God? And
does the Holy Father of left-wing Latin American poets their socialism never built, their great poems
never written appear an incomprehensible, jesting sadist only because of the shortcomings of his
adherents? Or is invoking this God just the height of their bullshit? The ambiguity lies over Bolaos own
created world: to the extent that his fiction refuses to behave anything like fiction, is this a mark of its
triumphant reality? Or (the depressive obverse to the mania of belief) is the world of Bolaos generation,
and perhaps the world generally, too refractory to order and understanding to permit its transformation
into literature, leaving inconclusive testimony the only honest form?
To these questions the answer would seem to be a ringing . . . simonel. In the first section of The Savage
Detectives, Garca Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: If simn is slang for yes and nel
means no, then what does simonel mean? Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a
former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra (Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when
the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry) recounts the drunken discussion he had one night
with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their
vanished Cesrea Tinajero:
And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said
dont worry, Amadeo, well find Cesrea for you even if we have to look under every
stone in the north . . . And I insisted: dont do it for me. And the one who was asleep . . .
said: were not doing it for you, Amadeo, were doing it for Mexico, for Latin America,
for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking?
Werent they joking?. . . and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really
worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.
49

Letters
From Lorna Scott Fox
Its not entirely true, as Benjamin Kunkel states in his welcome piece on Roberto Bolao, that Distant
Star concerns the sole poet in Bolao whose work we are able to read (LRB, 6 September). The Savage
Detectives, being the definitive novel about the Mexican cultural scene of the 1970s, is also a roman
clef. Having lived in Mexico City, I recognised several friends and acquaintances, some transparently re-
created, others fragmented or combined, leading to no end of speculation in some quarters. But the model
for the wandering poet Ulises Lima is plainly Mario Santiago, who with Bolao founded the radical,
anarchic Infrarealist Movement on which the visceral realist group in the book is based. The Infras only
collective publication was Pjaro de calor in 1976: they hated the literary establishment and thought of
poetry as a way of life, chronicled in photocopied pamphlets at emotional caf readings. Charismatic and
wilfully maudit, Santiago was a poet of huge talent, somewhat wrecked but still writing long after the
group broke up. He died under a bus in 1998.


The Nation, 18 Dec 2008
The Tr i umph of Rober t o Bol ao
Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolao was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag
fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent
it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs
ahead of a critics one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaos conceptual play and you risk
missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up
threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is its hard to
think of a writer who is less of a snob, orin the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and
carrying seeds for the futureless sterile.
The contours of his life are becoming well known. Bolao died of liver failure in 2003 in Spain, where he
had long resided. He was born in southern Chile in 1953a wrenchingly different place and era. His
father had been a champion amateur boxer and his mother was a teacher who encouraged her dyslexic
sons love of poetry. In 1968, the family moved to Mexico City, where Bolao began to acquire a
cosmopolitan self-education through the happily random method of shoplifting books. (As an adult his
taste was wide enough to appreciate Paracelsus, Max Beerbohm, and Philip K. Dick.)
In 1973, playing his small part in the political fever of the day, he returned to Chile to support the
embattled socialist cause of Salvador Allende. What happened next seems to live on in his fictions
patterns of abrupt cessation. After Augusto Pinochets coup, Bolao was detained and could have joined
the thousands who were jailed, killed, or sent into official dramatic exile. Instead, he was spotted by old
classmates who worked for the new regime, and let go.
He went back to Mexico and co-founded a Surrealist-influenced, anti-status-quo school of poetry. After
that fizzled he went to Europe, where he took a series of low-paying but intellectually uncompromised
jobs. He had a heroin habit, which he would later find out had damaged his health. But eventually he
cleaned up, settled down on Spains Costa Brava, had a child, and by the 1990s felt the imperative to
provide. He had begun to enter provincial story contests and collect modest prize money. Increasingly
aware of his fragile health, he filled a shelf with compact, fresh, and potent books that might have taken
decades to write: among them Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), a funny and disturbing catalog of
imaginary writers ; Amulet (1999), the tale of a woman who sits in the bathroom during the army raid on
Mexicos UNAM university in 1968; Distant Star (1996), the tale of an airman for the Pinochet regime
who scribbles disturbing poems in the sky and is also a freelance murderer of women; and By Night in
50

Chile (2000), the deathbed confession of a corrupted Chilean literary critic and priest, half-
comprehending the horror of his own career.
Bolao had a deep skepticism about national feeling, and it has been said that his work starts to point the
way to a kind of post-national fiction. But some of his insights still seem rooted in particular, not
transcendent, experience. In Bolaos youth, well before the arrival of Pinochet, Chile was a country of
profound inequality and social conservatism, with power held in the Church and by elites aspiring to a
faraway dream of refinement. To some degree, it must have been here that Bolaos hatred of pretension,
at times of the very idea of culture, as the mask for a power fantasy, started to be forged. Yet it was a land
of poets. One entry in The Romantic Dogs, the first gathering in English of Bolaos wonderfully
unreserved poems, pays homage to Nicanor Parra, who swam against the Chilean tide with his poetry of
defancified directness.
And then there was Mexico, which Bolao never again saw after he left in 1977. Here he found a more
creative, vivid, and generous chaos, though one hardly free from corruption or violence. Mexico City in
the 1970s is the beautifully drawn scene of The Savage Detectives (1998),
1
the first book by Bolao to be
longer than a novella, and the most acclaimed work to come out while he was alive. The opening
sections narrator, an excited young would-be poet, describes his thrilling (to him) involvement with a
haphazard bunch of literary rebels. Theyre presided over by a melancholy Mexican, Ulises Lima, and a
restless Chilean named Arturo Belanopartial stand-ins for Bolao and his Mexican best friend.
Abruptly, the story breaks off, switching to a parade of testimonials by people who encountered Belano
and Lima in the subsequent decades. The arc that their memories trace is heavy and sad with unfulfilled
promise, even as the novels methods make it feel full of distracted life.
The final section plants us back where we left off in the 1970s. The hopeful narrator and a young
prostitute have tagged along with Belano and Lima to the desert state of Sonora, in northern Mexico.
They are on a quixotic double mission. Gallantly, theyre trying to protect the girl from a Mexico City
pimp. And theyve been researching a long-forgotten figure from Mexicos poetry avant-garde in the
1920s. Of her surviving output, Belano and Lima have been able to find no more than a paper with
mysterious, squiggly lines. But they are determined to track her down in the area near a town called
Santa Teresa.
Like Borgeswhom he loved and from whom he learned muchBolao was attracted to the idea of
literature that could speak to the Americas.
2
He introduced a Spanish edition of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, and elsewhere suggested that The Savage Detectives had been his stab at an adventure
tale in the spirit of Twain. He hinted at another model worth thinking about: Melville, tackling the
overwhelming subject of evil in Moby-Dick. Writing a brief note on a book by the Mexican reporter
Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez, Bolao sounded a similar theme. In 2002, Gonzlez Rodrguez published his
reportage on hundreds of unsolved murders of women and girls in Ciudad J urez, just south of the Texas
border. The murders had begun to accelerate in the early 1990s, in tandem with the drug trade and a
proliferation of new assembly plants for exports.
As it happened, Bolao wrote, the novel he was currently working on dealt in part with the murders, and
he had struck up a correspondence with Gonzlez Rodrguez, frequently seeking his grisly expertise. To
the novelist, the story Gonzlez Rodrguez was reporting on was becoming a metaphor for Mexico, for
its past, and for the uncertain future of all Latin America. It belonged not to the adventure tradition but to
the opposite pole of stories of the Americas, the apocalypticthese being the only two traditions that
remain alive on our continent, perhaps because theyre the only two to get close to the abyss that
surrounds us.
2666 was published in Spanish in 2004, a year after Bolaos death. It runs to 898 pages in English and
was not quite finishedyet one doesnt really feel the lack of final revisions doing much to diminish its
power. At many points, one feels about to be able to compare the book to something else. When a former
Black Panther reminiscent in a few details of Bobby Seale gives a sermon on such topics as danger and
stars, it feels like a nod to the sermon scene in Moby-Dick. Elsewhere there is an ominousness
reminiscent of David Lynch, whose method of digging into his unconsciouswhatever may come
spilling outseems an inspiration. Bolao liked detective pulp, and once claimed he would have liked to
51

be a homicide detective, facing the worst, with access to the scene of the crime. The grimy atmosphere of
unsolved mystery should, to most readers, feel utterly familiar. Yet despite all the signposts, we quickly
discover that were no good at guessing what comes next.
We follow Bolao into digressions, and with the weak intuition of a dream we sense him playing with the
tools of genre: halfway through, a scene might vaguely take on a quality of thriller, porn, or fable. Every
so often a character might start to discuss the problems of semblances and metaphors that reveal or
conceal. This is the doubt-raising problem of representation itself. Yet there are scenes that feel like they
could be there for no other reason than to memorialize a vivid incident Bolao might have witnessed, and
which arrive in the novel like assertive, physically present ambassadors from life. Because there are many
references to painting, and because the plot seems at times to move invisibly, as if unable to break out of
stasis, the visual starts to take on great importance. It would help if we could somehow assign new
characters their place in the growing mural in our mind. But we wonder how to deal with women whom
we meet only as corpses. And we arent sure how to sort out characters who, in a way we cant remember
encountering before in fiction, seem to be made of different densitiessome seeming solid and all there,
and others like a hologram you could stick a hand through.
The novel is divided into five sections. Once we have made it through to the finish, the opening feels like
a thin memory. But it does its own curious work to disorient us. Set in the mid-1990s, the first section
brings us a quartet of young European academics. At conferences, they have bonded like musketeers over
their shared line of argument about the work of a writer named Benno von Archimboldi, a German who
everyone guesses is still livinghe may even be a Nobel contenderbut who for decades hasnt been
seen by anyone except his publisher.
The critics hail from different European countries, with traits that occasionally suggest that Bolao is
teasing national types. Theres a Parisian, smooth in his self-presentation; and an Italian, less ambitious
because he is passive, ill, and stuck in a wheelchair. A Spanish critic has arrived at his Archimboldi phase
after a prior, dubious literary infatuation and a period of concern over the national literature of Spain (not
the highest recommendation in Bolaos universe). And a woman from London is sharp, with a catlike
detachment and honesty. She sleeps with both the Frenchman and the Spaniard, and for a while lets them
compete for her with adolescent grandiosity.
To describe the satire makes it sound crueler than it feels in the reading. What comes through in the
critics lives is a poignant barrenness. The novels never-specified narrating voice describes two critics
out for a walk, sharing their innermost feelings. At one point, in London, the frustrated suitors achieve
displaced catharsis by beating up a Pakistani cabdriver, whose illiberalism has tried their tolerance. The
joke is schematic, but still bracing. We realize a couple of things. First, despite the strangeness of their
presentation, the quartet are in many ways typical European liberals, with the usual contradictions.
Second, Bolao has been directing us to observe them along fairly specific lines: their relation to sexual
expression, curiosity, goals, and waiting, the size of their assumptions, their comfort with violenceall
factors in their mastery or nonmastery of self.

The Depar t ed
By J ONATHAN LETHEM
NYT Book Review, : November 12, 2008
In Philip K. Dicks 1953 short story The Preserving Machine, an impassioned inventor creates a device
for preserving the canon of classical music the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of
Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions
into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the
classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence
beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value.
Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor
attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves
52

as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed
true essences irregularities, ferocities disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?
Dicks parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic
paradoxes masterpieces embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only
value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does
such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers,
are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what weve plopped
onto the planet all these cities, nations, languages, histories then why get worked up in the first
place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.
Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the visual arts, which can at least play at
abstract beauty. Novels and stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff: language,
history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds
the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal
instinct and times remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such
losers cobble together anything particularly sublime?
The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolao, born in 1953, lived in Mexico, France and Spain before his death
in 2003, at 50, from liver disease traceable to heroin use years before. In a burst of invention now
legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly becoming so internationally, Bolao
in the last decade of his life, writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health, constructed a
remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely such doubts: that literature, which he revered the
way a penitent loves (and yet rails against) an elusive God, could meaning fully articulate the low truths
he knew as rebel, exile, addict; that life, in all its gruesome splendor, could ever locate the literature it so
desperately craves in order to feel itself known. Is a lifetime spent loving poems in a fallen world only a
poor joke? Bolao sprints into the teeth of his conundrum, violating one of the foremost writing-school
injunctions, against writer-as-protagonist (in fact, Bolao seems to make sport of violating nearly all of
the foremost writing-school rules, against dream sequences, against mirrors as symbols, against barely
disguised nods to his acquaintances, and so on). Again and again he peoples his singular fictions with
novelists and poets, both aspiring and famous, both accomplished and hopeless, both politically oblivious
and committedly extremist, whether right or left. By a marvelous sleight of hand writers are omnipresent
in Bolaos world, striding the stage as romantic heroes and feared as imperious villains, even aesthetic
assassins yet theyre also persistently marginal, slipping between the cracks of time and geography,
forever reclusive, vanished, erased. Bolaos urgency infuses literature with lifes whole freight: the ache
of a writing-workshop aspirant may embody sexual longing, or dreams of political freedom from
oppression, even the utopian fantasy of the eradication of violence, while a master-novelists doubts in his
works chances in the game of posterity can stand for all human remorse at the burdens of personal life, or
at knowledge of the burdens of history.
In the literary culture of the United States, Bolao has become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight.
The overnight is the result of the compressed sequence of the translation and publication of his books in
English, capped by the galvanic appearance, last year, of The Savage Detectives, an eccentrically
encompassing novel, both typical of Bolaos work and explosively larger, which cast the short stories
and novellas that had preceded it into English in a sensational new light. By bringing scents of a Latin
American culture more fitful, pop-savvy and suspicious of earthy machismo than that which it succeeds,
Bolao has been taken as a kind of reset button on our deplorably sporadic appetite for international
writing, standing in relation to the generation of Garca Mrquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes as,
say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike and Roth. As with Wallaces Infinite J est, in The
Savage Detectives Bolao delivered a genuine epic inocu lated against grandiosity by humane irony,
vernacular wit and a hint of punk-rock self-effacement. Any suspicion that literary culture had rushed to
sentimentalize an exotic figure of quasi martyrdom was overwhelmed by the intimacy and humor of a
voice that earned its breadth line by line, defying traditional fictional form with a torrential insouciance.
Well, hold on to your hats.
53

2666 is the permanently mysterious title of a Bolao manuscript rescued from his desk after his
passing, the primary effort of the last five years of his life. The book was published posthumously in
Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaos
final intentions a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer, the
indefatigable translator of The Savage Detectives) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive
statements justifying the books present form. They neednt have bothered. 2666 is as consummate a
performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolao won the race to the finish line in writing
what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not
only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in whats possible for the novel as
a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks
positively hermetic beside it.
2666 consists of five sections, each with autonomous life and form; in fact, Bolao evidently flirted
with the notion of separate publication for the five parts. Indeed, two or three of these might be the equal
of his masterpieces at novella length, By Night in Chile and Distant Star. In a comparison Bolao
openly solicits (the novel contains a series of unnecessary but totally charming defenses of its own formal
strategies and magnitude) these five long sequences interlock to form an astonishing whole, in the same
manner that fruits, vegetables, meats, flowers or books interlock in the unforgettable paintings of
Giuseppe Arcimboldo to form a human face.
As in Arcimboldos paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily cataloged, while the
composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by
more direct strategies. Parts 1 and 5, the bookends The Part About the Critics and The Part About
Archimboldi will be the most familiar to readers of Bolaos other work. The critics are a group of
four European academics, pedantically rapturous on the topic of their favorite writer, the mysterious
German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. The four are glimpsed at a series of continental German
literature conferences; Bolao never tires of noting how a passion for literature walks a razors edge
between catastrophic irrelevance and sublime calling. As the four become sexually and emotionally
entangled, the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest declines, in fact, ever to
appear inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives.
Following dubious clues, three of the four chase a rumor of Archimboldis present whereabouts to
Mexico, to Santa Teresa, a squalid and sprawling border city, globalizations no mans land, in the
Sonoran Desert. The sections disconcertingly abrupt ending will also be familiar to readers of the
novellas: the aca demics never locate the German novelist and, failing even to understand why the great
German would exile himself to such a despondent place, find themselves standing at the edge of a
metaphysical abyss. What lies below? Other voices will be needed to carry us forward. We meet, in Part
2, Amalfitano, another trans-Atlantic academic wrecked on the shoals of the Mexican border city, an
emigrant college professor raising a beautiful daughter whose mother has abandoned them. He is
beginning, seemingly, to lose his mind. Bolaos genius is for weaving a blunt recitation of lifes facts
his novels at times evoke biographies, case studies, police or government files with digressive
outbursts of lyricism as piercing as the disjunctions of writers like Denis J ohnson, David Goodis or, yes,
Philip K. Dick, as well as the filmmaker David Lynch. Here, Amalfitano considers a letter from his
absconded wife: In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job
that started at 10 and ended at 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning. . . . For a second he thought it was all a lie, that
Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly.
He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a
mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris
blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning companys smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and
maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lolas fingers, Lolas wrists, Lolas blank eyes, he saw
another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a
trick photograph that isnt a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending
messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion. Bolao has been, because of his bookishness,
compared to J orge Luis Borges. But from the evidence of a prose always immediate, spare, rapturous and
drifting, always cosmopolitan and enchanted, the Bolao boom should be taken as immediate cause for a
54

revival of the neglected master J ulio Cortzar. (Cortzars name appears in 2666, but then it may seem
that every human name appears there and that Bolaos book is reading your mind as you read it.)
By the end of Amalfitanos section a reader remains, like the critics in the earlier section, in possession of
a paucity of real clues as to this novels underlying story, but suffused with dreadful implication.
Amalfitanos daughter seems to be drifting into danger, and if weve been paying attention well have
become concerned about intimations of a series of rape- murders in the Santa Teresa slums and foothills.
Whats more (if weve been reading flap copy or reviews) well have noted that Santa Teresa is a thin
disguise over the real town of Ciudad J urez, the site of a dismayingly underreported sequence of
unsolved crimes against women, with a death toll that crept into the hundreds in the 90s. In the manner
of J ames Ellroy, but with a greater check on both prurience and bathos, Bolao has sunk the capital of his
great book into a bottomless chasm of verifiable tragedy and injustice.
In the third section The Part About Fate this real-world material comes into view in the course of
a marvelously spare and pensive portrait of a black North American journalist, diverted to Santa Teresa to
cover what turns out to be a pathetically lopsided boxing match between a black American boxer and a
Mexican opponent. Before arriving in Mexico, though, the journalist visits Detroit to interview an ex-
Black Panther turned motivational speaker named Barry Seaman, who delivers, for 10 pages, the greatest
ranting monologue this side of Don DeLillos Lenny Bruce routines in Underworld. Heres a bit of it:
He talked about the stars you see at night, say when youre driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on
Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe its the oil or the radiator, maybe its a flat
tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an
hour, at most, and when youre done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked
about star athletes. Thats a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though
as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best,
whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you
could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who
gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending
on your point of view, he said, it doesnt matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of
semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances.
At last, and with the blunt power of a documentary compilation, comes Part 4, The Part About the
Crimes. Bolaos massive structure may now be under stood as a form of mercy: 2666 has been
conceived as a resounding chamber, a receptacle adequate to the gravity the weight and the force of
the human grief it will attempt to commemorate. (Perhaps 2666 is the year human memory will need to
attain in order to bear the knowledge in 2666.) If the word unflinching didnt exist Id invent it to
describe these nearly 300 pages, yet Bolao never completely abandons those reserves of lyricism and
irony that make the sequence as transporting as it is grueling. The nearest comparison may be to Haruki
Murakamis shattering fugue on J apanese military atrocities in Mongolia, which sounds the moral depths
in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Bolaos method, like Murakamis, encapsulates and disgorges dream
and fantasy, at no cost to the penetration of his realism.
BY the time we return to matters of literature, and meet Archimboldi, a German World War II veteran
and a characteristically culpable 20th-century witness whose ambivalent watchfulness shades the Sonoran
crimes, weve been shifted into a world so far beyond the imagining of the first sections critics that
were unsure whether to pity or envy them. Though Archimboldis literary career is conjured with
Bolaos customary gestural fulsomeness, 2666 never presents so much as a scrap of the fictional
masters fiction. Instead the titles of Archimboldis books recur as a kind of pulse of implication, until the
conjectured power of an unknown literature has insisted itself upon us like a disease, one that might just
draw us down with the savagery of a murderer operating in a moonless desert.
A novel like 2666 is its own preserving machine, delivering itself into our hearts, sentence by questing,
unassuming sentence; it also becomes a preserving machine for the lives its words fall upon like a
forgiving rain, fictional characters and the secret selves hidden behind and enshrined within them: hapless
academic critics and a hapless Mexican boxer, the unavenged bodies deposited in shallow graves. By
writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare
55

pronounce the names of our worlds disasters, Bolao has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at
least, given a name to the unnamable.
Now throw your hats in the air.

December 8, 2008 The Nation.
Al one Among t he Ghost s: Rober t o Bol aos 2666
The Part About the Author
Shortly before he died of liver failure in J uly 2003, Roberto Bolao remarked that he would have
preferred to be a detective rather than a writer. Bolao was 50 years old at the time, and by then he was
widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist since Gabriel Garca Mrquez. But
when Mexican Playboy interviewed him, Bolao was unequivocal. I would have liked to be a homicide
detective, much more than a writer, he told the magazine. Of that Im absolutely sure. A string of
homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of
ghosts.
Detective stories, and provocative remarks, were always passions of Bolaos--he once declared J ames
Ellroy among the best living writers in English--but his interest in gumshoe tales went beyond matters of
plot and style. In their essence, detective stories are investigations into the motives and mechanics of
violence, and Bolao--who moved to Mexico the year of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and was
imprisoned during the 1973 military coup in his native Chile--was also obsessed with such matters. The
great subject of his oeuvre is the relationship between art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the
totalitarian state.
In fact, all of Bolaos mature novels scrutinize how writers react to repressive regimes. Distant Star
(1996) grapples with Chiles history of death squads and desaparecidos by conjuring up a poet turned
serial killer. The Savage Detectives (1998) exalts a gang of young poets who joust against state-funded
writers during the years of Mexicos dirty wars. Amulet (1999) revolves around a middle-aged poet who
survives the governments 1968 invasion of the Autonomous University of Mexico by hiding in a
bathroom. By Night in Chile (2000) depicts a literary salon where writers party in the same house in
which dissidents are tortured. And Bolaos final, posthumous novel, 2666, is also spun from ghastly
news: the murder, since 1993, of more than 430 women and girls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua,
particularly in Ciudad J urez.
Often these victims disappear while on their way to school or returning home from work or while theyre
out dancing with friends. Days or months later, their bodies turn up--tossed in a ditch, the middle of the
desert or a city dump. Most are strangled; some are knifed or burned or shot. One-third show signs of
rape. Some show signs of torture. The oldest known victims are in their 30s; the youngest are elementary-
school age. In J anuary of this year at least four such girls and women were killed. Since 2002 these
murders have been the subject of a Hollywood film (Bordertown, starring J ennifer Lopez), several
nonfiction books, a number of documentaries and a flood of demonstrations in Mexico and abroad.
According to Amnesty International, over half of the so-called femicides have not resulted in a
conviction.
Bolao was fascinated by these cold cases long before the murders became a cause clbre. In 1995 he
sent a letter from Spain to his old friend in Mexico City, the visual artist Carla Rippey (who is portrayed
as the beautiful Catalina OHara in The Savage Detectives), mentioning that for years hed been working
on a novel called The Woes of the True Policeman. Though he had other manuscripts on submission to
publishers, this book, Bolao wrote, is MY NOVEL. Set in northern Mexico, in a town called Santa
Teresa, it revolved around a literature professor who had a 14-year-old daughter. The manuscript had
already topped eight hundred thousand pages, he boasted; it was a demented tangle that surely no one
will understand.
56

Surely, it seemed so then. Bolao was 43 when he sent this missive, and as near to failure as hed ever
been. Though hed published two books of poetry, co-written a novel and spent five years entering short
story contests all over Spain, he was so broke that he couldnt afford a telephone line, and his work was
almost entirely unknown. Three years earlier, he and his wife had separated; around the same time he was
diagnosed with the liver disease that would kill him eight years later. Though Bolao won many of the
short story contests he entered, his novels were routinely rejected by publishers. Yet late in 1995 he
would begin an astonishing rise.
The turning point was a meeting with J orge Herralde, the founder and director of the publishing house
Editorial Anagrama. Though Herralde couldnt buy Nazi Literature in the Americas--it was snapped up
by Seix Barral--he invited Bolao to visit him in Barcelona. There Bolao told him about his cash
problems and the desperation he felt over the many rejections hed received. I told him that...Id love to
read his other manuscripts, and shortly afterward he brought me Distant Star (later I found out that it had
also been rejected by other publishing houses, including Seix Barral), the editor recalls in an essay.
Herralde, however, found the book extraordinary. Thereafter, he published all of Bolaos fiction: nine
books in seven years.
During that time, as each volume found more readers than its predecessor, Bolao toiled away on his
demented tangle. The work involved writing, of course, but also investigating. By setting his novel in
Santa Teresa, a fictional town in Sonora, rather than in J urez, Bolao was able to blur the lines between
what he knew and what he imagined. But he was deeply concerned with understanding the circumstances
facing J urez and its inhabitants. Bolao was already familiar with the regions bleak, arid landscape--
hed traveled to northern Mexico during the 1970s--but the femicides didnt begin until sixteen years after
he had left for Europe, and hed never visited J urez. Since he didnt know anyone living in the city, his
knowledge was limited to what he could find in newspapers and on the Internet. From these sources he
would have learned that J urez had become the perfect place to commit a crime.
Once a watering hole for Americans during Prohibition, J urez grew rapidly after NAFTA was
implemented in the 1990s. Hundreds of assembly plants sprang up, luring hundreds of thousands of
destitute residents from all over Mexico to take jobs that often paid as little as 50 cents an hour. The same
traits that made J urez appealing to NAFTA manufacturers--good roads, proximity to a large consumer
market, an abundance of unorganized labor--also made it an ideal hub for narcotraficantes. By 1996,
some 42 million people and 17 million vehicles were traveling through the city every year, making it one
of the busiest transit points on the US-Mexico border and a favorite for illegal crossings. The town
transformed itself into a crossroads for cheap and illicit commerce; as it did, poor, hardworking women
began turning up dead.
J urez and its fictional counterpart bear little resemblance to the cultural centers where Bolao set most of
his novels--even Distant Star takes place in the most important university town in southern Chile. There
are no writing workshops amid the shantytowns of Santa Teresa, nor gangs of rebellious poets. Like all of
Bolaos fiction, 2666 teems with writers, artists and intellectuals, but these characters come from
elsewhere: from Europe, South America, the United States and Mexico City. Stuck in the badlands of
northern Mexico, the same region where Cormac McCarthys gang of merry killers rampage in Blood
Meridian, Santa Teresa is literally and culturally parched.
The link between this industrial desert and the settings of Bolaos previous novels lies, like a scarlet
letter, on the books front cover. The devilish date 2666--which appears nowhere in the pages of 2666--
sends us on a scavenger hunt to Amulet, where it crops up in the waking nightmares of a woman named
Auxilio Lacouture. Visions of hell besiege Auxilio from the novels earliest pages, when she peers into a
flower vase and sees everything that people have lost, everything that causes pain and that is better off
forgotten.
Later, as she walks through the streets of Mexico City, she has another evil hallucination. Its the middle
of the night. The streets she crosses are vacant and windy. At that hour, Auxilio says, Avenida Reforma
turns into a transparent tube, a cuneiform lung where you feel the citys imaginary breath, and Avenida
Guerrero looks like nothing more than a cemetery...a cemetery from the year 2666, a cemetery forgotten
57

under a dead or unborn eyelid, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that, for wanting to forget
something, has ended forgetting everything.
2666, like all of Bolaos work, is a graveyard. In his 1998 acceptance speech for the Rmulo Gallegos
Prize, Bolao revealed that in some way everything he wrote was a letter of love or of goodbye to the
young people who died in the dirty wars of Latin America. His previous novels memorialized the dead of
the 1960s and 70s. His ambitions for 2666 were greater: to write a postmortem for the dead of the past,
the present and the future.

Carla Rippey
The Gar dens of Ci udad J ur ez, 2006
The Part About the Crimes
Bolao put off the possibility of a liver transplant so he could complete 2666, but the illness grew more
acute and he died before he reached the books end. After the funeral, his friend and literary executor, the
Spanish book critic Ignacio Echevarra, combed through the manuscripts in Bolaos office to assemble
the work that Anagrama published in 2004, and that Natasha Wimmer, the gifted translator of The Savage
Detectives, has now brought into English.
Bolao marked his manuscripts carefully. He may have been reckless, but he wasnt stupid, and he knew
that he was dying. Yet Anagrama broke with his wishes on one point. For years Bolao had talked about
2666 as one book, bragging that it would be the fattest novel in the world, but in the final months of his
life, he decided to break up the novels five sections and publish them as separate books. The reasons
behind this impulse were practical. Bolao would leave behind two young children, to whom he dedicated
2666, and he wanted to provide for them after his death. Five short novels, he figured, would earn more
money than one backbreaking monster. Thankfully, his family and Anagrama did him the favor of
following his original vision. As Echevarra notes in his epilogue, although the five parts that comprise
2666 may be read independently, they not only share many elements (a subtle web of recurring themes),
they also join unequivocally in a unified design. Meanwhile, here in the States, the books publisher,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is hedging its bets: putting out both a 2.75-pound hardcover and a three-
volume slipcased paperback edition.
Either way, 2666 isnt for the faint of heart. The book is nearly 900 pages long, and charting its locations
would yield something like an airline flight map, red dots marking landings in Argentina, England,
France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Prussia, Romania, Russia, Spain and the United States. As if
such globe-trotting wasnt enough, the novel also contains scores of characters and covers almost an
entire century of history.
Bolao once wrote that in the Americas, all modern fiction springs from two sources: The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. The Savage Detectives, with its carousing characters, is Bolaos novel
of friendship and adventure. 2666 chases the white whale. For Bolao, Melvilles novel held the key to
writing about the land of evil; and like Melvilles saga, 2666 can be stunning or soporific, depending on
your taste for the slow burn. Ive read it three times, and I find it to be dense, brilliant and horrifying, with
scattered scenes of cleverness and fun.
Page one plunges us into the lives of four European academics who adore the books of a reclusive
German author named Benno von Archimboldi almost as much as they enjoy luring each other to bed.
Bolaos approach to the murders in the first two parts of 2666--The Part About the Critics and The
Part About Amalfitano--is coy, elliptical. Not for him the rapid gore of Patricia Cornwell or Stephen
King. The first, glancing mention of the crimes doesnt occur until forty-three pages into the book, and
only two of the three professors who visit Santa Teresa in the first part even hear about the murders. They
are visitors to Mexico, and though they dabble in sex tourism, their wealth and indifference insulate them
from the realities of the city.
58

The Part About Amalfitano--which clearly derives from the book Bolao described to Rippey in 1995--
moves closer to the locals, while still keeping the murders at arms length. If part one is a brainy romance,
part two is an existential drama. A Chilean philosophy professor who has left Europe for the University of
Santa Teresa founders in quiet desperation. He fears that hes going crazy--a voice speaks to him at night.
He fears that the citys violence may reach out and grab his daughter--a black car keeps appearing just
outside his house.
Careful readers will spy hints of whats to come, like so many red fingerprints, throughout these two
sections, but it isnt until the third part, The Part About Fate, that the violence of Santa Teresa spills
into the foreground. Standing in a bar, a nave American reporter sees a man across the room punch a
woman: The first blow made the womans head snap violently and the second blow knocked her down.
The reporter had driven to Mexico to see another kind of beating--a fight between an American boxer and
his Mexican rival--but he soon learns that the real blows in Santa Teresa occur outside the ring.
Befriended by some of the seedier elements of the city, he is shown what appears to be the video of a
woman being raped. He meets the chief suspect in the citys murders, and he winds up peeling out of
town afraid of the police.
This noir escapade is prelude to a dirge. The Part About the Crimes opens in J anuary 1993 with the
description of the corpse of a 13-year-old girl and ends 108 bodies later during Christmas 1997. Each one
of these forensic discoveries is clinically detailed--at 284 pages, the section is the longest in the book--and
the resulting chronicle of death is braided through with the narratives of four detectives, one reporter, the
chief suspect in the crimes and various ancillary characters. In Bolaos hands, this collage produces
terrific fugue-like sequences and damning repetitions. (The case was soon closed becomes a haunting
refrain.) Bolao lightens these grim story lines with flashes of gallows humor and the occasional tender
subplot. Overall, however, reading The Part About the Crimes feels like staring into the abyss.
Strangling, shooting, stabbing, burning, rape, whipping, mutilation, bribery and treachery are all detailed
in deadpan prose. In the middle of November, a typical paragraph runs:
Andrea Pacheco Martnez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16....
When she was found, two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation,
with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was
tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by
which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied. A Salvadorean immigrant found the
body behind the Francisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia lamos. It was fully dressed,
and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact.
Those whove sampled Bolaos other fictions will recognize the cool detachment of this passage. But the
level of grisly detail is like nothing in any of Bolaos previous works--or in any of the newspaper
accounts he could have read. His descriptions of the murder investigations, and of the incidents
surrounding the trial of the chief suspect, are equally precise and uncanny.
How did Bolao become so intimate with the details of these crimes, and the procedures of the local
police, when he lived an ocean away? His other investigative novels were written after the fresh blood of
history had dried; even then, Bolao had always drawn from firsthand knowledge of the events or from
that of his friends. Yet at the time he was writing The Part About the Crimes, information about the
murders in J urez was quite restricted. To pull off this kind of hyperrealism, he must have had the help of
someone on the inside, someone whose interest in autopsy was as relentless as his own.
The Part About the Journalist
In the summer of 1995, the year Bolao wrote to Carla Rippey, the bodies of several young women were
discovered semi-nude and strangled just south of J urez, near the local airport. That September the city
offered a $1,000 reward for information about The Predator. A month later, police arrested Abdel Latif
Sharif Sharif, an Arab-American with a history of sexual aggression, and charged him with the five
murders, plus a few others committed in September. But two months later, while Sharif Sharif awaited
trial in prison, fresh corpses began to appear. The police maintained that Sharif Sharif, a chemist, had
59

directed these murders from his cell, paying $1,200 for each woman killed. His accomplices, they said,
were eight teenage boys they arrested in a sweep of nightclubs. They were called The Rebels.
Almost 1,000 miles away, in Mexico City, this news fascinated a reporter named Sergio Gonzlez
Rodrguez. A novelist and arts journalist, Gonzlez Rodrguez had launched his career during the 1980s
by doing reviews for Carlos Monsivis, a leading cultural critic and a pioneer of the nueva crnica, or
New J ournalism, style in Mexico. By the time the newspaper Reforma came calling in 1993, Gonzlez
Rodrguez was well known as a centrist critic who wasnt afraid of riling the government: hed been fired
from the magazine Nexos for publishing an article in Reforma that questioned the ethics of intellectuals
who allied themselves with then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whod been elected in 1988 amid
widespread allegations of voter fraud. This independent temperament made Gonzlez Rodrguez a good
match for Reforma--the paper had a history of serious investigative reporting--and he was hired to edit
one of the papers weekend cultural supplements, El ngel. (These days Gonzlez Rodrguez still
serves as the sections editorial consultant. He also writes three regular columns for the paper.)
The news from J urez reminded Gonzlez Rodrguez of the movie Silence of the Lambs, which hed seen
a few years earlier. Could it be, he wondered, that Ciudad J urez held a real Hannibal Lecter? Answering
that question wasnt part of his regular beat, but as he explained to me in a series of interviews last
summer, hed always been interested in literature about violence. His favorite books include Truman
Capotes In Cold Blood, Norman Mailers The Executioners Song and Hans Magnus Enzensbergers
Politics and Crime. He already had plans to travel to the state of Chihuahua to teach a seminar. It wasnt
hard to persuade Reforma to pay for a jumper flight from there to J urez so he could report on a press
conference that the chief suspect planned to hold, in prison, on April 19, 1996.
That day Gonzlez Rodrguez watched a tall, middle-aged man with green eyes talk to some thirty
reporters. Sharif Sharif barely spoke Spanish--hed lived in Mexico for less than a year--so he gave his
presentation in English while a bilingual reporter translated. What he said sounded like a soap opera.
According to Sharif Sharif, the femicides were being committed by a pair of rich Mexican cousins, one
who lived in J urez and the other just over the border in El Paso. He told a love story involving one of the
cousins and a poor, beautiful girl from J urez. The press corps was annoyed--they exchanged glances,
cracked jokes. Gonzlez Rodrguez felt pretty skeptical himself, but the critic in him was intrigued by
Sharif Sharifs style. Rather than pound his chest and declare his innocence, the suspect calmly recounted
his ninety-minute tale. He seemed to believe that if he provided an alternate explanation for the murders,
the charges against him would be dropped.
At the end of the session, Gonzlez Rodrguez introduced himself to a local reporter. In a park near the
prison, the two chatted about the strange presentation. A mother and her daughter approached them.
Are you journalists? the mother asked.
Yes, they answered.
Then we want to tell you something we think that you should know.
The 14-year-old girl beside her wore a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. She told the reporters that
the J urez chief of police had forced her to accuse The Rebels. The chief, she said, had taken
her by the hair and banged her against a wall until she agreed to say exactly what he told her.
For Gonzlez Rodrguez, perspective suddenly shifted. Old facts (the nightclub sweep, the escalating
charges against Sharif Sharif) glittered in a new light: the police were beating witnesses. This, he
thought, is the undercurrent. Later, he learned that while Sharif Sharif had been holding forth in prison,
the State Commission on Human Rights had announced that six of the eight witnesses against The Rebels
had been detained illegally by the J urez police.
Gonzlez Rodrguez flew back to Mexico City and published an article about his findings and the
suspicious treatment of the witnesses. Soon after, Reforma asked him to join a special investigations unit
devoted to the situation in J urez. The head of the unit, Rossana Fuentes Berain, sent a journalist
undercover into the factories where many of the murder victims had worked; she assigned other reporters
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to track the details of individual police investigations. Gonzlez Rodrguez was given the task of studying
the big picture for patterns and motivations. Though Berain edited Gonzlez Rodrguez like any other
reporter--sometimes demanding that he corroborate sources or provide additional proofs for his more
damning assessments--she also allowed him considerable interpretive leeway.
For three years he traveled back and forth between J urez and Mexico City, juggling book and film
reviews with criminal investigation, until, in the summer of 1999, his reporting began to suggest that the
policemen, government officials and drug traffickers of J urez were all connected to one another, and to
the femicides. An attack on the son of Sharif Sharifs lawyer earlier that year had hardened his suspicions.
Why would someone attack a lawyers son if the justice system was functioning properly? he wondered.
Then, on J une 12, together with a reporter from the El Paso Times, Gonzlez Rodrguez interviewed a
prisoner who implicated local police and a prominent senator in the femicides.
In his book Huesos en el desierto, Gonzlez Rodrguez recounts that three days later he was kidnapped
and assaulted by two men in Mexico City. He had hailed a taxi in the posh neighborhood of Condesa,
heading home after a late night. The taxi drove for a while and then stopped. Two armed men jumped
aboard. They ordered Gonzlez Rodrguez to close his eyes and sit between them in the back seat. The
taxi took off--the driver was complicit. Though Gonzlez Rodrguez didnt resist his captors, the men
cursed him, punched him, pistol-whipped him and pierced his legs with an ice pick. They would kill him
in a deserted spot south of the capital, they said. The taxi stopped again. One of the men got out, and
another, whom they called The Boss, sat down. The beatings and threats of rape and death resumed. A
patrol car passed nearby with its flashers on. The men dumped Gonzlez Rodrguez on the street. He filed
a police report and went to see a doctor, who prescribed painkillers and bed rest. On J une 18, his article
Police Are Fingered as Accomplices [in J urez] appeared in Reforma.
For the next two months, Gonzlez Rodrguez lived like a zombie, writing reviews, editing his section
and going out with friends even as his vision clouded, his speech slurred and his memory disintegrated.
Finally, on August 11, when he couldnt even brew a cup of coffee in his own home, two friends from
Reforma rushed him to a hospital, where he had emergency surgery to remove a life-threatening
hematoma that was pressing on his brain.
Against all expectations, he made a complete recovery, but the beating marked a turning point in his life.
Before the attack, Gonzlez Rodrguez had had problems with his home and cellphones--strange noises,
deficiencies in service. After, he was often followed. His friend Paola Tinoco recalls that whenever she
and Gonzlez Rodrguez ate in a restaurant in the months following his surgery, they were watched by
people wearing earphones. Terrified and helpless, the two took refuge in humor, telling each other absurd
stories every time the strangers were present. One night, for example, they recited the lyrics to a popular
childrens song called The Ducky:
Ducky goes running and searching in her purse-y
For pennies to feed her own little duckies
Because she knows that when she gets back
All the ducks will run up and ask
What did you bring me, Mam, quack quack?
What did you bring me, quack quack?
When Gonzlez Rodrguez flew to J urez in 1995 looking for a Hollywood-style serial killer, he recalls,
I had no idea what I was getting into. Instead of Hannibal Lecter, he found a system of impunity that
protected the worst criminals in J urez, simply because they were ruthless and rich, a system that
implicated the police and judicial institutions of the city, the state and the country. Once he drew these
conclusions, there was no going back. Youre in a hell, he says, that you dont know why youve been
chosen to live. The heat incinerated many of his old illusions about accountability and justice, revealing
Mexicos black heart.
The authorities, he believed, were deliberately trying to confuse and obscure the realities in J urez,
suggesting that the numbers were exaggerated, or that the murders were crimes of passion, or that the
61

victims were prostitutes. He wanted to make a permanent record of his findings to contradict those stories,
a record that wouldnt be tossed out at weeks end.

The Part About the Correspondence
The year that Gonzlez Rodrguez was first attacked, Bolao had been working on his demented tangle
for more than half a decade. Searching for information about J urez, Bolao e-mailed his friends in
Mexico, asking more and more detailed questions about the murders. Finally, tired of these gruesome
inquiries, his friends put him in touch with Gonzlez Rodrguez, who, they said, knew more about the
crimes than anyone in Mexico. Bolao first e-mailed him around the time that Gonzlez Rodrguez
decided to write a nonfiction book about his investigation.
In retrospect, its strange the two didnt correspond earlier. They were roughly the same age: Gonzlez
Rodrguez was born in 1950, Bolao in 1953. Both had been part of Mexico Citys counterculture in the
1970s: Bolao tramping about town with the Infrarealist poets, Gonzlez Rodrguez playing bass for a
heavy-metal band called Grupo Enigma. Both began writing novels late and prided themselves on the
integrity of their literary judgments. They had several friends in common: J orge Herralde and the critic
and novelist J uan Villoro. And in middle age both were consumed by J urez.
Gonzlez Rodrguez could tell right away that Bolaos interest in the crimes wasnt a whim. It wasnt a
temp job, like that of so many novelists, Gonzlez Rodrguez says. It was the passion of a lifetime. He
would say to me, What you do think of such and such text? He had read everything.
What Bolao needed, Gonzlez Rodrguez explains, was help with the details of the murders and the
police investigations, because the press accounts of them were too vague. He wanted to know how the
narcos in J urez operated, what cars they drove, what weapons they carried. What he liked was
precision, Gonzlez Rodrguez says. In the case of weapons, for example, Bolao wanted to know not
just the brand but also the model and the caliber.
He was also interested in connecting with the mentality of Chihuahuas police to understand the
particularities of their conduct and misconduct. He wanted to know exactly how murder cases were
written up. He wanted a copy of a forensic report; Gonzlez Rodrguez unearthed one in the papers hed
gotten from a defense lawyer. At Bolaos request, he transcribed a section describing the victims
injuries. He wanted to know the language of forensic investigation, Gonzlez Rodrguez recalls. It is
this language that appears in The Part About the Crimes.
I imagine, based on what he would ask me, that what he wanted was to compare notes, Gonzlez
Rodrguez says. Id say that the savage detective wanted the other savage detective, who is me, to draw
analogous conclusions. Yet any writer knows that sharing conclusions often changes them. Comparing
notes with Gonzlez Rodrguez, Bolao may have altered a few long-held beliefs. Take, for example, the
two detectives discussion of Robert K. Ressler, the former FBI criminologist who visited J urez in 1998
to consult on the murders, thanks to a deal made between Mexicos Congress and its attorney general.
Bolao had already read Resslers famous books--among them, Sexual Homicide and Crime
Classification Manual--and he was amazed that Ressler didnt solve the murders during his trip.
Why didnt Ressler catch the killer? he asked.
That trip was just window dressing, Gonzlez Rodrguez remembers telling him. He explained that
Ressler had come to J urez unprepared. He didnt bring his own translator. He was paid by the same
authorities who might be implicated by his findings. He had to review criminal files in Spanish, a
language he didnt know. He was given a bodyguard who watched everything he did. This information,
Gonzlez Rodrguez remembers, hit Bolao like cold water.
He wanted to believe that there was a rational power that could conquer the criminal, he observes. In
fact, such a triumphant ratiocinator appears in all Bolaos novels--except for 2666. In Distant Star, the
serial killer is caught by detective Abel Romero, with the help of a smart poet. In By Night in Chile, the
crimes of the literati are unearthed by an anonymous young detective. Another anonymous interrogator
62

traces the history of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima in The Savage Detectives, while these two young
poets successfully locate the mysterious writer Cesrea Tinajero--whom they find in a town near Santa
Teresa.
Only in 2666 do criminals slip the noose, trapping and killing or beating every Nosy Parker who comes
their way. Significantly, in the final version of 2666, the character based on Ressler (Albert Kessler) first
appears as a cunning, if tactless, detective, only to have the rug pulled out from under his investigation
several pages later.
More fundamentally, Gonzlez Rodrguez told Bolao how his findings suggested that the killings in
J urez were connected to the local police and politicians and to the mercenary gangs maintained by the
drug cartels. The police dont seriously investigate the murders, he explained, because theyre badly
trained, or theyre misogynists, or theyve made deals that allow the narcos to operate with impunity.
So theres no serial killer? Gonzlez Rodrguez recalls Bolao asked him.
No, of course theres a serial killer, Gonzlez Rodrguez replied. But its not just one serial killer. I think
there are at least two serial killers.
This revelation, Gonzlez Rodrguez says, disconcerted Bolao. By then, the writer had already devised
an elaborate, ingenious structure for his novel, a structure that in some ways depends on the idea of a
single serial killer. The innocence or guilt of the real Sharif Sharif wasnt the issue, Gonzlez Rodrguez
says. The problem was how to fit fresh news about the crimes into 2666.
Bolaos solution, I suspect, was to adopt many of Gonzlez Rodrguezs conclusions about J urez
wholesale, then to dramatize these theories in his own way. The parallels between the stories in The Part
About the Crimes and the conclusions in Gonzlez Rodrguezs book Huesos en el desierto--which isnt
available in English--are startling. Yet nothing, Gonzlez Rodrguez points out, is ever followed to the
letter. Names are changed, nationalities transformed, characters invented, entire plots embroidered out of
imagination, style and air. Bolao may have used everything Gonzlez Rodrguez taught him--he read the
manuscript for Huesos months before it was published--but he refashioned it all to suit his own ends.

The Part About the Goat
After years of correspondence, the two savage detectives finally met in November 2002, when Gonzalz
Rodrguez traveled to Barcelona for the official launch of Huesos. Anagrama had bought the book for its
prestigious Crnicas imprint, setting it alongside works by Gnter Wallraff, Ryszard Kapuscinski and
Michael Herr. More than 100 people attended the debut presentation. Months later, the Mexican consulate
would decline to send a representative to a theatrical performance inspired by Huesos, stating that its
officials dont support works that denigrate Mexico.
Huesos was launched in Spain partly to protect its author. When it was printed, many of the government
and police officials fingered by Gonzlez Rodrguez were still in power, and its account of systematic
corruption in J urez angered those who wanted to portray Mexico as a civilized nation. But press
coverage for the book in Europe provided Gonzlez Rodrguez with a measure of protection against
reprisals. After such coverage, there would be no way of making the book or its author quietly disappear
when Huesos was later released in Mexico.
Bolao didnt attend the launch, but early the next day Gonzlez Rodrguez and a friend headed north to
the seaside town of Blanes to meet him and his family for lunch. They arrived several hours late. Hung
over from the previous nights celebration of dinner and absinthe, Gonzlez Rodrguez and his friend had
boarded the wrong train. Bolao forgave their late appearance, opening a bottle of wine and offering ham
sandwiches. Knowing that Bolaos illness made it impossible for him to drink liquor, Gonzlez
Rodrguez had brought him a half-kilo of coffee from La Habana, the cafe in Mexico City that Bolao
immortalized in The Savage Detectives. Bolaos liver was so bad that he couldnt drink coffee either, but
Gonzlez Rodrguez recalls that he opened the bag and buried his nose in it.
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For the next several hours, they talked about the murders in J urez. For once, they had no worries about
tapped phones or intercepted e-mails. Bolao could ask all the questions he wanted.
Listen, Bolao joked, Im going to make you a character in my novel. Im going to plagiarize the idea
from J avier Maras, who made you a character in La negra espalda del tiempo.
Gonzlez Rodrguez felt his stomach sink. Really, Roberto? he said. With my name?
Yes, dont worry about it, Bolao said. His daughter, Alejandra, was playing with Gonzlez Rodrguezs
friend. Bolao looked happy. Gonzlez Rodrguez didnt know what to say.
The next evening they met for sushi in Barcelona. This time they talked, not about J urez but about
literature. Bolao asked if writers in Mexico still wore beards or if theyd all cut them off. At one point,
he announced that he and Mario Santiago had officially dissolved the Infrarealist movement in Paris in
1992. Hes crazy, Gonzlez Rodrguez thought. He thinks that the only Infrarealists who matter are him
and Santiago.
Shortly after this visit, Bolao published the essay Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez Under the Hurricane,
which declared his affection and admiration for the journalist and sang the praises of his book. Gonzlez
Rodrguezs technical help in the writing of my novel, he wrote, has been substantial. And Huesos en
el desierto is not only an imperfect photograph--how could it be anything else--of evil and of corruption;
it also transforms itself into a metaphor of Mexico and of Mexicos past and of the uncertain future of all
of Latin America.
Seven months later, on J uly 1, 2003, Bolao was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona. Two weeks later, he
died.
When 2666 was released in Mexico in 2004, Gonzlez Rodrguez could barely bring himself to read it. It
took me months to read the section about the dead women, he says. It terrified me. To live through it is
one thing, but to see it told by a great literary master like Bolao isnt funny. Roberto is crazier than a
goat, you understand? You cant believe it because in some way youre there.
As a reporter, Gonzlez Rodrguez had cultivated a critical distance that helped him ignore how easily he
could be attacked again. Finding in 2666 a character with his name pinioned to a world of killers and
cover-ups shattered that illusion. At one point Bolao even describes a kidnapping exactly like the 1999
attack on Gonzlez Rodrguez, except that it ends in death. Its not clear whether the reporter who dies is
the character Sergio Gonzlez.
1

Such pointed mind games aside, any Mexican journalist writing about cartels or corruption would have
felt vulnerable in 2004. That year, five investigative reporters were killed or disappeared in Mexico. One
of them was shot to death in front of his two young children. According to a report put out by Reporters
Without Borders last year, Mexico has become the second-most dangerous place in the world for
journalists, the first being Iraq. Alejandro J unco de la Vega, the president of Grupo Reforma, recently told
an audience at Columbia University that his three newspapers no longer run bylines, in order to protect
their journalists. We find ourselves under the siege of drug lords, criminals, he explained, and the
more we expose their activities, the harder they push back. J unco himself has moved his entire family to
a safe haven in the US.
So it may be a coincidence that the same year 2666 was published, Gonzlez Rodrguez decided to stop
traveling to J urez. Hed heard there was a bounty on his head in the state of Chihuahua. Suits alleging
slander had been filed, and he risked being jailed the moment he set foot in the state. Given these
maneuvers, his lawyers recommended that he not enter Chihuahua under any circumstances. (It wasnt
until April 2007 that President Felipe Caldern signed a federal law that decriminalized defamation and
insults, and obliged state governments to do the same.) The last time Gonzlez Rodrguez visited,
nobody wanted to talk about what was going on. It had become a city of closed doors.
Neither Huesos nor 2666 is an easy book to read. I was plagued by nightmares as I read both of them.
Their pages are like freshly dug graves, but they are shadowed by different philosophies of evil. In
Huesos, J urez is a casualty of rampant corruption. When cops and courts look the other way, Gonzlez
64

Rodrguez believes, brutal acts become ordinary events. The rape and murder of women, the assassination
of journalists, the kidnapping of people for ransom: none of these crimes are page-one news in Mexico
anymore. A malevolent person, like a serial killer, can unleash a kind of sweeping effect, Gonzlez
Rodrguez says, igniting a mechanism of extermination that rivals that of any totalitarian dictatorship.
This normalization of barbarism, he argues, is the most serious problem facing Mexico and Latin
America today.
In the final section of 2666, The Part About Archimboldi, Bolao presents a more sinister vision of
evil. The section opens at the end of World War I, with a wounded Prussians return home. Everything is
changing, a stranger tells him: The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin. [The
Prussian] answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change. Indeed, the whole finale of 2666, which
spans the First World War to the late 1990s, seems designed to prove Archimboldis belief that history is
nothing more than a series of instants that vie with one another in monstrousness. As Archimboldi
fights for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front and starts his career as a novelist in the ruins of Berlin,
Bolao regales us with tale after tale of rape and murder. In the hills of Germany, a man kills his wife and
the authorities turn a blind eye. During the war, city folk who flee to the country are routinely robbed,
raped and killed. The land around a Romanian castle is filled with buried human bones, and allusions to
the Holocaust abound.
In this landscape of brutality and impunity, Santa Teresa seems less aberrant. Its just one of many places
where an underlying, pervasive evil has broken the surface. As it is now in Santa Teresa, the novel seems
to say, as it has always been, as it shall be in the cemeteries of 2666. Evil is as widespread and eternal as
the sea.
This vision of violence brings to mind Americas own apocalyptic writer, Cormac McCarthy, but
Bolaos novel has more sex and comedy, and his hero is quite different from those in The Road or Blood
Meridian. Archimboldi marches through the battlefields of Poland and Romania like a man trolling along
the bottom of the sea, immersed in the deeps dark horror yet untouched by it. As a teenager, he reads
Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival and is captivated by the idea of a lay and independent medieval
knight. His own holy grail turns out to be a dead mans diary he discovers in an abandoned shtetl.
A lay and independent knight: these words could describe both the great detectives and the great writers
who wander through the pages of 2666. All of them are loners who devote themselves to reading and
swimming in the abyss. Being a writer in this world is as dangerous as being a detective, walking through
a graveyard, looking at ghosts.
1- Italian translators note

Though admirable, the text by Marcela Valdes contains some inaccuracies. This one seems to be the most
evident one. The author confuses (perhaps because the series of events to which they refer are
simultaneous, in the apparently labyrinth-like chronology of the Part About the Crimes) the character of
Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez and that of J osu Hernndez Mercado, collaborator of La Raza de Green
Valley sensationalistic tabloid that thrives thanks to financing coming from the Chicanos and with
variable printing schedules (weekly, bi-monthly or monthly), specialised in crime news. At a certain
point, after having gathered the umpteenth more or less delirious testimony by Sharif Sharif (Klaus Haas,
in the book), the character of Hernndez Mercado disappears (literally: Bolao does not describe any
kidnapping) and we know nothing more about him, despite the occasional searches of a colleague. The
reader intuits that he has been killed. Instead, in the same moment of the third part which, more than in an
alternate editing, seems to proceed for juxtaposed parallelisms with the regular interposing of the
discoveries and/or autopsies of the cadavers, Gonzlez Rodrguez is taken, in the dead of the night, from a
Mercedes. Not to be beaten, but in order to be discreetly put in contact with a high level member of the
PRI (Partido Republicano Institucional), Azucena Esquivel Plata, interested in the crimes of J urez for
reasons that are more personal than political.

65

New York Magazine, 24 August 2008
I s Rober t o Bol aos Fi nal Novel 2666 Hi s Gr eat est ?
Only five years after his early death, Roberto Bolaos life already reads like a legend. He spent most of it
as an obscure, heroically impoverished radical poet drifting across the world (Chile, Mexico, Spain) in
search of menial jobs and revolutions. He was imprisoned in his native Chile during Pinochets 1973
coup, only to be released eight days later by guards who happened to be his ex-schoolmates. In his late
thirties, finding himself suddenly in need of money to support a family, Bolao turned, improbably, to
writing fiction. Even less probably, it worked. Within ten years, he had become one of the most
celebrated Spanish-language writers in the world.
Last year, his long novel The Savage Detectivesa menacingly funny chronicle of a gang of avant-garde
poets scouring the Mexican desert for another avant-garde poetbecame an unlikely English-language
best seller. This November, the crescendo of recent Bolao translations will culminate in what is
apparently the fortissimo climax of his entire career: the mammoth, mysteriously entitled 2666, which
revolves around the unsolved murders of hundreds of real-life women in Northern Mexico. (He was
working on it when he died, at age 50, of liver failure.)
For a certain demographic of high-lit dorks, 2666 is like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Weve
been shivering for it for months. Given the current climate of critical love, it might even have a shot at
becoming the Infinite J eststyle Strangely Popular Giant Novel of the Year. It promises all the Bolao
signatures: sex, violence, nightmares, stories within stories, obsessed obsessives, an intercontinental hunt
for a literary recluse, radical art (one painter finishes a self-portrait by affixing his mummified severed
hand to the canvas), and the occasional five-page-long sentence. The big question will be, can a former
poet whose mind seems to work most powerfully in short dashes, and whose long novels tend to feel like
rapid successions of short fevers, sustain our attention for almost 900 pages? Either way, its publication is
bittersweet: Although it marks the end, finally, of the English-speaking worlds Bolao lag, its also the
end, forever, of our new Bolao.

New York Magazine, 9 November 2008
A Timeline Of Roberto Bolaos Career
Since The Savage Detectives came out last year to gaga acclaim, Roberto Bolao has become Americas
favorite new posthumous literary genius, appealing to an astonishingly broad demographic (particularly
for a foreign writer: Less than 4 percent of literature published here is fiction in translation). For his
publishers, Bolao is big business. A peek at how a phenomenon was madeand will continue.
1953
Born in Santiago, Chile. Moves with family to Mexico at 15.
1973
Returns to Chile to help build socialism. A few months later, Pinochet stages his coup. Bolao is
detained but soon released after two guards recognize him from their
school days.
1976
In Mexico City, writes the manifesto for the Infrarealists, a ruckus-raising group of young poets, and
publishes a book of poems, Reinventar el Amor. The next year hes off to Europe.
1980s
Bolao works odd jobs (night watchman, etc.) in Spain but also wins a literary prize for a co-authored
novella. By the nineties, he makes his decision to earn a living from fiction.

66

1992
Diagnosed with liver disease.
19962002
Bolao, said to be able to write for 48 hours straight, publishes on average a book a year. In 1998, Los
Detectives Salvajes comes out in Spanish. He dies in 2003.
20042006
Momentum builds. New Directions publishes the novel Distant Starand The New Yorker publishes a
review, followed by its first Bolao story, Gmez Palacio.
October 2006
Farrar, Straus & Giroux begins to send out 950 advance copies of The Savage Detectivesabout
(loosely) the obscure poetry wars of Bolaos youthto media folks.
SpringFall 2007
A tidal wave of Bolao coverage, including James Woods dubbing him one of the greatest and most
influential modern writers and Edmund Whites listing The Savage Detectives among his top-five
most important books in Newsweek.
SpringFall 2008
Superagent Andrew Wylie takes over the Bolao estate. A New York Observer piece compares carrying
an advance copy of 2666 to driving an open-top Porsche.
November 2008
FSG publishes 2666 simultaneously as a hardcover and a three-volume paperback. New Directions
releases a volume of Bolaos poetry, The Romantic Dogs.
The Future
How much more is out there? New Directions will publish The Skating Rink in August 2009 and plans
to follow with four more novels, an essay collection, and even more short storiesmaking Bolao the
unofficial Tupac of publishing.

Inside Higher Ed, December 16, 2009
By Scott McLemee
A Gl adi at or Of Let t er s
Posthumous, he responded to the interviewer: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an
unconquered gladiator. At least thats what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.
Bolaos reputation in English, almost entirely posthumous, has involved one victory after another. His
unfinished novel 2666 (a sprawling work that moves from a cloistered group of literary scholars to a
hellish landscape of torture, rape, dismemberment, and death) received this years National Book Critics
Circle award for fiction. And The Last Interview, while slender, amounts to an ardent love-letter to
literature that will reward more than one reading. With the Modern Language Association meeting later
this month, it might give bleary convention-goers a little inspiration.
I ask for creativity from literary criticism, says Bolao, creativity at all levels. The critic should be
capable of arguing a reading, of proposing diverse readings, thus creating something completely
different from what criticism tends to be, which is like an exegesis or a diatribe. He cites as an
exemplary figure Harold Bloom: I am generally in disagreement with him and even enraged by him, but
I like to read him. Or [George] Steiner. The French have a very long tradition of very creative critics and
essayists who are very good, who illuminate not just one work but a whole era of literature, sometimes
committing grave mistakes, but us narrators and writers also commit errors.
67

The volume opens with an essay by Marcela Valdes, now a Nieman Fellow in Arts and Culture
J ournalism at Harvard University. Among my Bolaophile friends and colleagues, Valdes is by far the
most ardent and informed. We recently exchanged e-mail about the authors work and posthumous career.
A transcript of the exchange follows.
Q: In these interviews, it seems Bolaos favorite way to praise a writer is to call his or her work
enormous. It doesnt mean that any given book is bulky or the oeuvre necessarily large, but that the
authors work possesses some vastness of inner space. Enormous is a good word for Bolaos own
output, on all fronts. He seems like a writer who believes in masterpieces and is not afraid to try to create
one. Where does this faith (and the will to act on it) come from?
A: I dont know that Bolao had much faith in the idea of masterpieces. What I find more striking is his
fascination with courage in the face of failure. His novels, stories, and interviews are filled with portrayals
of and allusions to crushed poets, slaughtered bank robbers, outcast detectives. All of which fit perfectly,
of course, with his romantic, noir aesthetic. Certainly, one can easily read The Savage Detectives as a
paean to young people who destroy themselves by devoting their lives to an ideal of Art.
And perhaps such a belief in brave failure is exactly what a writer needs to produce masterpieces.
Because what else could reliably sustain an intelligent, older man undertaking ambitious works that he
knows he might never live to complete? (Remember, Bolao was diagnosed with a chronic liver ailment
in 1992, long before hed published any of his major works.) In such a case, it might be better to cherish,
as Bolao did, the idea of the gladiator who fights to the brutal end, rather than the hero whos bedecked
with praise and laurels. Especially, if you come from a part of the world where the people who do get
laurels are often morally corrupt.
Yet this fight is worthy only if it tests a writers courage and aims at magnificent ends. This may be why
enormous works garner so much of Bolaos praise. As you rightly point out, the term has nothing to
do with the books actual length. What matters is the vastness of the project, and the daring needed to
undertake it. Incidentally, in his nonfiction essays, Bolao also praises the works he loves as black
holes -- talk about vastness of inner space!
Q: There is some grumbling about American Bolao-mania these days. One charge is that it masks a
profound indifference to the rest of the worlds literature; one non-anglophone writer will catch on every
so often, but thats it. Another complaint is that the Bolao myth (sex, drugs, death in his prime) has
overshadowed appreciation of his work, as such. What do you think of those accusations?
A: I assume that youre referring not just to cocktail party or conference chatter but also to Sarah
Pollacks article, Latin America Translated (Again). Pollack does a terrific job with the history of the
translation of Latin American works in the U.S., and I agree with her assertion that Americans practice a
kind of cultural essentialism when it comes to the region. My problem is with her apparent expectation
that the landscape for Spanish-language in the United States could ever be as broad and diverse as it is in
Spain or Latin America.
She cites for example, the fact that Oprah Winfreys book club has chosen only 3 Spanish-language books
(out of 66). To her, this appears to be an rotten statistic, but I think that 4.5 percent is actually pretty good.
Especially when you consider that Spanish is only one of many languages in which great works of
literature are being written and when you remember that Oprah draws an audience that is interested,
above all, in self improvement, not literature.
And the fact that American publishers have used Bolaos life story to sell his books? Is this really a
mortal sin? The book industry is in such terrible shape these days that publishers are trying everything to
sell books. Why is the deployment of an authors life story so much worse than setting up a fan group on
Facebook? The important thing is that Bolao was not chosen for translation and promotion in the United
States because of his life story but rather because of the quality of his work and the acclaim he had
already received in Spain and Latin America.
Do you know how Bolaos fiction came to be translated in the United States? It wasnt because someone
wanted to capitalize on the Bolao myth. It happened because the novelist Francisco Goldman told
68

Barbara Epler of New Directions that Bolaos work was not to be missed, and not long afterwards she
heard from another American editor that a galley of Chris Andrewss translation of By Night In Chile was
lying around neglected at his publishing house.
So she tracked down a copy of it from Harvill Press in England, fell in love with it, and convinced them
to sell her the rights to publish most of his works in the U.S. Epler is a champion reader and shes done
the same with dozens of important authors. Some of them have gone on to gain cult audiences in the U.S.;
others havent.
So, as a journalist, my view is both more pragmatic and more cynical. I dont think that Americans have a
basic indifference to world literature. I think they have a basic indifference to literature, period. And
thats not so different from what Ive witnessed among people in Chile, Mexico, or Spain. Serious readers
-- the kind of people who prefer reading a book like2666 to the kind of pabulum thats generated to be
consumed primarily on airplanes -- have always been few on the ground. And I dont see that changing
anytime soon. To the extent that it does, it may change precisely because publishers and critics get better
at luring general audiences to the hard stuff through narrative and persuasion, in hopes that theyll get
addicted to the special highs that only great literature can provide. What encourages me most is when
someone who fell in love with Bolaos books asks me, What should I read next?
Q: This collection of interviews with Bolao is slender, but dense with references to the authors he loved.
(Or, on occasion, despised.) What do you find most striking about Bolaos taste as a reader?
A: The thing that I like most about Bolao as a reader is his passion. He rarely expressed lukewarm
sentiments about any writer and, unlike so many contemporary authors, he seemed entirely unconcerned
with whether his opinions would offend. That latter attitude, in particular, is refreshing, and aligns Bolao
more with professional critics than with most authors who dabble in literary commentary. I like, for
example, when he tells Mnica Maristain that hes not upset that the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit was
angry with him after he published the scathing essay El pasillo sin salida aparente. Diamela doesnt
hurt me, he says, Other things hurt me. Perhaps thats one of the advantages of being so cognizant of
your own impending death: lesser concerns are stripped away. Though, we know that not everyone whos
seriously ill reacts like this Eltit, by the way, is a terrific author worth checking out, and I think that
Bolao himself emerges as a problematic figure in that notorious essay.
As for Bolaos taste itself -- hes not that radical. Most of the Latin American authors he champions are
well known to the regions serious readers: Borges, Rulfo, Ocampo, Cortzar, Bioy Caceres, J avier
Maras, Daniel Sada, Carmen Bullosa, Sergio Pitol, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, etc. And most of the other authors
he mentions as favorites are also renowned: Kafka, Breton, J arry, Philip K. Dick, Pascal.
Still, there are a few notable patterns to his choices. First, with the exception of a few particular books, he
prefers the precursors to the Boom to the Boom writers themselves. Second, he keeps up with
contemporary literature and is generous with praise for young writers. Third, he is a champion of gay
writers and of smart women writers who are often overlooked here in the U.S, like Pedro Lemebel and
Belen Gopegui. Fourth, and most obvious, he loves comic and detective fiction. Fifth, and most
important, he is hugely concerned with literary forms. As he tells Carmen Bullosa in one of the books
interviews, he believes that plot finds a writer by chance, while form is a choice made through
intelligence, cunning, and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. All the
authors he praises are cunning in this literary way.
Q: Youve written about Bolaos critical prose. Do you know if well be getting Bolao the essayist and
reviewer in English anytime soon?
A: I believe that New Directions will be bringing out Between Parentheses (Entre parntesis) Bolaos
posthumous collection of nonfiction, sometime in 2011. Ive heard its being translated by Natasha
Wimmer, who did a terrific job with both The Savage Detectives and 2666, neither of them easy projects.
For the serious reader of Bolaos work, Between Parentheses is a must. The style varies quite a bit since
its a grab bag of speeches, essays, and columns plus his most controversial story Beach (La Playa).
Some of the essays are quite personal and nostalgic, like the one where he recalls the books he stole as a
69

teenager in Mexico. Most of the columns are lightly conversational. The speeches tend to begin angry and
combative, and then ease into something more thoughtfully provocative.
Bolao was a strange combination of a fierce ironist, a technical virtuoso, and a hopeless romantic; the
result is an engaging, complex perspective and voice that that I cant easily find a parallel for among
English-language critics. (Though it is, of course, the exact same combination as Bolaos favorite writer,
Borges.) In the piece I wrote about the collection for The Nation, I said he was like a T.S. Eliot or a
Virginia Woolf. What I was referring to is not so much his style or opinions but rather his omnivorous
reading, his position as a tastemaker (or at least as an articulator of certain shared tastes), and his belief in
the value of intelligent criticism as a sister to literature itself.
Of course, it matters what kind of criticism one does. Bolao is too absolutist to be a great critic like
Edmund Wilson -- a professional critic, I think, needs to be able to see shades of gray -- but his writing
about books is lively, informed, and committed. And Between Parenthesis allows you to spend time with
the analytical half of his mind.

Overland Literary Journal (OVERLAND 199), winter 2010
ISBN 978-0-9805346-6-5
published 31 May 2010
The Event f ul ness of Rober t o Bol ao
Andrew McCann on the writer of globalisation
Seven years after his death, it is possible, without much risk of exaggeration, to talk about a Roberto
Bolao industry. The writers estate is represented by Andrew Wylie, New Yorks most influential agent,
the market breathlessly awaits a spate of posthumous publications, and The Savage Detectives and 2666
have attained a status that lets us talk about Bolao in the same breath as J oyce, Kafka and Borges. Amid
the clamour, even a sceptical reader cant avoid concluding that Bolaos work has revived a sense of the
novel as an urgent cultural form, at a time when readers of English-language fiction might have been
forgiven for thinking that the genre had ceased to matter much. It is difficult to underscore just how
eventful all of this has been. The novel is first and foremost a form of entertainment, a leisure activity
that has little tangible relationship to what goes on in other aspects of our lives. We might be moved,
outraged or excited by a particular work of fiction, but it barely seems possible to imagine a novel that
could change the way we envision the world or the way we live in it. What we have lost, and what
Bolaos work seems to have rediscovered, is the sense that literary texts can shape, rather then merely
reflect, the consciousness of the culture in which they circulate.
In 2666, posthumously published in 2004 and translated into English in 2008, this process is as politically
profound as it is unsettling. This massive novel universally hailed as an event in its own right is
global in orientation. Its settings include London, Paris, Madrid, New York, Detroit, Berlin, Moscow and
Mexico City, and its organisation into five loosely related sections is in keeping with this lack of a single
national orientation or geographical focus. And yet, at the centre of the novel, like a vortex or a black hole
that pulls everything else towards it, is the border between Mexico and the United States, and a thinly
fictionalised version of the largest city on it, Ciudad J urez in the state of Chihuahua. Between the 1965
inception of Mexicos Border Industrialisation Program and the 1994 ratification of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, J urez became a major industrial centre and a key destination for migrant labour.
Since 1993 it has also been the site of unprecedented levels of serial killing, predominantly of young
working-class women and young women of colour, many of whom were, as Alicia Schmidt Camacho
puts it, recent migrants to the border city from urban and rural communities in Mexicos
interior.
1
Critics and activists use the term feminicidio (or femicidio), instead of a word like homicide,
to describe these crimes. If homicide implies something that can be understood and accommodated by a
purely judicial process, the term feminicidio insists that the killings need to be discussed in terms of a
broader set of causes beyond the particular motives and pathologies of individual killers. Like the word
genocide, it insists that the violence is systemic, not random. For Schmidt Camacho, the
70

denationalised character of the border zone is central to an understanding of the violence that occurs
there. Rapid industrialisation, market deregulation, abusive labour practices, social dislocation, and a
corresponding disintegration of civic space and authority have contributed to a situation in which national
sovereignty and attendant rights are being displaced. They are being replaced by both licit and illicit
forms of cross-border traffic: export-driven manufacturing, the drug trade, prostitution, sex tourism and
people smuggling, all of which prey upon a population of disposable people with tenuous access to legal
protection and security. The murder and violation of vulnerable working-class women, Schmidt Camacho
argues, is an extreme consequence of global economies turning these women into commodities.
The first part of 2666 gives little of this away. It focuses on four European academics who move between
various centres of learning and higher education as part of a German literature conference circuit and who
develop a shared obsession with a reclusive German novelist. When they hear that the writer has headed
to the Mexican side of the MexicanUS border, they leave the privilege of the Western European
metropolis for Mexico City and then Santa Teresa (a fictionalised version of J urez). In Santa Teresa, the
Europeans begin to confront their redundancy in the face of a malevolence that is as impalpable as it is
overwhelming. On the approach to Santa Teresa the city looks like an enormous camp of gypsies or
refugees ready to pick up and move at the slightest prompting.
2
A drive around the city seems to take the
Europeans to a parallel place where they couldnt make their presence felt (p. 112), a place that would
have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican
US border (p. 114).
Bolao evokes the socio-economic divisions of the city in a way that juxtaposes visions of a superficial,
middle-class affluence to the overwhelmingly degraded ambience of industrial waste spaces. Against
unpaved streets, houses made out of scrap, giant garbage dumps, and neighbourhoods that had grown
up lame or mutilated or blind (p. 129), the signifiers of an aspirational society drifting over the border
(shopping centres, tourist hotels and the tinsel trappings of the US) seem either hollow or permeated by
violence. Always in the background are the silhouettes of industrial warehouses and the horizon of
themaquiladoras (p. 129) that mark the border zone as a space shaped by transnational capitalism. The
apocalyptic connotations here are dramatically highlighted when reality seemed to tear like paper
scenery to reveal a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel maybe, was tending hundreds of
barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings (p. 135). For the European literary intellectual, the
industrial city is a vision of the end of time, yet one that offers no hope of redemption.
This view is one the novel goes on to qualify, yet without ever obviating Santa Teresas apocalyptic
character. In the third section of the novel, Bolao contextualises the city of slums and maquiladoras in
term of broader histories of oppression that define the Americas. In this part of the novel we follow the
Harlem-based, African-American journalist Quincey Williams (aka Oscar Fate) as he interviews an ex-
Black Panther turned cookbook author (a fictionalised Bobby Seale) in Detroit, and then travels to Santa
Teresa to cover a light-heavyweight bout. Once there he gets the idea of writing an expos on the city: A
sketch of the industrial landscape in the Third World (p. 294), as he puts it. This trajectory, out of the
ruins of industrial America and the dispersed remnants of a defeated Left to the border zone, enables
Bolao to construct analogies between capitalisms historically different subject populations without
losing a sense of the specificity of each. These analogies emerge through references to Hugh Thomas
bookThe Slave Trade, which Fate reads en route to Mexico. Moving from this text within the text to the
overarching narrative frame of the section, from the Atlantic slave trade to the non-spaces of the
American south-west, we get a sense of the underlying violence that defines capitalist time and space.
When Fate ends up in a diner on the American side of the border, a famous criminologist expounds upon
the forms of violence and criminality that remain historically illegible. Why were the victims of the slave
trade or of the Paris Commune largely ignored in a society that could celebrate the victim of a single,
sensationalised act of homicide? The ones killed in the Commune werent part of society, the dark-
skinned people who died on the ship werent part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French
provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be
written, you might say, it was legible. Shortly afterwards, the criminologist, commenting on the crimes
in Santa Teresa, makes the contemporary relevance of this diatribe clear: everyone living in that city is
outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the Christians in the Roman circus (p. 267).
71

The idea of a population, caught on one side of a border, banished from society and thus subject to a
lethal violence exercised with apparent impunity, raises one of the novels most pressing questions: under
what circumstances, and through what structures of victimisation and neglect, does a population become
disposable or killable?
In his wide-ranging discussion of contemporary necropolitics the subjugation of life to the power of
death
3
Achille Mbembe explores this question primarily in terms of the history and legacy of
colonialism. While his account of the necropolitical clearly owes much to Giorgio Agambens work on
bare life (the life that can be killed with impunity), he also develops it in relationship to African states that
can no longer claim a monopoly on violence and the means of coercion within their territories, have
ceded that conventional form of sovereignty to a range of organisations and forces Mbembe calls them
war machines that have emerged out of the postcolonial states failure to build the economic
underpinnings of political authority and order. These war machines, he goes onto say, often have direct
connections with transnational networks.
4
The result is territories in which populations can be treated as
an expendable source of labour (military, industrial or sexual), a situation tantamount to slavery, which
for Mbembe is the original form of necropolitics: the slave, kept alive but in a state of injury, is treated
as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production.
5

J urez has become a site of necropolitical violence in the way that Mbembe suggests. As Melissa Wright
argues, young women enter the border zone as industrial labourers under the assumption of their
disposability. With a regular turnover in the factory labour force essential to the efficiency of
themaquiladora, the female factory worker is treated as a permanently unskilled entity whose efficiency
declines as an inevitable result of the tension between her physical, sexual and emotional needs and the
time-work discipline of the factory. This situation generates, and is legitimised by, what Wright calls the
myth of disposability in which the Mexican woman personifies waste-in-the-making, as the material of
her body gains shape through discourses that explain how she is untrainable, unskilled, and always a
temporary worker.
6
Where the disposability of the female worker is taken for granted by industry and
government, the actual murder, rape and mutilation of women seems to literalise a logic integral to the
industrial practices of the border zone.
7
Highlighting J urezs longstanding role as a sex tourism
destination for North Americans, Schmidt Camacho extends Wrights argument to draw a wide range of
connections between local prostitution, global sex traffic and human smuggling:
The dual economy of the sex trade and the maquiladoras produced a popular discourse that
conflates womens sale of their labour with the sale of their bodies for sex The moral
discourse linking obrerasand prostitutes both masks the states interest in sexualising female
labour and legitimates subaltern womens exclusion from the protected sphere of citizenship.
8

While the subject of cosmopolitanism mobile, affluent and at home with possessive individualism,
autonomous culture and the market might be enabled by the cultural and commercial consequences of
transnationalism, it is clear that the liberalisation of labour markets along the MexicanUS border has also
helped to create a population of disposable people whose lives are being systematically devalued and
constantly threatened.
This disposable population and the forces that threaten it haunt Bolaos novel. Even when 2666 is
focused on cosmopolitan intellectuals and tends to read a bit like a campus thriller, it is permeated by a
sense of menace. Something immense and unrepresentable is always looming on its margins.
The long fourth section of the novel, The Part about the Crimes, brings the reader face to face with this
malevolence. This section explores the violence of Santa Teresa. As the novel immerses itself in the
necropolitical space of the border zone, it clearly shifts from narrative frames premised on conventional
notions of character and event to an apocalyptic register that overwhelms the familiar conventions of
fiction. As Bolao obsessively recounts the murders of young Mexican women, character and plot seem
virtually redundant. Over hundreds of pages the text conveys schematic forensic accounts of crime scenes
including repetitive details of sexual violation and mutilation without offering any narrative
framework capable of containing or making sense of the violence. J udicial process and police procedure,
like the conventions of the detective fiction they inform, are impotent and meaningless. All of the
characters who appear in this section policemen, private investigators, criminologists, corrupt officials,
72

journalists, lawyers, drug lords, gang members, prison inmates seem adrift in a world that is as sadistic
as it is formless. The effect is disorienting, and it clearly partakes of a sort of anti-aesthetic impulse that
interrupts the scene of reading itself, creating a disquiet at its centre that makes all notions of literature as
a refuge, as a source of solace or as a mode of entertainment impossible to maintain. In a novel that
otherwise focuses on the lives of academics and writers, and their tenuous attempts to make meaning out
of the chaos of history, J urez embodies a reality against which Western fantasies of literary form
disintegrate into the stuff of nightmares.
But this is only one side of the story that Bolaos fiction presents. If his work explores the ways in which
literature falters before the abyss of history, it also offers literature itself as a way of forming alternative,
resistant modes of social being. The textual origin of 2666s otherwise cryptic title gives us a sense of
how this works. In Bolaos novel Amulet, which expands upon one of the sections of his earlier
novel The Savage Detectives, the narrator Auxilio Lacouture describes the Avenida Guerrero in Mexico
City as more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery
in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the
dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting
everything else.
9
What makes sense of this image is the novels focus on state violence. That Mexico
City is constantly presented as a site of impending catastrophe, a city about to be swallowed by dust
clouds or to be reduced to ruins, is intimately bound up with the events of 1968 (the military occupation
of the UNAM campus and the subsequent Tlatelolco massacre) and more remotely of 1973 (the Pinochet
coup in Chile). Both dates concentrate a broader sense of catastrophe, but Amulet is really a lament for the
lives and hopes lost to the specific historical processes they mark.
From this perspective, the year 2666 is the point at which the utopian potential of Amulet a potential that
hinges on the friendships forged in the literary underground of Mexico City around the two pivotal dates
of the novel is irrevocably lost to the horror of history. While Bolao continually evokes a bohemian
world of poets and exiles in order to register its loss in circumstances of violence and alienation, it is just
as clear that a degree of dislocation is also integral to its initial creation. This paradox creates one of the
central tensions to emerge from his work: while the denationalised subject is always a potential victim, it
also opens up the possibility of a network that, while not necessarily directly political, at least offers a
counterpoint to the violence of history. What we find here is something like Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negris notion of the multitude, which they describe as the living alternative that grows within
empire.
10
It is hard not to read Bolaos evocation of informal, subcultural literary publics in these terms
when, in the largely autobiographical piece Dance Card, he seems to do so himself: I think of the poets
who died under torture, who died of AIDS, or overdosed, all those who believed in a Latin American
paradise and died in a Latin American hell. I think of their works, which may, perhaps, show the Left a
way out of the pit of shame and futility.
11

The temporality of the communal impulse in Bolaos work is always ambiguous: it is at once already
lost and thus an object of melancholic longing, and yet it is still somehow immanent to the processes that
have destroyed it, as if it is waiting to be born again. The eventfulness of Bolaos work has a lot to do
with this tempestuous phantom, this spectre stalking the dislocated, denationalised experience of global
capitalism. Reading his prose, it is hard not to be gripped by the possibility that literature itself might be
the resting place of these ambiguous revenants: the space where the victims of globalisation are
remembered and from which new modes of affiliation and consciousness indebted to them might be
imagined.

1
Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Womens Rights in
Ciudad J urez, Mexico, Centennial Review, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, p. 259.
2
Roberto Bolao, 2666, Natasha Wimmer (trans.), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008, p. 111. Hereafter
cited parenthetically.
3
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Libby Meintjes (trans.), Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, p. 39.
4
ibid., p. 33.
73

5
ibid., pp. 212.
6
Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 73.
7
ibid., p. 87.
8
Schmidt Camacho, op. cit., pp. 2656.
9
Bolao, Amulet, Chris Andrews (trans.), New Directions, New York, 2007, p. 86.
10
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War And Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, New York,
2004, p. xiii.
11
Bolao, Last Evenings of Earth, Chris Andrews (trans.), New Directions, New York, 2006, p. 218.
Andrew McCann is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He is the
author of, most recently, Subtopia (2005).
Andrew McCann
Overland 199-winter 2010, pp. 7479

Harpers Magazine, December 2008
Mor e i s mor e: Rober t o Bol aos magnum opus
By Francine Prose
2666, by Roberto Bolao. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 898 pages. $30.
Almost halfway through Roberto Bolaos novel 2666,a seventy-year-old seer and healer named Florita
Almada appears on a local TV talk show. Local, in this case, means Sonora, a state that includes the city
Bolao calls Santa Teresa, which is based on Ciudad J ureza bleak, industrial desert hellhole on the
Mexican side of the border, where over the past fifteen years hundreds of women (many of them factory
workers in the maquiladoras) have been raped and killed, as they are in Bolaos book. By the time
Florita makes her television debut, Bolao has described, in clinical detail, the discovery of dozens of
corpses, but no one in any official capacity has been much concerned; the police have been busy trying to
catch a madman known as the Penitent, whose illness compels him to desecrate churches.
The litany of dead women and girls (many of the victims are very young) has exerted an intensifying
pressure on the reader. Why isnt anyone saying or doing anything about the killings? That pressure will
erupt through Florita at the end of a scene that goes on for ten dense (there are no paragraph breaks)
pageswritten in the third person but clearly in Floritas voicea passage that seems musical in its
flights of melody, its swells and dips and crescendos, like a great operatic aria, but more free-form and
improvisational, more like a brilliant jazz solo.
Florita begins by describing the nature and limitations of her gift (sometimes she didnt see anything, the
picture was fuzzy, the sound faulty, as if the antenna that had sprung up in her brain wasnt installed right
or had been shot full of holes or was made of aluminum foil and blew every which way in the wind) and
goes on to dispense some basic nutritional advice (a tortilla with chile is better for you than pork rinds
that are actually dog or cat or rat). Next she lists the various schools of herbalism, or botanomancy,
including those that promote the use of hallucinogens (Everyone was free to mess with their own heads.
It worked well for some people and not for others, especially lazy youths with regrettable habits). She
provides a brisk autobiography, an account of how she cared for her blind mother, and later her blind
husband, a dealer in livestock whose habit of bringing books home turned Florita into a voracious reader
and autodidact. Next comes a meditation on the childhood of Benito J urez and the inner lives of
shepherds, then an explanation of the circumstances that have brought Florita to follow a ventriloquist
from Guaymas on An Hour with Reinaldo.
74

Then she glanced at Reinaldo, who was fidgeting in his chair, and began to talk about her
latest vision. She said she had seen dead women and dead girls. As she talked, trying to
recall her vision as exactly as possible, she realized she was about to go into a trance and she
was mortified, since sometimes, not often, her trances could be violent and end with the
medium crawling on the ground, which she didnt want to happen since it was her first time
on television. But the trance, the possession, was progressing, she felt it in her chest and in
the blood coursing through her, and there was no way to stop it no matter how much she
fought and sweated and smiled at Reinaldo, who asked her if she felt all right, Florita, if she
wanted the assistants to bring her a glass of water, if the glare and the spotlights and the heat
were bothering her.
Even while she struggles against it, Floritas vision takes shape:
Its Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. Theyre killing my
daughters! My daughters! My daughters! she screamed as she threw an imaginary shawl over
her head and Reinaldo felt a shiver descend his spine like an elevator, or maybe rise, or both
at once. The police do nothing, she said after a few seconds, in a different voice, deeper and
more masculine but what are they watching? Then, in a little girls voice, she said: some
are driven away in black cars, but they kill them anywhere. Then she said, in a normal voice:
cant they at least leave the virgins in peace? A moment later, she leaped from her chair,
perfectly captured by the cameras of Sonoras TV Studio 1, and dropped to the floor as if
felled by a bullet. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist hurried to her aid, but when they tried to
help her up, each taking an arm, Florita roared dont touch me, you cold-hearted bastards!
Dont worry about me! Havent you understood what Ive said? Then she got up, turned
toward the audience, went to Reinaldo and asked him what had happened, and a moment later
she apologized, gazing straight at the camera.
It was at this point in my reading of 2666 that I began importuning nearly everyone I knowclose
friends, fellow writers, family members, casual acquaintancesto put down whatever they were reading
or writing and to start Roberto Bolaos novel. Immediately. My messianic enthusiasm was altruistic, in a
wayI wanted others to enjoy the book as much as I didbut also somewhat self-interested, because to
read2666 is to enter into a world that resembles our own but that exists only between the covers of a
novel; its much like the experience of reading Moby Dick or David Copperfield or In Search of Lost
Time. One cant help wanting company in those alternate worlds, and I wanted to ask someone about a
subplot in the first of the novels five sections, The Part About the Critics, an interpolated story about a
painter who cuts his hand off as the ultimate work of art and winds up in a mental hospital, where he is
visited by several of the sections principal characters. Or the parallel insane-asylum story in the second
section, The Part about Amalfitano, a sequence in which the estranged wife of the protagonist (a
depressed Chilean academic stranded in northern Mexico) becomes infatuated with a poet with whom she
has had semi-public sex at a party in Barcelona, a poet who winds up in a loony bin, where his doctor
turns out to be writing the poets biography. And what about the passage near the start of the third section
(The Part About Fate) in which yet another protagonistin this case, Oscar Fate, an African-American
journalist writing muzzy human-interest features for a New Yorkbased magazine named Black Dawn
attends a lecture by a character named Barry Seaman, who is obviously modeled on the former Black
Panther Bobby Seale? Like the larger novel, the lecture (which spans ten pages) is divided into five
sections, the third of which, FOOD, begins, As you all know, porkchops saved my life, and segues
from a capsule history of the Panthers to Seamans absurd conversations with his parole officer to a
reflection on various Chinese Communist politicians, then back to the aforementioned porkchopsand
finally to a recipe for duck lorange.
Although what would I have asked the obliging friends who would (or so I hoped) read quickly to the
point that I had reached in the novel? I suppose I wanted to ask: Whats up with those glorious passages,
and what are they doing in the book? Its a question with no answer, really. They are stations along the
circuitous route on which Bolao has chosen to take us to Santa Teresa. Perhaps I just wanted
confirmation of my own sense of the uniqueness, the inventiveness, the strangeness of what Bolao is
doing. Which is what, exactly?
75

Four hundred pages in, I thought I was beginning to have some idea of what the book was about, though
later I realized how little Id known. The five books get steadily more engrossing as they comment and
reflect on, refract, deepen, and complete one another, five sections so unalike that they suggest different
genres, all converging on the dead women lying half-buried or simply tossed aside in the nightmare
moonscape of Santa Teresa. On my second reading of 2666, I was surprised to notice how often buzzards
and vultures are mentioned, because after Id finished the book the first time, it had occurred to me (out of
nowhere, or so I had thought) that the shape of the narrative is like the flight of some carrion-eating bird
with a wingspan so enormous that to see it take off and soar seems miraculous. Bolaos terrifying and
gorgeous vulture of a novel keeps landing in Santa Teresabut the wider arc of its flight (which includes
Nazi Germany) reminds you that evil touches down in one country this time, next year in another place.
The erratic but relentless flight plan of human evil from one era and continent to the next is, as much as
anything, the subject of 2666.
Apparently, Bolaowho was dying of liver failure while he wrote 2666wanted this, his last novel, to
be published as five separate books, in the hopes that his heirs might make more money that way. But the
sections are clearly parts of a single volume that is 900 pages long and far denser than that number
suggests, crammed with events, plots, subplots, dreams, visionary lyricism, stories within stories, pages of
compressed, rapid-fire dialogue, switches of pace and tone from academic comedy to something
suggestive of a classic film noir, of David Lynchs Blue Velvet, of newspaper reports, police
procedurals, A Touch of Evil, all of which culminate in an apocalyptic vision of a war-ravaged Europe
thats part history, part Thomas Pynchon, part Stanley Kubrick, but mostly Roberto Bolao. Unless one
reads the book slowly, and with a high degree of concentration, its easy to miss some of its most
virtuosic turnssuch as this moment, buried in a long scene during which Harry Magaa, an Arizona
sheriff, is having dinner with Ramrez, a Mexican cop; the fact that Harry is a widower has been
mentioned so far only in passing:
Then Ramrez talked about women. Women with their legs spread. Spread wide. What do you
see when a woman spreads her legs? What do you see? For Christs sake, this wasnt dinner
conversation. A goddamn hole. A goddamn hole. A goddamn gash, like the crack in the
earths crust theyve got in California, the San Bernardino fault, I think its called. Then
came a long story about children. Have you ever listened carefully to a child cry, Harry? No,
he said. I dont have children. True, said Ramrez, forgive me, Im sorry. Why is he
apologizing? wondered Harry. A decent woman, a good woman. A woman you treat badly,
without meaning to. Out of habit. We become blind (or at least partly blind) out of habit,
Harry, until suddenly, when theres no turning back, the woman falls ill in our arms. A
woman who took care of everyone, except herself, and she begins to fade away in our arms.
And even then we dont realize, said Ramrez. Did I tell him my story? wondered Harry
Magaa. Have I sunk that low?
Luckier in death than in his peripatetic and often penurious life, Roberto Bolao has had the rare good
fortune to find not one but two brilliant translators into English, first Chris Andrews, whose rendering of
the stories and short novels is eloquent and fierce, and now Natasha Wimmer, who gracefully follows the
books switchback turns in diction even as she accommodates the specialized vocabularies of every
diverse historical and cultural subject that Bolao packs into this novel, the consummation of his lifes
work.

The first time I picked up 2666, I had to read its opening fifty pages twice to sort out the characters in a
plot that, summarized, sounds like the first line of the sort of joke to which the novel slyly refers: An
Italian, a Frenchman, and an Englishman are in a plane with only two parachutes. In 2666, that joke
(which the principals could hardly take more seriously) involves four academics: a Frenchman, an Italian,
a Spaniard, and an Englishwoman. All four share a passion for a cult novelist, a reclusive German named
Benno von Archimboldi; this collective devotion helps tie them into knots of romantic and sexual
entanglement. The section struck me as gripping, hilarious, and peculiar, but several times, trying to
persuade friends to read 2666, I found myself telling them not to give up if they didnt like the first part,
because the opening is quite different from the rest of the book. I understood why a reader might falter in
76

the midst of the initial section, which (in its charting of a quixotic literary quest) most resembles Bolaos
earlier work The Savage Detectives, whose plot turns spun me out of the novel so often that I lost the
energy to work my way back in. Although I am a huge fan of Bolaos short stories and short novels, The
Savage Detectives seemed to me to suffer from a sort of attention deficit disorder, contagious to the
reader.
By contrast, the opening of 2666 had me in its thrall from those first few pages. Even as the academics are
having sex and screwing with one anothers heads in book-filled apartments and at the sort of hotels that
house participants at international German-literature colloquiums, a thrum of disorder and violence is
rumbling just beneath the surface. Theres a horrifying incident involving a Pakistani cabdriver in
London, a scene in which Bolao reminds usas he so often doesthat you cant predict what any of us
will do once the punching and kicking begin. But only when I read the last section (The Part About
Archimboldi) did I realize how inextricably the opening chapters are connected to the remainder of the
novel. 2666 begins in one version of Europe, the home of Old World high culture, which we leave for the
New World, with its slave trade, its political, sexual, and drug violence, its legacy of colonialism, and its
ongoing economic exploitation. Then we head east again for another perspective on the Old World, in
case we need reminding that horror and mass murder are not restricted to the Sonoran desert.
For a novel that begins in the most hypercivilized of venues, the academic conference,2666 may set some
kind of record for sheer carnage. Although the last section is set mostly in Europe during World War II,
the book is more disturbing than a war novel, since at least some of the soldiers at Waterloo, Austerlitz,
the Polish front, and in Vietnam are conscious combatants, unlike the dead women of Santa Teresa.
Besides, those wars are historic events, in contrast to the murders of the women, which go on for a very
long time before anyone much notices or cares.

Among the unusual achievements of 2666 is its ability to make the reader feel as if the novel is being
acted out, cinematically, on two screens at once. On one screen is the latest discovery of a raped and
mangled woman, and on the other is the rest of the world, which doesnt want to see whats happening in
Sonora.
Ive mentioned the experience of reading Melville, Proust, and Dickenstheir long novels, it should be
pointed out, a form that Bolao mentions in a passage that has been cited as key to understanding his
intentions in writing 2666. Amalfitano is reflecting on an acquaintance, an avid reader
who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The
Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple
Heart over Bouvard and Pcuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The
Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists
are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the
unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the
same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real
combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies
us all, that something that cows and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
The Savage Detectives is similarly full of this sort of thing: half-serious, half-ironic flights in which a
literary fellow makes a case for a certain kind of literatureusually the kind he writes. But apart from
extending a pointless invitation to consider why someone might want to read Bartleby the Scrivener when
he could read Moby Dick,or, for that matter, 2666, Bolao is onto somethingsomething about capacity
and weight. In those great torrential novels, room and heft are necessary for the steady accumulation of
events and characters that connect to other events and characters and together form those parallel fictional
worlds.
In a series of notes on 2666, Natasha Wimmer compares Barry Seamans lecture to the sermon in Moby
Dick. The two novels share the same encyclopedic impulse, a drive to include everything that can be
known about a subject as proof that nothing can ultimately be known about that subject, if that subject
happens to be the mystery of evil. In Moby Dick, Melville offers his readers a full course in cetology
77

containing all the available scientific knowledge about the whale, and we wind up understanding no more
than Ahab does about the object of his obsession. 2666 likewise provides us with an encyclopedia on the
subject of the dead women of Santa Teresa, most of whose murders will remain unsolved.
By the time we reach the fourth and longest section of the novel, The Part About the Crimes, weve
followed the literary critics to Sonora, where theyve alighted briefly, like butterflies, before flying on, in
search of their literary idol. They have introduced us to the academic Amalfitano, marooned in Santa
Teresa with his daughter, Rosa, whose story carries over into that of Oscar Fate, who in the third section
comes to Santa Teresa to cover a prize fight and who learns about the murders but is unable to interest his
editor in an article about the killings.
The fourth section begins at what will be the first of many crime scenes:
The girls body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonial Las Flores. She was dressed in a white
long-sleeved T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big. Some children playing in
the lot found her and told their parents. One of the mothers called the police, who showed up
half an hour later. The lot was bordered by Calle Pelez and Calle Hermanos Chacn, and it
ended in a ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy in ruins. There was no
one around, which at first made the policemen think it was a joke. Nevertheless, they pulled
up on Calle Pelez and one of them made his way into the lot. Soon he came across two
women with their heads covered, kneeling in the weeds, praying. Seen from a distance, the
women looked old, but they werent. Before them lay the body. Without interrupting, the
policeman went back the way hed come and motioned to his partner, who was waiting for
him in the car, smoking. Then the two of them returned (the one whod waited in the car had
his gun in his hand) to the place where the women were kneeling and they stood there beside
them staring at the body. The policeman with the gun asked whether they knew her. No, sir,
said one of the women. Weve never seen her before. She isnt from around here, poor thing.
This happened in 1993. J anuary 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But its
likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gmez Saldaa and
she was thirteen. Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the first to be killed in 1993,
she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women who died in 1992. Other girls and
women who didnt make it onto the list or were never found, who were buried in unmarked graves in the
desert or whose ashes were scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them
knew where he was, what place he had come to.
Describing the aftermath of the murders, Bolao manages to combine the stripped-down, just-the-facts
style of an autopsy report with the more compassionate sensibility of a tragic neighborhood story. It is a
credit to Natasha Wimmer that her translation succeeds in helping the reader follow these subtle but all-
important tonal shifts. In its precision about street names, location, time, the victims outfit, the order of
events surrounding the grim discovery, and the initial impressions of the policemen, the passage above
mimics the statement that one of the cops might have written. That is, until we get to the women praying
over the body, like mourners in a religious painting, and to their phrase poor thing, an expression of
compassion that effectively turns the mangled corpse back into the body of a person with a name and an
age. The sake of convenience, the first to be killed, she heads the listsuch phrases warn and
remind us that the list will grow. And then we reach that final sentence and its reference to the ashes of
the women being scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them knew
where he was, what place he had come toand the language steps up to something more poetic, an
evocation of a shadowy killer, lost in the dead of nightsomething that would never appear in the official
report.
The killings continue, and Bolao gives us every detail about each victimher name, her age, her history,
her job, her domestic situation, what she was wearing, and how she was found. Knowing that very few
readers (and not necessarily the kind of readers a writer might want) will stay with a book for several
hundred pages of gory crime scenes and wrenching victim bios, Bolao weaves these sections together
with a number of suspenseful plotsa police detectives love affair with the director of an insane asylum,
a boy who is recruited from the countryside to work as a bodyguard for a drug lords wife, Harry
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Magaas ill-fated trip south of the border after an American woman has been killedto keep us reading.
Some of the murders are solveda few of the women have been killed by their husbands, or pimps, or
boyfriendsbut most are not, though throughout there is the suggestion that, as in life, the killings have
something to do with the collusion between the narcos and the police, as well as the more generalized
cruelty and corruption of the maquiladora system, which attracts young women from all over Central
America to work, for almost nothing, in the factories. In addition, there is the hint, floated early on, that
Benno von Archimboldithe critics darlingmight have some connection to the murders. Suspects are
arrested and detained, confessions are extorted, and the killings go on, as they have in reality.

All of which brings us back to Florita Almadas appearance on An Hour with Reinaldoand to the
possibility that its Floritarather than the obsessed literary critics or the academic Amalfitano, with his
convictions about the blood and mortal wounds and stench of great fictionwho functions as the true
stand-in for the novels author. Surely its no accident that her television debut is preceded by the
performance of a ventriloquist, or that Florita herself gives voice to an urgent and impassioned vision of
the dead of Santa Teresa. Every artist has felt, at times, like some equivalent of a ventriloquists puppet,
speaking words or creating images that seem to come from a source outside the self. And Floritas
progression from the general to the specific, from autobiography to history to science to meditation, from
the literal to the metaphysical, is a compressed version of what Bolao does in 2666.
For there are some novels that make you feel as if a powerful force has moved through the writer, as if the
artist has become the vehicle for the words of an exalted ventriloquist or has indeed been possessed by
something, a narrative or a theme, larger than himself. For all the precision and poetry of its language, for
all the complexity of its structure, for all the range of styles and genres it acknowledges and encompasses,
for all its wicked humor, its inventiveness and sophistication, 2666seems like the work of a literary genius
in the ferocious grip of a spirit not unlike the one that seizes Florita Almada. Dying, aware that his time
was short, Roberto Bolao gave himself over to the most important of subjects, to the eternal and
ineradicable evil that hasfor the momentalighted on the Mexican border, to the desire to insist that
the blameless murdered women of Ciudad J urez were once individual living beings with names and
faces and souls, and to our human need, our obligation, to cry out, as Florita does: Havent you
understood what Ive said?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5464942.ece
The Many Deat hs Of Rober t o Bol ao
Michael Saler
Times Literary Supplement, 7 J an 2009
Roberto Bolao once said that he would rather have been a detective than a writer not a humdrum
gumshoe but an avenging angel, someone able to return alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not
be afraid of ghosts. Like Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe, he was a disillusioned romantic with a
passion for exposing evil and fortifying hope. It is true that Bolao would have scoffed at the notion that
he was untarnished or unafraid, but he admired courage, and often displayed it in a short life spent largely
in the mean streets of Latin America and Europe. He viewed art as a forensic tool, using it to transfix and
then transfigure the void he detected at the heart of existence. As a young Chilean poet in the 1970s, he
challenged dictators, death squads and writers whom he claimed were fellow travelers or simply frauds.
Defeat and loss were ever-present realities for him; he had memories of friends murdered by the Pinochet
regime, and was for some time aware of his own imminent demise (he died of liver disease at the age of
fifty in 2003). He confronted these and other horrors with a youthful insouciance tempered by hard-won
wisdom. One of the poems collected in The Romantic Dogs is set in a hospital, and Laura Healys
idiomatic translation renders Bolaos strategy for survival: But experience is a hoax. / In the hospital
Im accompanied only by / My deliberate immaturity / And splendors glimpsed on another planet / Or in
another life. The young detectives who wage existential battles in his spare, colloquial poems are rarely
79

given the opportunity to mature. Despite their best efforts to keep their eyes open / In the middle of the
dream, they end up lost, frozen and crushed.
Perhaps they would have had better luck solving the mysteries spurred by the English translation of his
epic novel 2666 (which was published in Spain in 2005 and reviewed in the TLS of September 9 that
year). There was an outburst of what The Economist called Bolaomania when the book appeared in
the United States last November: eager buyers queued outside bookshops, and the American press
lavished more attention on this deceased writer and his translated novel than they normally accord to
living authors who write in English.
But this mystery is relatively simple to solve even Bolaos ill-starred detectives could crack it. The
English translation of 2666 was eagerly awaited by readers and critics who had been impressed by
Bolaos previous autobiographical novel The Savage Detectives, which had been masterfully translated
by Natasha Wimmer in 2007. The authors exuberant, informal voice echoed that of several American
classics; while he cited Huckleberry Finn as an inspiration, the book clearly bore the imprint of On the
Road and The Catcher in the Rye. In addition, many of his themes resonated with the puritan and
romantic impulses of the American literary tradition. Bolaos world is open to self-invention and
redemption, but also pervaded by ineradicable evil. It is bracingly egalitarian in its range of cultural
references: The Savage Detectives borrows from the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon as well as
from Mark Twain; 2666 references both Herman Melville and David Lynch; figures in his poems include
Anacreon, J uan Ramn J imnez, Sam Peckinpah and Godzilla. Readers of all tastes could thus feel at
ease with this disquieting writer, and many sought his other translated works. In some of them, he planted
tantalizing references to the year 2666. In Amulet (1999), the apocalyptic date is associated with death
and willed amnesia when it is invoked to describe a deserted Mexico City street of the early 1970s. It was
like
a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn
child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular
thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
And at the end of The Savage Detectives, a poet, in refusing to forget crimes, actually anticipates them,
sketching menacing visions of a factory from sometime around 2600. Two thousand six hundred and
something. (2666s most horrifying crimes occur in a factory city.) To the newly Bolao-besotted, it
seemed likely that the earlier works were fragments of a larger whole, with 2666 as its capstone. After all,
Bolao himself declared the book to be his masterpiece and knew it to be his final testament: its narrator
insists that The words of the diseased . . . carry more weight than those of the healthy . . . . Then, too, the
diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. (Bolao-mania
may owe something to his appeal as the J ames Dean of literature, living fast, dying young, and leaving a
beautiful corpus.)
The ominous title raises a second mystery, for the book is not literally about the future, let alone the year
2666. In this remarkable and challenging work Bolao intends the distant J udgement Day to evoke an
apocalypse now. While the novels events span the globe and cover the past century, the plot converges
on the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the Mexican metropolis of Santa Teresa since the
early 1990s. Bolao based his fictional locale and scenario on Ciudad J urez in northern Mexico, where
over 400 women, many of them migrant factory workers, have been murdered or have disappeared. Few
of these cases have been closed: the victims are mainly those marginalized by globalization, the likely
perpetrators those able to exploit it, including drug lords and corrupt officials. For Bolao, the city
represents a microcosm of contemporary ills. As a character in the novel muses, No one pays attention to
these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
If a partial answer to the second mystery what is 2666 about? concerns the problem of evil, Bolao
adds to the topics complexity by structuring the novel around five distinct parts that seem only
tangentially related. Certainly 2666 revels in lifes ambiguities. Behind every indisputable answer lies an
even more complex question, reflects a pivotal character. Complexity, however, makes him laugh.
(Natasha Wimmer once again smoothly conveys Bolaos polyphonic approach and his humour.) But as
in his previous works, Bolao embeds clues that help decipher the works underlying structure and central
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theme. One of these is a geometry book that turns out to be made up of three books, each independent,
but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole. The five parts of 2666 work in similar fashion;
while each operates autonomously, they contain common references and issues that become clearer as the
novel unfolds. Another clue emerges when a character is inspired to hang the textbook on a clothesline to
see what happens when abstract theory collides with messy reality, art with the chaos of existence. This
conflict is a fundamental theme in Bolaos work. Can individuals confront evil, from the banal to the
malignant, without retreating into comforting illusion or nihilistic collusion?
Even as the novel exudes the improvisatory nature of lived experience, Bolao eases the reader towards
the void represented by the murders in Santa Teresa. Quirky, vibrantly etched characters undergo crises
that resonate with the darkness at the heart of the novel. In Part One, four European literary critics three
men and a woman come together to search for a mysteriously reclusive writer, Benno von Archimboldi.
Their quest takes them to Santa Teresa, where he was last seen, but his importance fades, as the men find
themselves competing for the affections of their female colleague. The petty displays of machismo and
misogyny among the suitors foreshadow the horrors to come. In Santa Teresa, they meet another
Archimboldian, Professor Amalfitano, whose gradual nervous breakdown is the focus of Part Two. An
exile from Chile, Amalfitano feels unmoored in the formless city, is terrified of losing his daughter to the
growing toll of murders, and worries about his own desires. He tries to find stability in the tidy systems of
mathematics and philosophy, but without success. His inability to confront directly and act on his fears
the wrong orientation by Bolaos moral compass results in his daughters becoming ensnared with the
drug traffickers who might be involved with the killings. This is the focus of Part Three, narrated from the
perspective of an African-American journalist who comes to her aid, and written as a tribute to the noir
novelists whom Bolao loved. Part Four, the longest section, is devoted to the serial killings themselves.
Many are described with such appalling precision that it is difficult not to become desensitized; this is
perhaps the authors way of making even the reader feel complicit in the crimes.
Following these harrowing passages, Bolao concludes with the life story of the mythic author
Archimboldi and his fateful arrival in Santa Teresa. Here the many related strands of the earlier parts fall
into place. Archimboldi, who had nearly been swallowed by the abyss during the Second World War,
emerges with the courage to challenge it. Bolao indicated that there was a hidden center to 2666;
readers will undoubtedly find many possible candidates in its 900 pages. It is significant, however, that
Archimboldi discovers his own centre in a young Russian poet and political martyr, Boris Ansky. Like
the figure in Bolaos hospital poem who lives in deliberate immaturity, we discover that Ansky lived
his whole life in rabid immaturity because the revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature. He
insists that reality could be pure desire, a desire that in time not only supplants reality but is imposed
upon it. His elders dismiss this as naive; one says that over her lifetime she has seen too much to believe
it. Ansky responds that belief is irrelevant: it has to do with understanding, and then changing. This was
Bolaos stubborn credo as well. Perhaps, he reflects in the poem The Donkey,
That is the unrestrained longing of our ignorance,
But that is also our hope
And our courage.
Michael Saler is the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 1999. The Re-Enchantment of the
World: Secular magic in a rational age, co-edited with J oshua Landy, is forthcoming.

81

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/2/the_caracas_speech
The Car ac as Speec h
by Roberto Bolao, translated by David Noriega
The first complete English translation of the Chilean novelists 1999 speech accepting the
Rmulo Gallegos Prize.
In 1999, four years before his death, Chilean novelist Roberto Bolao won the highly prestigious Rmulo
Gallegos prize for his novel The Savage Detectives. The Caracas Speech is his acceptance of that prize.
Rmulo Gallegos (18841969) was a prominent Venezuelan novelist and politician. The prize bearing his
name has been awarded by the Venezuelan government since 1964 and honors the author of the years best
novel written in Spanish.
Doa Brbara, Cantaclaro, Canaima, and Pobre Negro are all novels by Gallegos. Carlos Fuentess Terra
Nostra and Mario Vargas Llosas La Casa Verde are previous recipients of the prize. The Florid Wars of
precolonial Mesoamerica were conflicts organized for the express purpose of capturing prisoners for ritual
sacrifice.
Ive always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a
minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal and geographic
nature. It is also probably due to a sort of undiagnosed dyslexia. I dont mean to say by this that my
mother never took me to the doctor; on the contrary, until the age of ten I was an assiduous visitor to
doctors offices and even hospitals, but from that point on my mother decided I was strong enough to
handle anything.

But let us return to the problem. When I was little, I played soccer. My number was 11, the number of
Pepe and Zagalo in the World Cup in Sweden, and I was an enthusiastic player but a pretty bad one,
though my left leg was my good leg and supposedly lefties never lose steam during a match. In my case,
this wasnt true: I almost always lost steam, though every once in a while, say once every six months, I
would play a good match and recover at least a part of the enormous credit lost. At night, as is natural,
before going to sleep, I would run circles in my head around my pitiful condition as a soccer player. It
was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my
right hand. That was a fact. I would have liked to write with my left hand, but I did it with my right. And
that, right there, was the problem. For instance, when the coach would say, Pass it to the guy on your
right, Bolao, I wouldnt know where to pass the ball. And sometimes, even, playing along the left flank,
hearing my coach shout himself hoarse, I would have to stop and think: leftright. Right was the soccer
field, left was kicking it out of bounds, out toward the few spectators, children like me, or toward the
miserable pastures that surrounded the soccer fields of Quilpue, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bo-Bo.
With time, of course, I learned to have a reference every time I was asked or informed about a street that
was on the right or the left, and that reference was not the hand with which I wrote but the foot with
which I kicked the ball.

And with Venezuela I had, more or less around the same timemeaning until yesterdaya similar
problem. The problem was its capital. For me, the most logical thing was for the capital of Venezuela to
be Bogot. And the capital of Colombia, Caracas. Why? Well, by a verbal logic, or a logic of letters.
The v inVenezuela is similar, not to say related, to the b in Bogot. And the c in Colombia is first cousin
to the c in Caracas. This seems insubstantial, and it probably is, but for me it constituted a problem of the
first order when, on a certain occasion, in Mexico, during a conference about the urban poets of
Colombia, I showed up to talk about the potency of the poets of Caracas, and the peoplepeople just as
kind and educated as yourselvesremained silent, waiting for me to move beyond the digression about
the poets from Caracas and start talking about the ones from Bogot, but what I did was keep talking
about the ones from Caracas, about their aesthetic of destruction. I even compared them to the Italian
Futuristsdifferences notwithstanding, of courseand to the first Lettrists, the group founded by Isidore
82

Isou and Maurice Lematre, the group out of which the germ of Guy Debords Situationism would be
born, and the people at this point began to conjecture. I think they must have thought that the poets from
Bogot had made a mass migration to Caracas, or that the poets from Caracas had played a defining role
in the new group of poets from Bogot, and when I finished the talk, abruptly, as I liked to finish any talk
those days, the people stood up, applauded timidly, and ran off to consult the poster at the entrance. And
as I was leaving, accompanied by the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, who always went around with me
and who had surely noticed my mistake, though he didnt say anything, because for Mario mistakes and
errors and equivocations are like Baudelaires clouds drifting across the sky, that is to say something to
look at but never to correcton our way out, as I was saying, we ran into an old Venezuelan poet (and
when I say old, I remember the moment and realize that the Venezuelan poet was probably younger
than I am now), who told us with tears in his eyes that there must have been some kind of mistake, that he
had never heard a single word about these mysterious poets from Caracas.

At this point in the speech, I get the feeling that don Rmulo Gallegos must be turning over in his grave.
But to whom have they given my prize? he must be thinking. Forgive me, don Rmulo. Its just that
even doa Brbara, with a b, sounds likeVenezuela and Bogot, and Bolivar, also, sounds
likeVenezuela and doa Brbara. Bolivar and Brbara, what a good couple they would have made,
although don Rmulos other two great novels, Cantaclaro and Canaima, could perfectly well be
Colombian novels, which leads me to thinking that maybe they are, and that beneath my dyslexia there
might perhaps be a method, a bastard semiotic method or a graphological or metasyntactic or phonemic or
simply poetic method, and that the truth of truths is that Caracas is the capital of Colombia, just like
Bogot is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolivar, who is Venezuelan, dies in Colombia,
which is also Venezuela and Mexico and Chile.

I dont know if you can see where Im trying to get here. Pobre Negro, for instance, by don Rmulo, is an
eminently Peruvian novel. La Casa Verde, by Vargas Llosa, is a Colombo-Venezuelan novel. Terra
Nostra, by Fuentes, is an Argentinean
novel, though I warn you not to ask me what Im basing that affirmation on, because the answer would be
prolix and boring. The pataphysical academy teaches (and mysteriously, too) the science of imaginary
solutions, which, as you all know, is that which studies the laws that regulate exceptions. And this shock
in the order of letters is, in a sense, an imaginary problem that requires an imaginary solution.

But lets return to don Rmulo before we get into J arry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have
just won the eleventh Rmulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt.
This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldnt
tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogot, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to
once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular ngeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rmulo
Gallegos Prize. What would don Rmulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere
Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that
there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rmulo used to live.
According to Gimferrer (although he wouldnt put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great
Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.
The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was
talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts;
for instance, if don Rmulo, during his stay in Barcelonaand I say stay and not exile because a
Latin American is never exiled in Spainhad worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install
itself in the novelists house) As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking
about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the
Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and
suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I
walked a little further, and there was the plaque. Thats what I saw, in my mind.

But its also probable that during the years that I lived in Barcelona, I passed by that street and saw the
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plaque, a plaque that possibly says, Here lived Rmulo Gallegos, novelist and politician, born in Caracas
in 1884, died in Caracas in 1969, and then other things, in smaller letters, like his books, accolades, etc.
And its possible that I would have thought, without stopping, of another famous Colombian writer,
though I could have only thought this without stopping, I insist, because by that point I had read don
Rmulo as required reading in school in either Chile or Mexico, I cant remember which, and I
liked Doa Brbara, though, according to Gimferrer, Canaima is better, and of course I knew that don
Rmulo was Venezuelan and not Colombian. Which truly signifies very little, being Colombian or being
Venezuelan, and at this point we return, as if bounced back by lightning, to the b in Bolivar, who was not
dyslexic and who wouldnt have much minded a united Latin
America, a preference I share with the Liberator, as its all the same to me if people say Im Chilean, even
though some Chilean colleagues prefer to see me as Mexican, or if they call me Mexican, though some
Mexican colleagues prefer to call me Spanish, or even disappeared in combat. And in fact its all the same
to me if Im considered a Spaniard, even if some Spanish colleagues hit the ceiling and start proclaiming
Im from Venezuela, born in Caracas or in Bogot, which doesnt bother me much, quite the contrary, in
fact.

Whats true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I
must abandon J arry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is
his tongue. I dont remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a
writer who wrote in English or French. A writers homeland, he said, is his tongue. It sounds a little
demagogic, but I agree with him completely, and I know that sometimes there is no recourse left us but to
get a little demagogic, just like sometimes there is no recourse left us but to dance a bolero under the light
of streetlamps or a red moon. Although its also true that a writers homeland is not his tongue, or not
only his tongue, but also the people he loves. And sometimes a writers homeland is not the people he
loves but his memory. And other times a writers only homeland is his loyalty, and his courage. In truth, a
writers homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on
whatever he is writing at the moment. The homelands can be many, it occurs to me now, but the passport
can only be one, and that passport is evidently the quality of his writing. Which does not mean writing
well, because anyone can do that, but writing marvelously well, and not even that, because anyone can
write marvelously well, too.
What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick ones head into the
dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run
along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the
smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it
may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an
Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.

And now that I have returned, finally, to the number 11, which is the number of those who run along the
flanks, and now that I have mentioned danger, I recall that page of the Quijote where the merits of arms
and letters are discussed, and I suppose that, in the end, what is being discussed is the difference in the
level of danger, which also means the level of virtue, entailed in each occupation. And Cervantes, who
was a soldier, has arms win out over letters, has the soldier win out over the honorable occupation of the
poet. And if we read these pages well (something that now, as I write this speech, I am not doing, even
though from the table at which I sit I can see my two editions of the Quijote), we will sense in them a
strong aroma of melancholy, because Cervantes is having his own youth triumph, the ghost of his lost
youth, before the reality of his exercise of prose and poetry, which until then had been so adverse. And
this comes to my mind because to a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a
letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 50s and who chose at a given
moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say militancy) and gave the
little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to be
the most generous of the worlds causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasnt.

Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of
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propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged
victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our
generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we
not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we
were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And
now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and
those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didnt kill there they killed later in
Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten
youths. And this is what moves Cervantes to choose arms over letters. His companions, too, were dead.
Or old and abandoned, in misery and neglect. To choose was to choose youth, to choose the defeated and
those who had nothing left. And that is what Cervantes does, he chooses youth. And even in this
melancholy weakness, in this crack in his soul, Cervantes is the most lucid, for he knows that writers
dont need anyone to praise their occupation. We praise it ourselves.
Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a
general rule we tend to clap and dance when were alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite
our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we dont need for anyone to tell
us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations.
Cervantes, who wasnt dyslexic but who was left crippled by the exercise of arms, knew perfectly well
what he was saying. Literature is a dangerous occupation.

Which takes us directly to Alfred J arry, who had a gun and liked to shoot, and to the number 11, the
leftmost extreme, which looks out of the corner of its eye as it passes like a bullet by the plaque and the
house where don Rmulo lived. And I hope that at this point in the speech don Rmulo is not so angry
with me, that he wont appear to Domingo Miliani in dreams asking why they gave me the prize that
bears his name, a prize that for me is hugely importantI am the first Chilean to obtain ita prize that
doubles the challenge, as if that were possible, as if the challenge by its very nature, by its own virtues,
werent already doubled or tripled. A prize, by this reasoning, would seem a gratuitous act, and now that I
think about it, since this is all true, a prize does have something of the gratuitous in it. It is a gratuitous act
that does not speak to my novel or its merits but to the generosity of a jury. (Until yesterday, I did not
know any of its members.) Let this be clear, because like Cervantess veterans of Lepanto and like the
veterans of the Latin-American Florid Wars, my only wealth is my dignity. I read this and I dont believe
it. Me, talking about dignity. Its possible that the spirit of don Rmulo wont appear in dreams to
Domingo Miliani but to me.

These words are written now, in Caracas (Venezuela), and one thing is clear: Don Rmulo cant appear to
me in dreams for the simple reason that I cant sleep. Outside, the crickets are chirping. I calculate, very
roughly, that there are some ten or twenty thousand of them. Perhaps don Rmulos voice is in one of
their songs, confused, joyfully confused, in the Venezuelan night, in the American night, in the night that
belongs to all of us, to those who sleep and to those of us who cant.

I feel like Pinocchio.

http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Translating-Bolanyo
Tr ansl at i ng Sex
Natasha Wimmers tranlsations of Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives and 2666 have both
featured on the New York Timess Ten Best Books of the Year lists. She spoke to Ollie Brock about
the eerie but oddly touching world of Bolaos prose, as well as the unique atmosphere of his sex
scenes.
OB: Bolaos work is full of indifference and black humour, perhaps most of all when it comes to sex.
The Redhead, the extract from Antwerp printed in Granta110: Sex, in which a girl periodically visits a
narcotics cop to have sex with him, is no exception. One line reads, Purple-tinted scene: before she pulls
85

down her tights, she tells him about her day How much did you have to get absorbed in the
atmosphere of the book, and how did you achieve that?
NW: If you mean did I have to dim the lights and put on Barry White, I hate to disappoint you. I wont
say that the mood of a scene doesnt affect me, but Im not the translating equivalent of a Method actor.
And luckily, I dont think that Bolaos fiction even the sex scenes requires the translators own
fiction. As you say, his work is full of indifference and black humour, which means that there is a sense
of remove even when hes at his most graphic. And that layer of coolness is what makes his sex scenes at
once unromantic and curiously realistic and touching. Its also what makes it possible for me to translate
them more or less convincingly or so I hope. I had a much harder time with the Cuban writer Pedro J uan
Gutirrez, another novelist with a penchant for descriptions of unconventional sex, because his tone is
less controlled and more hedonistic, which frankly is a bit alien to me (I am the daughter of a Methodist
minister, after all).
Ive always assumed you would need a lot of empathy as a translator. Or perhaps its more purely
technical than that just a matter of understanding the words and putting them through the grinder? I
know that you spent some time in Mexico City when working on The Savage Detectives, Bolaos debut
novel in what way did this affect your interpretation of the book?
I think you do need empathy, but I resist the familiar notion that the translator somehow becomes the
author, or has some sort of special telepathic relationship with the author. Frankly, I think thats a bit
presumptuous and grandiose, and it obscures the delicate process by which the translator adjusts his or her
own voice to the authors voice. It requires a kind of harmonizing, by which I mean that the translator
must find a tone in her own register that somehow suits the authors. It is easier, at least for me, to
translate an author or a character for whom I have a natural affinity.
As for Mexico City, the time I spent there completely transformed my understanding of the book. The
Savage Detectives is a love song to Mexico City, and to walk the same streets that Bolao and his
characters walked gave me a very intimate, visceral sense of the city and the novel. Theres something
about Mexico City at night, in particular, thats distinctive. For one thing, its darker than most other
cities I know, which means that things seem to loom out at you as you walk, and you have the sense that
youre on the verge of the kind of bizarre encounter that Bolaos characters have all the time. I also spent
time at Caf La Habana (the original of Caf Quito in the novel), which hasnt changed much since
Bolao hung out there, and I stumbled over all kinds of cultural details that saved me from translation
pitfalls (El Santo??? for example, was one of the notes scribbled on my first draft of the translation; he
is, of course, Mexicos most famous masked wrestler, as I soon discovered).
Your translations can be quite lyrical, swinging with syntax youve preserved from the original but
somehow achieving great readability in English. Im interested in how you arrive at this could you give
us a sample sentence of the Spanish, and show us earlier and later versions, if thats how you work?
Im glad you think I make the translation read naturally in English while preserving some of the original
Spanish syntax, as thats something I strive for though its not always possible. Like many writers in
Spanish, Bolao has a high tolerance for what we would call run-on sentences. I cant always retain them
in English, but its easier when theyre clearly delivered in the voice of a particular character, because the
English reader is more willing to accept run-ons in the form of speech. In the example from Antwerp that
I cite below, the voice is that of a cop having sex with a nameless girl:
Meti los dedos hasta el fondo, la chica gimi y alz la grupa, sinti que sus yemas palpaban
algo que instantneamente nombr con la palabra estalagmita.
He pushed his fingers all the way in, the girl moaned and raised her haunches, he felt the tips of his
fingers brush something to which he instantly gave the name stalagmite.
I dont keep early drafts of translations, but do I remember some of the decisions I made. The word that
gave me most trouble was grupa, which literally means a horses hindquarters. I wanted to preserve the
farmyard connotations, which give the sentence an extra jolt of dirtiness. Another possibility might have
been rump, but theres something more suggestive and sexual about haunches. The rest was fairly
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straightforward, once the decision had been made (at the start of this short chapter) to respect the often
ungainly length of the sentences. Reading it over now, it occurs to me that the effect is almost of
breathlessness, or panting, which is certainly appropriate in the context.
Indeed a performative solution. And youve shown again here Bolaos trademark mix of bathos and
black comedy. His must be a strange mind to try and understand. If you could have met Bolao, what
single thing would you have asked him?
Thats a hard one. There are so many little things Id like to ask him: what did you mean here, what did
this word mean in Mexico City in 1970, how should this sentence read? Many times I had to make
decisions based on context and consultation and ultimately my own best guess, and there are all kinds of
minor questions that Id love to see decisively answered. But if I only had one question to ask, I suppose
it should be a big one, and Im not sure what that might be. In a way, I feel as if his books themselves are
the answer to any serious question I might ask, and Im not sure that theres anything he could (or would)
tell me that isnt revealed in the work he left behind.
Read Natasha Wimmers translations of Rodrigo Fresns essays, Notes Toward the Memoirs of a Book
Thief and Borges and Me, and Me.

The Millions:
The Bol ao Myt h And The Bac k l ash Cyc l e
Here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man who promises that this will be the last drink of
his life. Horacio Castellanos Moya
I.
If youve been tooling around the cross-referential world of Anglo-American literary blogs this fall,
chances are youve come across an essay from the Argentine paper La Naion called Bolao Inc. Back
in September,Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading linked to the original Spanish.
When Guernica published an English translation this month, we mentioned it here. The
Guardian followed suit (running what amounted to a 500-word paraphrase). Soon enough, Edmond
Caldwell had conscripted it into his ongoing insurgency against the critic J ames Wood. Meanwhile, the
literary blog of Woods employer, The New Yorker, had posted an excerpt under the title: Bolao
Backlash?
The basic premise of Bolao Inc. that Roberto Bolao, the late Chilean author of the novels The
Savage Detectives and 2666, has become a kind of mythological figure hovering over the North American
literary landscape was as noteworthy as it was unobjectionable. One had only to read reports
of overflow crowds of galley-toting twentysomethings at the2666 release party in New Yorks East
Village to see that the Bolao phenomenon had taken on extraliterary dimensions. Indeed, Esposito had
already pretty thoroughly plumbed the implications of the Bolao Myth in a nuanced essay called The
Dream of Our Youth. But when that essay appeared a year ago in the online journal Hermano Cerdo, it
failed to go viral.
So why the attention to Bolao Inc.? For one thing, there was the presumable authority of its author,
Horacio Castellanos Moya. As a friend of Bolaos and as a fellow Latin American novelist (one we
have covered admiringly), Castellanos Moya has first-hand knowledge of the man and his milieu. For
another, there was the matter of temperament. A quick glance at titles the wistful The Dream of Our
Youth, the acerbic Bolao Inc. was sufficient to measure the distance between the two essays. In the
latter, as in his excellent novel Senselessness, Castellanos Moya adopted a lively, pugnacious persona,
and, from the title onward, Bolao Inc. was framed as an exercise in brass-tacks analysis. Roberto
Bolao is being sold in the U.S. as the next Gabriel Garca Marquez, ran the text beneath the byline,
a darker, wilder, decidedly un-magical paragon of Latin American literature. But his former
friend and fellow novelist, Horacio Castellanos Moya, isnt buying it.
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Beneath Castellanos Moyas signature bellicosity, however, beats the heart of a disappointed romantic (a
quality he shares with Bolao), and so, notwithstanding its contrarian ambition, Bolao Inc. paints the
marketing of Bolao in a pallette of reassuring black-and-white, and trots out a couple of familiar villains:
on the one hand, the U.S. cultural establishment; on the other, the prejudiced, paternalistic, and
gullible American readers who are its pawns.
As Esposito and Castellanos Moya argue, the Bolao Myth in its most vulgar form represents a reduction
of, and a distraction from, the Bolao oeuvre; in theory, an attempt to reckon with it should lead to a
richer understanding of the novels. In practice, however, Castellanos Moyas hobbyhorses lead him badly
astray. Following the scholar Sarah Pollack, (whose article in a recent issue of the journal Comparative
Literature is the point of departure for Bolao Inc.), he takes the presence of a Bolao Myth as
evidence for a number of conclusions it will not support: about its origin; about the power of publishers;
and about the way North Americans view their neighbors to the South.
These points might be so local as to not be worth arguing certainly not at length were it not for a
couple of their consequences. The first is that Castellanos Moya and Pollack badly mischaracterize what I
believe is the appeal of The Savage Detectives for the U.S. reader and in so doing, inadvertently miss
the nature of Bolaos achievement. The second is that the narrative of Bolao Inc. seems as tailor-
made to manufacture media consent as the Bolao Myth it diagnoses. (Bolao was sooo 2007, drawls
the hipster who haunts my nightmares.) Like Castellanos Moya, I had sworn I wasnt going to write about
Bolao again, at least not so soon. But for what it can tell us about the half-life of the work of art in the
cultural marketplace, and about Bolaos peculiar relationship to that marketplace, I think its worth
responding to Bolao Inc. in detail.
II.
The salients of the Bolao Myth will be familiar to anyone whos read translator Natasha Wimmers
introduction to the paperback edition of The Savage Detectives. Or Siddhartha Debs long reviews in
Harpers and The Times Literary Supplement. Or Benjamin Kunkels in The London Review of Books,
orFrancisco Goldmans in The New York Review of Books, or Daniel Zalewskis in The New
Yorker (or mine here at The Millions), or any number of New York Times pieces. Castellanos Moya offers
this helpful prcis:
his tumultuous youth: his decision to drop out of high school and become a poet; his
terrestrial odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was jailed during the coup detat; the
formation of the failed infrarealist movement with the poet Mario Santiago; his itinerant
existence in Europe; his eventual jobs as a camp watchman and dishwasher; a presumed drug
addiction; and his premature death.
Alongside the biographical Bolao Myth, according to Castellanos Moya and Pollack, runs a literary one
that Bolao has replaced Garca Mrquez as the representative of Latin American literature in the
imagination of the North American reader.
Relative to the heavy emphasis on the biography, mentions of Garca Mrquez are less common in North
American responses to The Savage Detectives. But one can feel, broadly, the way that familiarity with
Bolao now signifies, for the U.S. reader, a cosmopolitan intimacy with Latin American literature, as, for
a quarter century, familiarity with Garca Mrquez did. And this must be irritating for a Latin American
exile like Castellanos Moya, as if every German one spoke to in Berlin were to say, Ah, yesthe
English languagewell, you know, Ive recently been reading E. Annie Proulx. (Perhaps Proulx isnt
even the right analogue. How large does Bolao loom in the Spanish-speaking world, anyway, assuming
such a world (singular) exists? Im told Chileans prefer Alberto Fuguet, and my friend in Barcelona had
never heard of him until he became famous over here.)
One can imagine, also, the frustration a Bolao intimate might have felt upon reading, in large-circulation
publications, that the author nursed a heroin addictionwhen, to judge by the available evidence, he
didnt. As weve written here [http://www.themillions.com/2008/11/was-bolano-junkie_1905.html], the meme of
Bolao-as-junkie seems to have originated in the Wimmer essay, on the basis of a misreading of a short
story. That this salacious detail made its way so quickly into so many other publications speaks to its
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attraction for the U.S. reader: it distills the subversive undercurrents of the Bolao Myth into a single
detail, and so joins it to a variety of preexisting narratives (about art and madness; about burning out vs.
fading away). Several publications went so far as to draw a connection between drug use and the authors
death, at age 50, from liver disease. This amounted, as Bolaos widow wrote to The New York Times, to
a kind of slander.
And so Bolao Inc. offers us two important corrections to the historical record. First, Castellanos Moya
insists, Bolao, by his forties, was a dedicated and sober family man. It is likely that this stability,
rather than the self-destructiveness we find so glamorous in our artists, facilitated the writing of Bolaos
major works. Secondly, Castellanos Moya reminds us of the difficulty of slotting this particular writer
into any storyline or school. What is certain, writes Castellanos Moya, is that Bolao was always a
non-conformist; he was never a subversive or a revolutionary wrapped up in political movements, nor was
he even a writer maudit. This is as much as to say, Bolao was a writer solitary, iconoclastic, and, in
his daily habits, a little boring.
III.
Bolao Inc. starts to fall apart, however, when Castellanos Moya dates the origins of the Bolao Myth
to the publication of The Savage Detectives. In 2005, editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux acquired the hotly
contested rights to The Savage Detectives, reportedly for somewhere in the mid six figures on the high
end for a work of translation by an author largely unknown in the U.S. The posthumous appeal of
Bolaos personal story no doubt helped the sale along.
FSGs subsequent marketing campaign for the novel would emphasize specific elements of the authors
biography. The profiles, a former editor at another publishing house observed, essentially wrote
themselves. Among the campaigns elements were the online publication of what would become
Wimmers introduction to the paperback edition. The hardcover jacket photo was a portrait of a scraggly
Bolao circa 1975. Castellanos Moya takes this as proof positive of a top-down crafting of the Bolao
myth (though Lorin Stein, a senior editor at FSG, told me, I stuck that picture . . . on the book because it
was my favorite and because it was in the period of the novel).
As it would with 2666, FSG printed up unusually attractive galley editions, and carpet-bombed reviewers,
writers, and even editors at other houses with a copy, basically signaling to the media that this was their
important book of the year, my editor friend suggested. When the book achieved sales figures
unprecedented for a work of postmodern literature in translation the standard discourse in publishing . . .
was was that the publisher had made that book. Or, as Castellanos Moya puts it,
in the middle of negotiations for The Savage Detectives appeared, like a bolt from the blue,
the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune, who decided that this excellent novel was the
work chosen to be the next big thing.
But here Castellanos Moya begs the question: why did these particular negotiations entice FSG in the first
place? He treats the fact that the book was excellent almost parenthetically. (And Pollacks article is
almost comical in its rush to bypass what she calls Bolaos creative genius a quality that doesnt lend
itself to the kind of argumentation on which C.V.s are built these days.) Then again, it might be fair to say
that excellence is an afterthought in the marketplace, as well.
Likely more attractive for FSG was the fact that, by 2006, much of the groundwork for the Bolao Myth
had already been laid. Over several years, New Directions, an independent American press, had already
published carefully and tenaciously, Castellanos Moya tells us several of Bolaos shorter works.
New Directions was clearly not oblivious to the fascination exerted by the author himself (to ignore
it would have amounted to publishing malpractice). The jacket bio for By Night In Chile, published in
2003, ran to an unusually detailed 150 words: arrest, imprisonment, death By the following year,
when Distant Star hit bookshelves, the head-shot of a rather gaunt-looking Bolao had been swapped out
for a fantastically moody portrait of the black-clad author in repose, inhaling a cigarette. These
translations, by Chris Andrews, won Best Books of the Year honors from the major papers on both
coasts, and led to excerpts in The New Yorker.
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Nor can the initial development of the Bolao Myth be laid at the feet of New Directions. Lest we forget,
the sensation of The Savage Detectives began in 1999, when the novel won the Rmulo Gallegos prize,
the preeminent prize for Spanish language fiction. Bolaos work in Spanish received glowing reviews
from the TLS, almost all of which included a compressed biography in the opening paragraph.
In fact, the ultimate point of origin for the Bolao myth however distorted it would ultimately become
was Bolao himself. Castellanos Moya avers that his friend would have found it amusing to know they
would call him the J ames Dean, the J im Morrison, or theJ ack Kerouac of Latin American literature, and
Bolao would surely have recoiled from such a caricature. But his fondness for reimagining his life at
epic scale is as distinctive an element in his authorial sensibility as it is in Philip Roths. It is most
pronounced in The Savage Detectives, where he rewrites his own youth with a palpable, and powerful,
yearning. So complete is the identification between Bolao and his fictional alter-ego, Arturo Belano,
that, when writing of a rumored movie version of The Savage Detectives, Castellanos Moya confuses the
former with the latter.
At any rate, Castellanos Moya has the causal arrow backward. By the time FSG scooped up The Savage
Detectives, Bolaos reputation and legend were already in meteoric ascent (as a 2005 New York
Times piece put it) both in the U.S. and abroad. The blurbs for the hardcover edition for The Savage
Detectives were drawn equally from reviews of the New Directions editions and from publications like Le
Monde des Livres,Neuen Zurcher Zeitung, and Le Magazine Littraire catnip not for neo-Beats or
Doors fanatics but for exactly the kinds of people who usually buy literature in translation. And it was
after all a Spaniard, Enrique Vila-Matas, who detected in The Savage Detectives a sign
that the parade of Amazonian roosters was coming to an end: it marked the beginning of the
end of the high priests of the Boom and all their local color.
A cynical reading of Bolao Inc. might see it less as a cri de coeur against the U.S. cultural
establishment than as an outgrowth of sibling rivalry within it. One imagines that the fine people at New
Directions have complicated feelings about a larger publisher capitalizing on the groundwork it laid, and
receiving the lions share of the credit for making The Savage Detectives. (J ust as Latin American
writers might feel slighted by the U.S. intelligentsias enthusiastic adoption of one of their own.) At the
very least, its worth at noting that New Directions, a resourceful and estimable press, in Castellanos
Moyas account and in fact, is also his publisher.
IV.
On second thought, it is a little anachronistic to imagine that either publisher figures much in the larger
U.S. cultural establishment. To be sure, it would be nave to discount the role publishers and the
broader critical ecology play in breaking authors to the public. There are even books, like The Lost
Symbol or Going Rogue, whose bestseller status is, like box-office receipts of blockbusters, pretty much
assured by the time the public sees them. But The Savage Detectives was not one of these. The amount
paid for the book was not exorbitant enough to warrant an all-out Dan Brown-like push, one editor told
me. Books with that price tag bomb all the time. And Lorin Stein noted that The Savage Detectives
surpassed our expectations by a long shot. How many 600-page experimental translated
books make it to the bestseller list? You cant work that sort of thing into a business plan.
Im thinking here of Pter Ndas A Book of Memories an achievement comparable to The Savage
Detectives, and likewise published by FSG, but not one that has become totemic for U.S. readers.
Castellanos Moya might attribute Ndas modest U.S. sales to the absence of a compelling myth. But
we would already have come a fair piece from the godlike landlords of the market, descending from
their home in the sky to anoint next big things. And the sluggish sales this year of J onathan Littells The
Kindly Ones another monumental translation with a six-figure advance and a compelling narrative
attached further suggest that the landlords power over the tenants is erratic, or at least weakening.
Indeed, it is Bolao Inc.s treatment of these tenants i.e. readers that is the most galling element of
its argument. The Savage Detectives, Castellanos Moya insists, offers U.S. readers a vision of Latin
America as a kind of global id, ultimately reaffirming North American pieties
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like the superiority of the protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see
themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbors to the South as
lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent.
As Pollack puts it,
Behind the construction of the Bolao myth was not only a publishers marketing operation
but also a redefinition of Latin American culture and literature that the U.S. cultural
establishment is now selling to the public.
Castellanos Moya and Pollack seem to want simultaneously to treat readers as powerless before the
whims of publishers and to indict them for their colonialist fantasies. (This is the same public that in
other quarters gets dunned for its disinterest in literature in translation, and in literature more broadly.)
Within the parameters of the argument Bolao Inc. lays out, readers cant win.
But the truth is that U.S. readers of The Savage Detectives are less likely to use it as a lens on their
neighbors to the south than as a kind of mirror. From Huckleberry Finn onward, we have been attracted to
stories of recklessness and nonconformity wherever we have found them. When we read The Savage
Detectives, we are not comforted at having sidestepped Arturo Belanos fate. We are Arturo Belano.
Likewise, the Bolao Myth is not a story about Latin American literature. It is a dream of who wed like
to be ourselves. In its lack of regard for the subaltern, this may be no improvement on the charges
Bolao Inc. advances. But the attitude of the U.S. metropole towards the global south in contrast,
perhaps, to that of Lou Dobbs is narcissistic, not paternalistic. Purely in political terms, the distinction is
an important one.
V.
Moreover, Pollacks quietist reading of the novel (at least as Castellanos Moya presents it) condescends to
Bolao himself, and is so radically at variance with the text as to be baffling. The Savage Detectives, she
writes, is a very comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the
superiority of the civilized. Perhaps she means this as an indictment of the ideological mania of
theNorteamericano, who completely misses whats on the page; such an indictment would no doubt be a
very comfortable choice for the readers of Comparative Literature. But to write of the novel as exploring
the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth, as J ames Wood has, is far from reading it as a
celebration of the joys of bourgeois responsibility.
Instead, The Savage Detectives offers a disquieting experience one connected less to geography than to
chronology. Bolao is surely the most pan-national of Latin American writers, and his Mexico City could,
in many respects, be L.A. Its the historical backdrop the 1970s that give the novel its traction with
U.S. readers. (In this way, the jacket photo is an inspired choice.)
The mid-70s, as Bolao presents them, are a time not just of individual aspirations, but of collective
ones. Arturo and Ulises seem genuinely to believe that, confronted with a resistant world, they will
remake it in their own image. Their failure, over subsequent years, to do so, is not a comforting
commentary on the impossibility of change so much as it is a warning about the death of our ability to
imagine progress to, as Frederic J ameson puts it, think the present historically. Compare the openness
of the 70s here to the nightmarish 90s of 2666. Something has been lost, this novel insists. Something
happened back there.
The question of what that something was animates everything in The Savage Detectives, including its
wonderfully shattered form, which leaves a gap precisely where the something should be. And this
aesthetic dimension is the other disquieting experience of reading book or really, it amounts to the same
thing. In the ruthless unity of his conception Bolao discovers a way out of the ruthless unity of
postmodernity, and the aesthetic cul-de-sac it seemed to have led to. Seemingly through sheer willpower,
he became the artist he had imagined himself to be.
VI.
This is the nature of the hype cycle: if the Bolao backlash augured by The New Yorkers Book Bench
materializes, it will not be because readers have revolted against the novel (though there are readers
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whom the book leaves cold) but because they have revolted against a particular narrative being told about
it. And Castellanos Moya, with his impeccable credentials and his tendentious but seductive account of
the experienceThe Savage Detectives offers U.S. readers, provides the perfect cover story for those who
cant be bothered to do the reading. That is, Bolao Inc. offers readers the very same enticements that
the Bolao Myth did: the chance to be Ahead of the Curve, to have an opinion that Says Something
About You. Both myth and backlash pivot on a notion of authenticity that is at once an escape from
commodification and the ultimate commodity. Bolao had it, the myth insists. His fans dont, says
Bolao Inc. But what if this authenticity itself is a construction? From what solid ground can we render
judgment?
For a while now, Ive been thinking out loud about just this question. One reader has accused me of
hostility to the useful idea that taste is as constructed as anything else, and to the hermeneutics of
suspicion more generally. I can see some of this at work in my reaction to Bolao Inc. But the
hermeneutics of suspicion to which Castellanos Moya subscribes should not mistake suspicion for proof
of guilt. Indeed, it should properly extend suspicion to itself.
It may be easier to build our arguments about a work of art on assumptions about the marketplace, but it
seems to me a perverse betrayal of the empirical to ignore the initial kick we get from the art that kicks us
the sighting of a certain yellow across the gallery, before you know its a De Kooning. Yes, youre
already in the gallery, you know youre supposed to be looking at the framed thing on the wall, but damn!
That yellow!
When I revisit my original review of The Savage Detectives a book I bought because I liked the cover
and the first page, and because Id skimmed Debs piece in Harpers I find a reader aware of the star-
making machinery, but innocent of the biographical myth to which he was supposed to be responding.
(You can find me shoehorning it in at the end, in a frenzy of Googling.) Instead, not knowing any better, I
began by trying to capture exactly why, from one writers perspective, the book felt like a punch in the
face. This seems, empirically, like a sounder place to begin thinking about the book than any
preconception that would deny the lingering intensity of the blow. I have to imagine, therefore, that,
whatever their reasons for picking up the book, other readers who loved it were feeling something similar.
Not that any of this is likely to save us from a Bolao backlash. Castellanos Moyas imagining of the
postmodern marketplace as a site with identifiable landlords his conceit that superstructure and base can
still be disentangled has led him to overlook its algorithmic logic of its fashions. The anomalous length
and intensity of Bolaos coronation (echoing, perhaps, the unusual length and intensity of his two larger
novels) and the maddening impossibility of pinning down exactly whats attributable to genius and whats
attributable to marketing have primed us for a comeuppance of equal intensity.
But when the reevaluation of Bolao begins in earnest and again, in some ways it might serve him well
one wants to imagine the author would prefer for it to respond to, and serve, whats actually on the
page. Of course the truth is, he probably wouldnt give a shit either way. About this, the Myth and its
debunkers can agree: Roberto Bolao would probably be too busy writing to care.

Three Percent: The Future Of Latin American Fiction (Part III)
LATI N AMERI CA, A HOLOGRAM
By J orge Volpi
3. Bolao, perturbation
Not since the Boom, or to be precise, since Garca Mrquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude in
1967, had a Latin American writer enjoyed such sudden celebrity as Roberto Bolao: After his success in
Spanishwinning the Herralde and Romulo Gallegos prizes and his conversion into the guru of the new
generationhe received unanimous praise from the French critics, his fame spread to the rest of Europe,
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and, five years after his death, it exploded in the United States, one of the most difficult media for foreign
literature to penetrate. The publication of 2666 in English at the beginning of 2009 became the fifth
moment of the Bolao delirium, and so began the construction of a global icon: thousands of copies sold,
each article and review more praise-filled than the lastincluding in the New York Times, the New York
Review of Books, and the New Yorker, the trend-setters of intellectual fashionand the launch of a legend
that combined his personal excesses and his early death. And if that were not enough, his heirs abandoned
the agency of Carmen Balcells, the mythical co-founder of the Boom, for Andrew Wylie, aka the Jackal,
the New York literary agent who has concentrated more Nobel prizes and cult authors per square meter in
his office (and who has already announced the recovery of a novel that Bolao left among his papers)
than any other agent.
While reading the reviews and articles published in the North American literary media about Bolao, I
was continually surprised that the American reading of Bolao, especially the reinvention of his
biography, had almost nothing in common with the reception of Bolao in Spanish. I do not believe, as
some Spanish critics and even some of his friends do, that the American Bolao is a falsification, a
marketing product, a forced reinvention, or a simple misunderstanding: on the contrary, maybe the power
of his texts lives in the diverse interpretations, sometimes contrasting or opposed, that it is possible to
extract from his books. But the reception of his American critics reveals, however, another phenomenon:
not only does the Bolao read and recreated by them have nothing to do with his Spanish reception, but it
seems that none of his panegyrists took the trouble of reading what the Spanish speaking critics had been
saying about himwith almost always the same admirationfor more than a decade. When he arrived in
the United States, he suddenly became a cult author; Bolao got across the desert, crossed the border, and
escaped the literary migration, but he could not take his family with him: as a whole, the American critics
boasted about their discovery, as if they were responsible for unearthing Bolao; they considered only
their contrived mythological creation and didnt take the real world into account.
Few authors were so conscious of their place in world literature, especially in the Latin America world, as
this Chilean author: each one of his texts is a double answerit might be worthwhile to say a slap in the
faceto the traditions that obsessed him. Of course, none of that appears in the readings of the American
critics. For a Mexican like myself, who also had the opportunity to converse with Bolao dozens of times,
its hard to believe that a book as plagued with references to Mexican literary history as The Savage
Detectivesin my opinion, a boxing ring in which Bolao settles accounts with his pastcould be read,
understood, and enjoyed by a media that totally ignores them. However, that is what happened: his
success in the United States was absolute. What does that mean? In the first place, the book is so
universaland so openthat Bolaos scholarly winks lose their importance; and perhaps the prejudices
and the superficiality of the American reading are huge. Bolao has not been glorified in English for
being Latin American or Chilean, nor because of his ties with this part of the worldhe could easily have
been Thai or Kuwaitibut for other reasons, literary as well as extra-literary, and his case is not
comparable, in any measure, to other writers of the regionor even Isabel Allendeand perhaps only to
Haruki Murakami, the only international literary star capable of casting a similar shadow in English.
If there is something outstanding in the critical reception of Bolao in the United States, it is the
evaluationor the reinventionof his biography. The novelist J onathan Lethem in his earth-shattering
review in the New York Times set the tone: In a burst of invention now legendary in contemporary
Spanish-language literature, and rapidly becoming so internationally, Bolao in the last decade of his life,
writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health, constructed a remarkable body of stories and
novels out of precisely such doubts: that literature, which he revered the way a penitent loves (and yet
rails against) an elusive God, could meaning fully articulate the low truths he knew as rebel, exile, addict
[].
Beyond the discussion of Bolaos 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 Bolao 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 Catalua). 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
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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.
Bolao, 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. Bolao, 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 causesin one case art and in the other politicsideal 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 Bolaos ascent are not that different from those
that governed Garca Mrquezs 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 airin other
words, of savagerybefore the contemporary lack of will power.
After a decade of reigning as the new paradigm for Latin American writers, Bolaos ascent to the
thronelet us not get to say manipulationin the United States and his rapid inclusion in the official
cannon, has severely perturbed us. As was expected, many of those who glorified him while he was a
minor author now point out the dangers of his accelerated upgrade to the mainstream, and while some
take advantage of his fame and present themselves as his confidants or literary heirs, others question a
success that suddenly seems suspect.
The Bolao case marks a watershed moment for Latin American literature. While he is unanimously
idolized by the greater part of the new writers, none of them has continued the relationship that the
Chilean used to keep with the Hispanic American tradition. Dozens of youths imitate his awkward style,
his fractal stories, his games and stylish threats, his plots as alleys without exit, his delirious
monologues, and his literary erudition, but none, in turn, has looked for dialogue, or war, with his
predecessorswith the vast plot that goes from modernism to the Boomthat is found in the center of
almost all of Bolaos books.
Bolao represents one of the highest points of our traditionthat spider web that goes
from Rayuela to2666and at the same time a fracture at its center. It is difficult to know if this break will
be definitive, but for the time being all of the signs point to a cataclysm: even if it were in a rebellious and
radically ironic manner, Bolao continued to present himself as a Latin American writer, in both the
literary and political senses; after him, nobody seems to have kept that abstruse faith in a cause that began
to be extinguished in the nineties. The followers or imitators of Bolao do not follow or imitate his spirit,
but his formal procedures, emptied of the Bolaos eccentric political and artistic militancy.
It is not accidental that Bolao, a Chilean who owned a house in Spain, wrote Mexican, Chilean,
Argentinean, or Peruvian short stories and novels with the same ease and conviction. It was not about
only copying the linguistic peculiarities of each placea mere exercise of memory and a good earbut
of creating books that would really deal with the tradition of each one of these countries. If the members
of the Boom wrote books centered in their respective places of origin with the goal of summoning an
elusive Latin American essence, Bolao did just the opposite: he wrote books that played at belonging to
the literature of these countries and ended up revealing the vacuity of the concept. While he sounded the
voices of his compatriots, Bolao assumed the role of the last total Latin American, capable of
supplanting a full generation of writers single-handed. Or in another sense, his imitation of different
accents and idiosyncrasies, taking it all the way to parody (for example the Argentinean in the wonderful
tale El Gaucho insufrible), hid a hilarious critique of the proper idea of national literature. Since
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Bolao, writing in the solemn Bolivian faith of the Boom has become impossible: one of the central
ruptures that mark his work. That does not mean that Latin America has disappeared as scenery or point
of interest, but it is beginning to be perceived with that post-national character, devoid of a fixed identity,
that is appropriate in a global world at the beginning of the 21st century. And Bolao is, in a good
measure, responsible of this change.

CONTRA J AMES WOOD:
Gutless Realism: James Woods Housebroken Bolao
There are times when J ames Wood indulges his professional vanity in so blatant a fashion that one is
tempted to feel embarrassed for him. Fortunately these moments occur in pieces the rest of whose
contents remove the temptation let him go ahead and embarrass himself! How Fiction Works, for
example, is dedicated to novelist Norman Rush and Rushs wife, to telegraph the idea that Wood is on
intimate terms with and even taken seriously by real writers. J ust in case we missed the point,
however, on page 4 he writes, W.G. Sebald once said to me . . . More recently we have the example of
his review of Patrick Frenchs V.S. Naipaul biography; Wood opens the article with the story of his own
encounter with the forbidding novelist, which reads very much like something out of Paul Therouxs
memoir, Sir Vidias Shadow, writ small. Ostensibly intended to illustrate a consistent duality in Naipauls
personality, the anecdotes subtext in screaming neon is that the young critics literary intelligence
had more than met the novelists exacting standards. The Naipaul who took me to lunch that day was
different from the horrid interviewee. Stern father had become milder uncle. Its a buffet system here.
Dont pile everything onto one plate . . .
As luck would have it J ames Wood didnt meet Roberto Bolao before the latters death in 2003 (I
imagine the prodigiously retentive reviewer having to use up an entire bottle of antiseptic hand-gel in
such an encounters wake), but Wood still manages to come up with a self-serving personal aside to
buttonhole us with in the first paragraph of his 2007 New York Times review of Savage Detectives:
Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaos reputation, in English at least, has been spreading
in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, The Savage Detectives, will ensure
that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about
the way Bolaos name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my
awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of
Bolaos extraordinary novella By Night in Chile.
Did you catch that? I am not a bandwagon jumper, he declaims from his perch atop the bandwagon (now,
thankfully for critics of Woods ilk, a hearse), I know the top-secret handshake, I was in the word-of-
mouth loop . . .
Its a curious review. With his Saramago piece, at least, one got the feeling that Wood, in some baffled
way, genuinely admired the Nobel laureates books, even as his personal biases and professional blinders
compelled him to misread and misrepresent (or, to use Saramagos own words, to dilute and obscure).
The Bolao review reads a little more like an assignment, and Wood lets us know early on that in his
opinion Bolaos best work isnt Savage Detectives but rather the novella that his lodge-brother from the
anecdote lent him, By Night in Chile, a book whose protagonist, writes Wood, comes to emblematize . . .
the silent complicity of Chilean literary establishment with the murderous Pinochet regime. This is sheer
brazenness coming from the establishment figure who was the New Republics lead reviewer in the years
when it was pounding war-drums on behalf of a regime many times more murderous than Pinochets, and
one can imagine Wood smiling as his dancing fingers tapped the line out on his keyboard. Its just a bit of
context, after all, to help set up the quotation from By Night in Chile that is the centerpiece of his
appreciation of Bolao, whom he sees as a practitioner, along with Saramago, Sebald, and others, of the
contemporary long-sentence form. Wood unpacks a formidable example from the novella and even feels
stirred to offer one of his trademark fine writing metaphors in response: The musical control is
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impeccable, he enthuses, and one is struck by Bolaos ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal
sentence impossibly, like someone punting a leaf image by image. Theres more to be said about
that leaf-punting metaphor, but for now it will suffice as an example of Woods showiness, as if the image
had occurred to him at some time in the past and he had been waiting, like a bore at a party, for just the
right time to spring it on a group of listeners, even if he must strain to steer the conversation in the right
direction. For it is one of this reviews curiosities that the metaphor-bedizened run-ons of By Night in
Chile turn out not to be as prominent a feature of Savage Detectives as Woods treatment suggests. This is
not to say that long sentences are absent from Savage Detectives some of the novels first-person
testimonials make use of them, others do not, depending on the speaker but reading Woods review by
itself would leave one with the mistaken impression that the entire book had been spooled out of
examples as rococo as the flight of fancy quoted from the novella.[1] Once Wood turns his attention
to Savage Detectives proper, however, the enthusiasm he showed for the earlier volume becomes more
tempered; the best he can muster is a candidate blurb for a future paperback reprint wildly enjoyable!
and the fainter praise of pointing out how Bolao courts yet ultimately avoids various postmodern
pitfalls that other writers (by implication the so-called hysterical, rather than visceral, realists) would have
pitched headfirst into.
So what is going on in this odd review? Wood esteems the earlier By Night in Chile and manages to find
things he likes about the more recent novel, but it is clearly not love that has prompted him to the labor of
aBolao review. In several earlier posts I have been developing the argument that J ames Woods
reviewing often works by domesticating novels that are not examples of domestic fiction to begin with,
and that is certainly the case in his review of Savage Detectives. It is almost as if Wood needs to respond,
not toBolaos work, but rather to his reputation, his growing popularity. There is a contradiction at the
heart of the rise of Roberto Bolao in the English-speaking countries that has been nicely outlined by Ilan
Stavans in theChronicle of Higher Education:
Witnessing Bolaos canonization in academe has been fascinating. Barely a few years ago,
he was a don nadie, a supreme nobody; now The New Yorker puts its imprimatur on him with
a review, hes a household name at symposia, and hes taught as a refreshing perspective, a
kind of J ack Kerouac for the new millennium.
[]
And why Bolao now? Because once again, literature in the West seems to have grown
complacent: It isnt so much written as manufactured. The genres dictated by mainstream
publishing are suffocating. Were in need of a prophet or an enfant terrible to wake us
from our slumber.
Of course, the way to neutralize a prophet is to tame him through acclaim. Bolao would have laughed in
particular at his arrival in Spanish departments. His mordant tongue frequently attacked the holy cows: He
described writers like Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende, and Diamela Eltit as complacent, solipsistic, and
tedious. With Borges, he built his own parallel aesthetic tradition, a rebels gallery of outlaws and pariahs.
And yet he is now moving steadily to the center of the curriculum.
To tame him through acclaim yes. But when it comes to the actual mechanics of such a procedure,
more than sheer acclaim might be necessary. This is where professional domesticators such as J ames
Wood come in. If theres no way to stem the burgeoning Bolao tide, then the effort must be made to
direct it into the proper safer channels.
Weve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time communist
Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and fallen human nature. Its in a similar spirit that Wood
transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult maturity after being
disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism. Bolao in the 1970s was
an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas, and so are the characters who make up the narratives
gang of literary guerillas, says Wood in his summary of the novel. Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to
affirm, is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the
difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. In other words, zany antics involving things like avant-garde
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agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed) as properly childish
preoccupations; a book is good and merits a positive review to the extent that its pretty sentences are
about the putting away of childish things. Wood, you see, likes a book with a healthy message it
needs to be about something that will keep children and servants in line with middle-class morality.
And if the book is not really about that at all, then like any good media pundit he will spin it, cherry-
picking the two or three examples that might best support his thesis. Heres one: A painter, interviewed
in Mexico City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima werent revolutionaries: They werent writers.
Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I dont think they were poets either. See how this works? Here are a
few more:
An Israeli friend of Ulises Limas says that the importance of the poets lives had nothing to
do with visceral realism: It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and
what we can regain. He continues, and says that what we have lost we can regain, we can
get it back intact. Can we? Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car
accident. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone
remembers the visceral realists anymore. Many are dead. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico
City. About Arturo Belano, he says, I know nothing. This is finally how the novel makes
good on its playful, postmodern impulses.
I love that last touch a novel with playful, postmodern impulses is OK as long as it ends in sackcloth
and ashes (i.e., realism, but not of the visceral variety). Reading Woods review, in fact, you would
actually think that Savage Detectives was a book about apostasy. Wood even includes, apropos of very
little, a quote from that arch-apostate Wordsworth: We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But
thereof come in the end despondency and madness. Superficially the quotation is supposed to apply to
the sad fates of Belano, Lima and their cronies in the novel, but Wood is completely aware of its full
resonance and has no doubt chosen it with that in mind. Bolao and Wordsworth its hard to think of a
less suitable literary association; it tells us little about Bolaos sensibility or the books, although it
speaks volumes about the reviewer.[2]
Contra Wood, The Savage Detectives articulates the stubborn persistence of a utopia of poetry (poetry in
its broadest sense, not just verse but the subversive transformation of daily life by the marvelous) in the
face of historys sharpest disappointments. This utopia persists precisely to the extent that it has not
appeared; it is the absent center of the novel itself. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the trgers, the
bearers, of poetry for young J uan Garcia Madero and many the novels other characters, just as, in a
kind of infinite regression,Cesrea Tinajero of the original Visceral Realist generation is
poetrys trger for Lima and Belano. Yet the pairs rediscovery of Tinajero leads to her demise, and
Belano and Lima themselves fade away. Nobody therefore really occupies the place of poetry, but it is
this very fact which keeps poetry alive as a radical possibility, as to switch to a different idiom
une promesse de bonheur. At another level, the death of Tinajero and the play of Bolao-Belano in the
context of the absence from the novel of the alter-egos point of view all suggest an effacing of author-as-
authority. Could the author, even a nominally radical author, really be a kind of caudillo that needs to
be displaced? If this is the case, then if anything perishes in the course of the novel it is the elitism that
was such a prominent if problematic feature of much twentieth-century aesthetic and political
vanguardism, here giving way not to restorationist maturity but to an ostensibly more radically
democratic and indigenous aesthetic, from below. And in fact we can see precisely this sort of working-
out of a historical and cultural dialectic in the very form of The Savage Detectives. On the one hand, the
novels comprehensive, epic ambitions it is nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation and its
carnivalesque juggling of voices and chronologies call to mind the great high modernist novels of El
Boom of Marquez and Cortazar, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. These novels were the products of a period
of Latin American optimism and self-assertion in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Yet Savage
Detectives most fundamental structuring device is the testimonio, the first-person testimonial-style
narrative that came to occupy an important place in Latin American prose in the period after the Boom.[3]
This was the period not of revolution and self-assertion but of reaction and retrenchment, of dictatorships
and death-squads, and its predominant literary mode is correspondingly both more chastened and more
populist a bedrock of fugitive resistance. The Savage Detectives, then, may be read as a Boom novel
97

filtered through, and revised by, the post-Boom testimonial, in the service of creating a new form that
includes its own prehistory. Its a feat of insurgent literary zapatismo.
Once again, however, Woods ideological biases will not allow him to read the novel that is actually in
front of him. Instead, ever the Restorationist, he must turn Savage Detectives into one more
accommodation with existing reality, a specific social arrangement that he wishes his readers to take for
a metaphysical absolute. Think of it as another sortie of J ames Woods arrire-garde literary movement,
Gutless Realism.
Earlier in the review, in a brief biographical sketch of Bolao, Wood writes, Returning to Chile in 1973
to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested.
As he saw it in a single, sniffy phrase, Wood dispenses with Bolaos leftism as if it were a dirty old
sock found among his freshly laundered and triple-starched tighty-whities (hell have to have a word with
Consuela, the housekeeper, about that sock!). But his refuse is our rose, so well tarry for another whiff:
The socialist revolution as he saw it. This means, of course, that Wood himself doesnt see it the
whole social process unfolding around the embattled leftist government of Salvador Allende that way.
Somehow I doubt that Wood is criticizing the Allende government from the left, for its reformist timidity
and half-measures. No, that phrase as he saw it is Woods way of distancing himself from any of
that leftist taint, that socialist stink. Yes, hes telling his readers (and employers), Im about to give
this seedy punks book a good review, but dont think for a minute that it means Im no longer clubbable
(likewise he would never put U.S.-backed in front of the Pinochet coup).
Its a priceless moment, but I know that many of you would rather vote for like someone punting a leaf
as your favorite phrase, as this reviews most preciously Woodsian locution. Its a real specimen, after all,
of the much-vaunted Wood style maybe youll even cut it out of The New York Times and press it,
like a flower, between the pages of Savage Detectives. But I think you should take as he saw it along
with like someone punting a leaf. They go together, really, the former being the root, as it were, of the
latters foliage. For this is how Woods style works: what hes able to appreciate, and how he appreciates
it, is dependent on what he wont allow himself, or his readers, to see.
Punting is, of course, a term from soccer, and in the context of this particular article it makes certain
associations unavoidable. Bolao managed to get away from the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup, but
thousands of others, that grim September eleventh, were not so lucky, and after being rounded up by the
armed forces they were interned, infamously, in the soccer stadiums. Up to forty thousand were held in
Santiagos big Estadio Nacional; thousands of others, including the folk-musician Victor J ara, were kept
in the Estadio Chile. Of these, many hundreds mostly leftists who had been helping the socialist
revolution as they saw it were soon to be tortured, or murdered, or were simply disappeared.
In an earlier post I quoted a long passage from J ohn Felstiners Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, about a
review of Celans volume Mohn und Gedchtnis by a German critic, Hans Egon Holthusen, who was
intent on (mis)reading Celans poetry in a way that would further the cause of German self-exoneration in
the wake of the Holocaust. The very terms by which Holthusen sought to praise Celan betrayed the
grotesqueness of his project of cultural whitewashing:
Celan has mastered a technique of repetition, says Holthusen, disregarding the use of master in
Todesfuge. He is congratulated for singing a ghastly event, even as the commandant tells his J ews to
sing up and play. The poet has overcome a staggering theme here Holthusens verb is bewltigen,
as if Celan were part of Germanys Vergangenheitsbewltigung (overcoming the past). This gruesome
theme can escape historys bloody chamber of horrors to rise into the ether of pure poetry. But it was
the J ews in Celans poem who rose into ether, never the poem; not Todesfuge but its German readers
who wanted to escape historys bloody chamber of horrors.
Some of the same creepy frisson comes through in the way that Wood treats Bolao. Holthusen wrote of
the ether of pure poetry rising from the death chambers; for Wood, helping out his adopted nation with
its own project of cultural amnesia, its punting a leaf. But as with Holthusens rhetorical choices, this
one cant help but point back to the scene of the crime, and bear a trace of the very thing its meant, oh-so
aesthetically, to transcend.
98

________________
[1] The short essay on Bolao in the Fall 2008 n+1, in fact, offers a perspective on the Chileans style
that is the exact opposite of Woods:
Bolao can write page after page without indulging in a single metaphor, or adding a dab of
rhetorical color to the account of a dinner party or a murder. Of course you can find perfect
sentences in Bolao, and crazy metaphors too, but for the most part he proceeds as if
literature were too desperate an enterprise to bother with being well written. The rationale for
his antieloquence belongs to the internal dynamic of any modern language: an idiom
encrusted with poeticisms needs a solvent bath. But for Latin Americans of Bolaos
generation there may also be political grounds for preferring writing degree zero to purple
haze. One more disgusting feature of the Argentine junta (it is Argentines who predominate in
Bolaos gallery of imaginary Nazi writers) was the generals magniloquence.
Wood, then, was responding to (and enthusiastically over-generalizing, if youll excuse the pun) a sample
of such magniloquence that had been successfully ventriloquized by Bolao. One silently complicit,
morally somnolent literary-establishment figure resonating to another.
[2] If there is any figure from era of the English Romantics who could be compared with Bolao, it is
Shelley, but I offer this only as a vaccine to the restorationist comparison put forward by Wood. Its
always a risky exercise to assimilate Latin American writers, as part of the process of culturally vetting
and approving them, to canonized English-language writers. The novelists of El Boom, for
example, were routinely recommended to readers in much U.S criticism on the basis of their being like
J oyce or Woolf or the favored comparison in such cases Faulkner. That gesture is being repeated
today, even by people who ought to know better, such as Benjamin Kunkel, who writes of Savage
Detectives:
Its something close to a miracle that Bolao can produce such intense narrative interest in a
book made up of centrifugal monologues spinning away from two absentee main characters,
and the diary entries of its most peripheral figure. And yet, in spite of the books apparent
(and often real) formlessness, a large part of its distinction is its virtually unprecedented
achievement in multiply-voiced narration. The confessional or first-person novel done in
multiple voices was an important Modernist mode, a logical extension of the tendency
towards authorial self-effacement that we associate with Flaubert. English speakers will think
of The Nighttown section of Ulysses, Dos Passoss USA, The Waves, and probably the
most successful several of Faulkners novels.
[3] The best-known example of the testimonio is, of course, I, Rigoberta Mench; adaptations of
thetestimonio-form for works of fiction include Marquezs Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Manilo
Arguetas One Day of Life, and Elena Poniatowskas Heres to You, Jesusa!

CONTRA J AMES WOOD:
The Landlords Of Fortune: The Publishing Industry And The Bolao Myth
Back in J anuary 2009 I wrote the following in a post called, Gutless Realism: J ames Woods
Housebroken Bolao, about the ideological intentions (i.e., myth making) behind J ames Woods review
of Savage Detectives:
Weve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time
communist Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and fallen human nature. Its in a
similar spirit that Wood transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an
adult maturity after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and
political radicalism. Bolao in the 1970s was an avant-garde poet bristling with mad
agendas, and so are the characters who make up the narratives gang of literary guerillas,
99

says Wood in his summary of the novel. Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to affirm, is
both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the
difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. In other words, zany antics involving things like
avant-garde agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed)
as properly childish preoccupations; a book is good and merits a positive review to the
extent that its pretty sentences are about the putting away of childish things. Wood, you
see, likes a book with a healthy message it needs to be about something that will keep
children and servants in line with middle-class morality. And if the book is not really about
that at all, then like any good media pundit he will spin it, cherry-picking the two or three
examples that might best support his thesis. Heres one: A painter, interviewed in Mexico
City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima werent revolutionaries: They werent writers.
Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I dont think they were poets either. See how this
works? Here are a few more:
An Israeli friend of Ulises Limas says that the importance of the poets lives had nothing to
do with visceral realism: It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and
what we can regain. He continues, and says that what we have lost we can regain, we can
get it back intact. Can we? Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car
accident. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone
remembers the visceral realists anymore. Many are dead. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico
City. About Arturo Belano, he says, I know nothing. This is finally how the novel makes
good on its playful, postmodern impulses.
I love that last touch a novel with playful, postmodern impulses is OK as long as it ends
in sackcloth and ashes (i.e., realism, but not of the visceral variety). Reading Woods
review, in fact, you would actually think that Savage Detectives was a book about apostasy.
Wood even includes, apropos of very little, a quote from that arch-apostate Wordsworth: We
poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and
madness. Superficially the quotation is supposed to apply to the sad fates of Belano, Lima
and their cronies in the novel, but Wood is completely aware of its full resonance and has no
doubt chosen it with that in mind. Bolao and Wordsworth its hard to think of a less
suitable literary association; it tells us little about Bolaos sensibility or the books, although
it speaks volumes about the reviewer.
Now, lets turn to some excerpts from Horacio Castellanos Moyas article, Bolao Inc., published in the
latest issue of Guernica. It is written as a personal amplification of some points made in Sarah Pollacks
Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives in the United States, in a
recent issue of Comparative Literature.
The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and its the landlords of
the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether its selling cheap condoms or
Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of Pollacks work is that
behind the construction of the Bolao myth was not only a publishers marketing operation
but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North
American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.
[..]
The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of Garca Mrquez, with its magical realism,
represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But
since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually
went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called
McOndo and Crack, but they didnt fit the enterpriseabove all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it
was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy
novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolao appeared with
his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.
[..]
100

The stories and the brief novels of Bolao were being published in the United States very
carefully and tenaciously by New Directions, a very prestigious independent publisher with a
modest distribution, when all of a sudden, in the middle of negotiations for The Savage
Detectives, appeared, like a bolt from the blue, the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune,
who decided that this excellent novel was the work chosen to be the next big thing, the
new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you will. And it was written, whats more, by an
author who had died a little earlier, which facilitated the process of organizing the operation.
[..]
The novelty for the American reader is that he will come away with two complementary
messages that appeal to his sensibility and expectations: on one side the novel evokes the
youthful idealism that leads to rebellion and adventure. But on the other side, it can be read
as a morality tale, in the sense that it is very good to be a brazen rebel at sixteen years old,
but if a person doesnt grow and change into an adult person, serious and established, the
consequences can be tragic and pathetic, as in the case of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.
Sarah Pollack concludes: It is as if Bolao were confirming what U.S. cultural norms tout as
truth.
In other words, J ames Wood, as a functionary for the landlords of fortune in the publishing industry, was
just serving his myth-making and marketing role in confirming what U.S. cultural norms tout as truth.
What I been sayin all along.
http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/roberto-bolanos-total-anarchy/

Rober t o Bol aos Tot al Anar c hy
By David Varno
The Bolao short fiction thats been coming out in the New Yorker and Harpers over the past few
months is getting stranger. Necrophilia and the Colombian porno industry are edgy enough subjects, but
Bolao went further by exploring elements of the fantastic. The stories have been available in Spanish for
a while; perhaps now that the late Chilean author has made such a name for himself, its safe to publish
the wackier stuff, and it comes at not a moment too soon. Since the mesmerizing 2666, weve had The
Skating Rink, a tight, well-told mystery; Monsieur Pain, an intriguing glance at Bolaos early
development, his passion for poets, and use of several genres to achieve his form; and now Antwerp,
which promises more of the same. Having read Antwerp, a loosely connected narrative of 56 prose pieces
spread over 78 pages, my anticipation has shifted to the short stories, which will appear in three
collections over the next year, translated by Chris Andrews.
William Burns, published in the New Yorker this past February, is a (relatively) conventional tale of a
gun-toting man whos crossed the border into Sonora from Ventura, California. Burns beats to death an
intruder on the house in which he is shacked up with two local women. He first sees the intruder, whom
the women call the killer, on a trip into town. The killers dog follows Burns, and he takes it home. The
transfer advances the story with the kind of quickness that Calvino attributed to Charlemagnes ring. No
explanation is necessary; Burns is now the killer.
Things get a little nuttier with The Return, which appeared in the April issue of Harpers. The story is
part of an eponymous collection forthcoming from New Directions in J uly. Its one of the better Bolao
stories out in translation, up there with the masterworks included in Last Evenings on Earth (ND, 2007).
Before the narrator, who is dead, goes through the events leading to his end, he mentions a few things
about the afterlife, where he has learned of a famous French fashion designers necrophilia. What follows
is made believable through concrete physical description, centered on a risky yet effective reference to
Ghost, a film that the narrator calls idioticinane and unbelievable, despite his appreciation for the
special effects. Whether Bolao himself was a closet Ghost fan or he let his character speak to his disdain
for it, he gets away with a parallel between the movie and his own plot. The matter-of-fact narration
101

makes this love story, featuring a fashion icon and the ghost of the corpse hes just molested, the opposite
of idiotic, inane, and unbelievable. The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura, which also appeared in April,
features a man who visits a retired porn actor, after telling us that he remembers seeing the actor penetrate
his mother from the womb. To top it off, they are from the Medelln neighborhood of Los Empalados
(The Impaled). Its hard to believe, the narrator says, in the first sentence, and yet we do.
The success of these stories reveal what is lacking in the fantastic elements of Antwerp. The narrative is
spotty and the juxtaposition of styles (detective, science fiction, prose poetry, etc.) doesnt really come
together. These factors didnt stop me from enjoying Monsiur Pain, another short novel written early in
Bolaos career, and Antwerp is set on familiar territory; the Calabria Commune in Italy, where six
murders are reported and vaguely investigated, brings to mind the Spanish campground in The Savage
Detectives and The Skating Rink. The difference is that we never get characters; the setting just floats in
space.
Antwerp seems to be functioning more on the terms of poetry than fiction, and works best when Bolao
pulls back: Maybe they committed suicide. Maybe it was all a dream. The wind in the rocks. The
Mediterranean. Blue. Another passage, called The Bum, is a beautifully written piece of microfiction.
It takes place in a bus stop, and the feverish prose dreamsI never closed my eyes or made an effort to
think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads in the middle of the empty waiting roomlike
news on an electronic tickercould have been influenced from Philip K. Dick
Elsewhere, the fractured dialogue and disembodied character descriptions seem extraneous. The author is
talking to himself while conducting an experiment. A line from a plainclothes polieceman, Destroy your
stray phrases, reads like advice the author could have followed more closely. But he makes it pretty clear
in the preface, Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later, written in 2002 when the book was finally
published from a collection of old notes, that he wasnt worried about what readers would think: I wrote
this book for myself, and even that I cant be sure about. He writes of having read antithetical writers,
science fiction, pornography, Greek poets and Cervantes, and draws a parallel to Ellisons Invisible Man:
I was drawn to [these writers] as if the cave and the electric light were mutually exclusive. The
narrative comes and goes, and the gaps in between are filled in with stray lyricism. Bolao seems to have
been anxious that something was missingwhat poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader,
he writes in a later passagebut unfortunately he didnt make up for it.
Why did Bolao say that the only novel that doesnt embarrass me is Antwerp? Perhaps because the
book is less revealing, and also less constructed, than his later fiction. Perhaps he was hedging his bets on
poetry. Theres the Frost adage that Dan Chiasson resurrected recently: We dance around in a ring and
suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. Did Bolao think wed be happy to keep guessing?
In this case, it doesnt seem to work. I went through the book a second time, armed with clues to crack the
narrative, and found the same false starts and loose ends. There doesnt seem to be enough here to make it
worth the effort, but perhaps other readers will find more. Me, Im waiting for The Return.

Published J un 4, 2010. Read more:
http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/roberto-bolanos-total-anarchy/#ixzz0pulyUdqF

Hor ac i o Cast el l anos Moya I s Di sgust ed w i t h t he Bol ano
Myt h
By Scott Esposito on September 23, 2009
Im not sure I can translate this properly, but this has to be one of the best lines Ive read recently:
El mercado tiene dueos, como todo en este infecto planeta, y son los dueos del mercado
quienes deciden el mambo que se baila, se trate de vender condones baratos o novelas
latinoamericanas en Estados Unidos.
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The market has owners, like everything in this filthy world, and are market owners who decide to dance
the mambo, they try to sell cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the United States.
This line comes in conjunction with a very acidic essay that novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya has
written on the Bolano Myth (published in the Argentina newspaper La Nacion). The following line
explains what moved Moya to such a statement (partial translation below):
I say this because the thrust of the work of Sarah is that, behind the construction of myth Bolao, not only
had an operation but also marketing editorial redefining the image of Latin American literature and
culture that the American cultural establishment now it is selling its audience.
Basically, in order to sell books marketers invented the Bolano myth, which Moya is taking as an act of
U.S. cultural imperialism on Latin America. Throughout the rest of the piece, Moya goes on to argue that
marketers and journalists created an image of Bolano to fit preconceived U.S. stereotypes of what a Latin
American is--and especially what a Latin American author is.
Moya concludes that the Bolano created by American marketers and journalists fits in with a sterotype
popularized in recent movies and books about Che:
Fue esa faceta contestataria de su vida la que servira a la perfeccin para la construccin del
mito en Estados Unidos, del mismo modo que esa faceta de la vida del Che (la del viaje en
motocicleta y no la del ministro del rgimen castrista) es la que se utiliza para vender su mito
en ese mismo mercado. La nueva imagen de lo latinoamericano no es tan nueva, pues, sino la
vieja mitologa del the road-trip que viene desde Kerouac y que ahora se ha reciclado con el
rostro de Gael Garca Bernal (quien tambin interpreta a Bolao en el film que viene, a
propsito).
(Google translation:
It was the rebellious side of life that would serve perfectly for the construction of the myth in
the United States, just as that aspect of the life of Che (the Che of the trip on a motorbike and
not the minister of the Castro regime) is used to sell his myth in the same market. The new
image of the Latin American is not so new, then, but the old mythology of the road-trip that
comes from Kerouac and now has been recycled using the face of Gael Garca Bernal (who
also plays Bolao in the film [of The Savage Detectives], by the way).
Moya notes that most of the inspiration for this diatribe comes from an essay called Latin America
Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives in the United States that Sarah Pollack will
be publishing in the next issue of Comparative Literature.
I should remark here that I covered a lot of this territory about a year and a half ago with this essay in
Hermano Cerdo.
First off, I think its pretty interesting to see how much Spanish-language authors have been pushing back
on the seizure of Bolano by the U.S. intellectual classes. I think its great, especially since its fostering an
authentic trans-national dialogue on literature (of the kind that Horace Engdahl said we dont participate
in enough these days). I dont know if this sort of this happened with Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he
became big in the English language, but I get the feeling that the changing relationship of the U.S. vis a
vis the Latin American world has made the absorption of Bolano a little different than that of Garcia
Marquez.
I cant disagree too much with what Moya says, although I think hes painting things a little too broadly.
(Granted, this is a diatribe . . .) Where hes dishing out blame, hes mostly talking about the old media
press and the publisher FSG, and while I would say that old media coverage of Bolano has featured a lot
of what Moya calls out (remember the whole heroin thing?), I dont think FSG is quite the publisher
Moya claims it to be. True, its no New Directions, and, true again, if there was any justice New
Directions would have gotten first shot at The Savage Detectives, but FSG does tend to treat literature
with a lot more respect than other publishers out there.
103

But more than that, I do think there is a community of readers that is attempting to read Bolano on his
own terms, instead of in terms of a prefabricated Latin American stereotype. Certainly theres lots of
bandwagoning and dumb reader tricks happening around Bolanos books, but I do get the feeling that
theyve captured the imagination of many readers and inspired them to try and live up to the books.
This does happen from time to time, after all. Moyas own translator, Katherine Silver, has in fact
spoken very eloquently on how a translated work of literature (in this case, Moyas own Senselessness,
which I cover in an essay here) can work to subvert dominant ideas in the U.S. mental image of Latin
America. Shes right, and I think Senselessness has done just that with its American readership.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2217
Hor ac i o Cast el l anos Moya and t he Bol ano Myt h
24 September 09 | Chad W. Post
At Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito points to an interesting article by Horacio Castellanos Moya
about his disgust with the Bolano Myth.
The article is primarily based on Sarah Pollacks essay Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto
Bolaos The Savage Detectives in the United States, which will appear in the next issue of Comparative
Literature (pre-order your copy today!). Hard to get into too many specifics without having read Pollacks
essay, but it sounds like she questions the way Bolanos personal life was mythologized in order to make
him that much more marketable. (Moya points to the hippie-esque author pic on The Savage Detectives as
an example of the Bolano-as-Renegade image, although TSD was written while Bolano was a calm
family man.)
Since Scotts Spanish is much better than mine, Ill let him summarize the Moya piece:
Basically, in order to sell books marketers invented the Bolano myth, which Moya is taking
as an act of U.S. cultural imperialism on Latin America. Throughout the rest of the piece,
Moya goes on to argue that marketers and journalists created an image of Bolano to fit
preconceived U.S. stereotypes of what a Latin American isand especially what a Latin
American author is. [. . .]
I cant disagree too much with what Moya says, although I think hes painting things a little too broadly.
(Granted, this is a diatribe . . .) Where hes dishing out blame, hes mostly talking about the old media
press and the publisher FSG, and while I would say that old media coverage of Bolano has featured a lot
of what Moya calls out (remember the whole heroin thing?), I dont think FSG is quite the publisher
Moya claims it to be. True, its no New Directions, and, true again, if there was any justice New
Directions would have gotten first shot at The Savage Detectives, but FSG does tend to treat literature
with a lot more respect than other publishers out there.
First off, I agree with Scott. The mainstream media seems more to blame for this image creation than
FSG. In fact, Id argue that both FSG and New Directions did a great job marketing Bolano and helping
introduce his masterful works to an English-speaking audience.
That said, this sort of stereotyping (in terms of what makes a typical Latin American author or
constitutes a typical Latin American book) has gone on for a while, and in terms of aesthetic
pigeonholing, publishers really do deserve a lot of the blame. Post-Garcia Marquez, its been near
impossible for a non-magical realist from south of our borders to get published in America. A certain
Isabel Allende-tainted vision of what counted as good Latin American literature came into being, and
anything that didnt fit that mold wasnt marketable.
The Crack group (J orge Volpi, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, etc.) rose up as a response to this situation,
this sort of pre-marketing that filters out certain types of literature in favor of more marketable books.
And it would be foolish to pretend that marketing doesnt play a role in which authors get published
especially in translation.
104

THE INSUFFERABLE GAUCHO
By Roberto Bolao
Translated by Chris Andrews
164 pp. New Directions. $22.95
THE RETURN
By Roberto Bolao
Translated by Chris Andrews
199 pp. New Directions. $23.95
ANTWERP
By Roberto Bolao
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
78 pp. New Directions. $15.95

Another aspect of American cultural imperialism is our general arrogance that an author doesnt exist
until he/she is discovered by the American public. Although Bolano was huge in the Spanish-speaking
world for years before his big novels were translated into English, theres a tendency to treat him as a
new author who has finally broke through. (Although the majority of reviews I read for 2666 and TSD
were by really thoughtful, perceptive critics who were more engaged with the complexity of the work
than with the myth of Bolano. So this is by no means a blanket statement.)
A good example of American publishing arrogance is what Scott Moyers said about W. G. Sebald on a
buzz panel a few years back. I wrote about this at the time but his comment about how Sebald had been
getting his name out there a bit thanks to New Directions, but that it was Random Houses publication
of Austerlitz that put the stamp of authority on Sebald as one of Europes great writers still makes me
vomit in my mouth a little bit.

New York Times, 19 Sep 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Greenberg-t.html
New l y Tr ansl at ed Wor k s By Rober t o Bol ao
The Chilean writer Roberto Bolao has to be one of the most
improbable international literary celebrities since William
Burroughs and Henry Miller, two writers whose work
Bolaos occasionally resembles. His subjects are sex,
poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate
glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The
prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching. His lens is
largely (though not literally) autobiographical, and seems
narrowly focused at first. There are no sweeping historical
gestures in Bolao. Yet he has given us a subtle portrait of
Latin America during the last quarter of the 20th century
a period of death squads, exile, disappeared citizens and
state-sponsored terror. The nightmarish sense of human life
being as discardable as clay permeates his writing.
Readers trying to navigate Bolaos gathering body of work may find themselves wondering where to
turn: since his death in 2003, 12 of his books have been published in the United States. The Insufferable
Gaucho would be an excellent place to start. The title story of this collection is one of Bolaos most
powerful fictions. It is a reimagining of Borgess story The South, an emblematic tale of the schism that
has plagued South Americas republics for almost two centuries: between the capital cities with their
totems to European culture, and the vast, serenely violent countryside that surrounds them. In Borgess
story, the protagonist has survived a fever that brought him to the brink of death. He sets out from Buenos
Aires to convalesce at his ancestral ranch on the Pampas. On arriving, he goes to the general store where a
drunken tough lures him into a fight that honor wont permit him to decline. Clutching a knife he hardly
knows how to wield, he walks resignedly and without fear into the death that he would have chosen or
dreamt had he been given the chance.
In Bolaos version, the protagonist, Pereda, heads south after the collapse of the Argentine peso. What
he finds on the Pampas is a sense of desertion and impotence. The gauchos have sold their horses and get
around on bicycles or on foot. There are no cattle, only a proliferating scourge of rabbits. Having
surrendered their ferocity, the gauchos are reduced to hunting the pests for food. Pereda gives them pep
talks: We have fallen, were down . . . but we can still pick ourselves up and go to our deaths like men.
During an argument he challenges the gauchos to a knife fight, believing his fate, like that of Borgess
character in The South, will be sealed. But the gauchos recoil: Pereda felt that the shame of the nation
or the continent had turned them into tame cats. In the end, he does use his knife, against a 50-year-old
writer with an adolescent air who insults him in a literary cafe in Buenos Aires.
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In Police Rat Bolao, with his taste for the subterranean life, vividly imagines a community of rats.
Hard-working, cooperative and exquisitely polite, they are the fortunate members of a society where
violent crime is unheard of. Every once in a while an artist is born among them. As a general rule, we
dont make fun of those individuals. On the contrary, we pity them, because we know that theyre
condemned to solitude. Why? Well, because creating works of art and contemplating them are activities
in which our people . . . are unable to take part. Even in this modest version of utopia, the artist is
doomed.
The stories in The Return are less even. Some are mere character sketches; others read like barroom
tales that would have been better off left unpublished. William Burns, about an American who kills a
man who may or may not be stalking two women, seems especially pointless. But there is gold to be
found in this collection as well. The narrator of Prefiguration of Lalo Cura is the son of a porn star. He
was raised in a neighborhood in Medelln, Colombia, called the Impaled. His father, an itinerant preacher,
abandoned his wife before the son was born. At the age of 19, Lalo watches the movies his mother starred
in while she was pregnant with him, crying my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my
head. He is sure that he remembers seeing and feeling these penetrations in the womb. Disturbing as they
are, Lalo cant help admiring the artistry of the movies; they seem to offer a glimpse into the mysteries of
existence. The sadness of the phallus, he says, was something the filmmaker understood better than
anyone. I mean the sadness of those monumental members against the backdrop of this vast and desolate
continent.
Bolaos alter ego, Arturo Belano, pops up in several stories. In Detectives, two veteran cops remember
holding Belano as a prisoner after the Chilean coup that overthrew President Allende in 1973. They were
classmates with Belano in high school and are inclined to protect him, though they just as easily could
have shot him through the head and come up with any old explanation. When Belano passes a mirror on
the way to the bathroom he tells one of his former classmates that what he sees is the face of a complete
stranger. The cop looks in the glass and fails to recognize himself as well. The atrocities have carried
them so far from themselves that they have become something other, mixed up with the faces of the other
prisoners and their guards who have also been alchemized into strangers.
In Photos, Arturo Belano is lost in Africa, like one of his creators heroes, Arthur Rimbaud. Sitting in
the dust of a village forsaken by god and abandoned by the human race, he leafs through an anthology
of French poetry someone has left behind. He peers at the author photographs, ruminating on desire,
projection, on the poets who are burned, even the bad ones, on those burning bridges that are so enticing,
so fascinating when youre 18, or 21, but then so dull, so monotonous.
With Bolao you rarely feel beset by monotony. Certainly not in Antwerp, a tiny, unclassifiable book
that will be of interest mainly to his most devoted fans. Bolao completed it in 1980, but didnt publish it
until a year before he died. I wrote this book for myself, and even that I cant be sure of, he tells us in
the preface. The short sections are like prose poems a bridge of sorts between Bolaos fiction and
poetry with such cryptic titles as A Monkey, There Was Nothing, Big Silver Waves. Though not
easily comprehensible, each section presents the reader with at least one startling line. A boy and a girl in
Cleaning Utensils, for example, weep like characters from different movies projected on the same
screen.
In an essay titled Literature +Illness =Illness, in The Insufferable Gaucho, Bolao confronts his own
impending death, at the age of 50, from liver disease. He compares a patients voyage on a gurney
from his room to the operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the
sect of the Hashishin to a hazardous 19th-century voyage where the traveler gives up everything. The
best of these stories confirm Bolaos ideal of literature as a voyage to the zero degree of human
existence, to the abyss, as Baudelaire, another of his heroes, would call it, where we lose the self in order
to find it again.
Michael Greenberg is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writers Life.
He writes the Accidentalist column for Bookforum.

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The Independent (U.K.) 23 August 2010
The Last I nt er vi ew , By Rober t o Bol ao, Wi t h Moni c a
Mar i st ai n
MELVILLE HOUSE, 9.99 Order for 9.49 from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
The posthumous success of the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolao is almost emblematic of our
desire, as readers, for stories behind our stories.
After a lifetime of more-or-less penurious existence, Bolao saw his novel The Savage Detectives jump
the language barrier to reap acclaim in the English- as well as Spanish-speaking world. He then raced to
complete its 900-page successor, 2666, apparently putting off treatment for the liver failure that killed
him to do so.
Now we are seeing the gradual emergence of earlier Bolao books into English translation. Picador has
given us The Amulet and Nazi Literature in the Americas, with The Skating Rink to come this autumn.
Positive though their reception has been, much of it seems to buy into the romantic idea of Bolao the
tragic, solitary genius.
This slim collection of four interviews, the first from 1999, the last shortly before his death, does a little
to feed the myth, and much to correct it. They contain pathos (my children are my only motherland),
humour (The good thing about stealing books unlike safes is that one can carefully examine their
contents before perpetrating the crime) and tough-tender mixtures of the two.
More important is the sheer profusion of Latin American writers that Bolao references, from the familiar
to the currently obscure. Whether Bolao is the best writer of his generation or not, he was inextricably
bound to it, and we make a mistake if we read about them only through him.
The interviews come with an introduction by US journalist Marcela Valdes that sheds light on the genesis
of 2666. She goes into detail about the spate of murders of over 400 women and girls in the Mexican
state of Chihuahua in the 1990s, the crime spree that forms the backbone of Bolaos novel. She gives
due honour, too, to the Mexican journalist Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez, who exposed the corruption and
connivance between state, police and drug traffickers that allowed the murders to continue.
Bolao and Rodrguez corresponded, and met, and Bolao made him a character in the novel under his
real name, which understandably seems rather to have unnerved Rodrguez. All of this makes The Last
Interview an indispensable acquisition for anyone with more than a passing interest in Bolao.

The Independent, 23 August 2010
Rober t o Bol ao: The Cont i nui ng Af t er l i f e Of A Wr i t er
J onathan Gibbs
A two part blog, this, to accompany my review of Roberto Bolao: The Last Interview. First of all, an
overview of the books we have yet to come from Picador, Bolaos UK publisher; and secondly, a brief
trawl through some of the best footnotes to this most fashionable and bloggable of authors on the
internet.
For anyone who picked up on Bolao through his two big, late novels, The Savage Detectives and
2666, the promise of dozens more books waiting on publishers schedules might seem like too much of a
good thing. Theyd probably be right. These two novels, which add up to nearly 1,500 pages in
paperback, were probably his greatest achievements, epic prose works at once carefully constructed and
loosely, flowingly written as if culled from a lifetime of memories and anecdotes.
And thats pretty much what they were. Heres Bolao talking in J avier Cercass Independent Foreign
Fiction Prize-winning Soldiers of Salamis, where he has a crucial cameo: To write novels you dont
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need an imagination. J ust a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections. Also, in a talk [see
below] his translator, Natasha Wimmer, quotes Bolaos friend Rodrigo Frsan as saying that The
Savage Detectives is ninety percent autobiographical.
Since those two doorsteps, Picador have given us Amulet and Nazi Literature of the Americas, the first
one a short lyrical novel quite close to Savage Detectives in its romantic vision of the young Mexican
poets of the 60s and 70s, while more focused politically than either and the second a strange Borgesian
work that pretends to be an encyclopedia of right-wing writers from Chile to the US, but is far more
moving that that blunt description would suggest.
Picador have eight more Bolao books scheduled for publication over the next three years, starting with
The Skating Rink, in October of this year. They are reasonably equally split between completed books
that came out in Spanish while Bolao was still alive, and collections culled from his posthumous papers,
uncollected stories and essays and the like. Its not necessarily a given that they will have the heft and
confidence of the two big novels that made his name.
In fact, this proviso that we already have the best of Bolao on our bookshelves might recast the
following list as a kind of warning: dont hold your breath for these if you dont have a couple of the
published ones under your belt!
The Skating Rink (1st October 2010) Published in Spanish in 1993 as La Pista de Hielo
Novel set in Catalonia featuring three narrators whose lives are drawn together by the skating rink of the
title where a beautiful young figure skater practices, and where a dead body turns up.
Monsier Pain (J an 11) Published in Spanish in 1982 as La Senda de los Elefantes (The Elephant Path)
Thats pain as in the French word for bread, not the English word for ouch. Set in Paris in 1938, it
nevertheless has the Bolao hallmarks of a dying South American poet and the threat of political violence
in the figure of a working as a torturer for Franco. Bolaos first published novel.
Entre Parentesis/Between Paranthesis (title undecided) (March 2011) Published in Spanish in 2004.
A posthumous collection of articles, columns, interviews and speeches, all of them written after the
success of The Savage Detectives turned Bolao into a hot literary property, in the Spanish-reading
world at least. The Spanish edition contains a massive 125 pieces, including dozens of short newspaper
columns, so you might prejudge it as a mixed bag. Nevertheless, Natasha Wimmer, one of two major
Bolao translators, says the book is a kind of literary autobiographyintense, funny, scathing, moving.
Bolao isnt bound by many conventions in writing about himself or about other writers, and hes in full
oblique-lyrical sail in lots of these pieces. Its the kind of book that actually makes you gasp in placesat
Bolaos daring, at his honesty, and at his skill.
Incidentally, not all of Entre Parentesiss is necessarily non-fiction. There has been a certain amount of
controversy over one of its essays, titled Playa, which begins with an apparent admission that Bolao
had at some point been addicted to heroin - leading to speculation that this might have caused the liver
disease that killed him. After refutations from Bolaos widow and literary agent, it seems that Playa, in
the English edition, is going to be tagged as fiction. You can read an unofficial translation of Playa here.
The Romantic Dogs (March 2011) Published in Spanish in 2000 as Los perros romnticos
Here, you might say, is the rub. This is a collection of poems, written between 1980-1998. Bolao
considered himself primarily a poet, not a novelist.
Antwerp (Sep 2011) Published in Spanish in 2002 as Amberes.
Fragmentary novel? Series of prose poems? This early piece (written in 1980, making it the authors first
novel, though not published at the time) is Bolao as his most experimental. Not the best way in for
newcomers.
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The Third Reich (J an 2012) First published in Spanish in 2010 as El Tercer Reich.
A novel found among Bolaos papers after his death. It seems it was a work-in-progress that Bolao
abandoned in order to be able to complete 2666 a partially typed-up manuscript based on a longer
handwritten manuscript from 1989. It concerns Udo Berger, a German war-gaming champion holidaying
on the Costa Brava before a big tournament, who finds himself sucked into a paranoid battle with an
enigmatic local figure, El Quemado. There was, in fact, a real strategy board game, Rise and Decline of
the Third Reich, which Bolao seems to have used as his model.
The Insufferable Gaucho (J an 2013) First published in Spanish in 2003 as El Gaucho Insufrible
A collection of five stories and two essays. Completed by Bolao before his death.
The Secret of Evil (Sept 2013) Published in Spanish in 2007 as El Secreto del Mal.
Posthumous collection of short stories and essays, mostly unfinished, taken from Bolaos papers after
his death.

Center For The Art Of Translation
I nt er vi ew w i t h Nat asha Wi mmer
On the publication of the issue of Two Lines which she co-edited
Posted on October 04, 2010 by Scott Esposito
Scott Esposito: In your introduction to Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, you make reference to one the
novel excerpts in this book. In it, a doctor at a sanatorium in Russia thats similar to the sanatorium inThe
Magic Mountain is sent a copy of that book. Far from reveling in the similarities--as the acquaintance
who sends him the book suggests--the doctor finds Manns characters frivolous and backward. You go on
to say that the pieces in this volume are stubborn and honest just like that doctor. I wanted to start by
asking why you find those qualities valuable for a collection of literary translation.
Natasha Wimmer: I guess I find those qualities valuable for any kind of fiction, translated or not. In the
case of literature in translation, they may be even more valuable, because the more directly the writer
speaks to the reader, the more easily he or she transcends cultural barriers. Its hard enough to
communicate across cultures, but when formal conventions get in the way, its even harder. The Mann
episode in the novel excerpt that you mention is especially revealing and immediate because in it, through
the narrator, the writer weighs in on the very problem of conventions: in this case, the (to him) alien
conventions of a classic Western novel.
Scott Esposito: You also mention in your introduction that as one of Bolanos translators youve seen
first-hand just how much an author in translation can shape perceptions. It might be a little too much to
hope that Beautiful Signal will have quite the impact that Bolano has had, but what is your hope for the
kind of impact that a series like Two Lines will make?
Natasha Wimmer: I actually think that the greatest impact a series like TWO LINES can have is
indirect. Of course, its wonderful when the average reader picks up a journal like this, but realistically,
readers of Two Lines are probably already avid readers of translation. On the other hand, a series like
TWO LINES is a great way for younger translators and writers unknown in the U.S. to get a foothold and
gradually worm their way into the American consciousness. The editors, writers, and readers of influence
who pick up TWO LINES are an ideal first audience for new literature in translation.
Scott Esposito: Do you feel like literature in translation in the U.S. has become higher-profile in the
years since Bolano came on the scene, roughly since 2003?
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Natasha Wimmer: Hard to say, since Im not a neutral observer, but it seems that way. A lot of people
are certainly working very hard to get translation to the American public, which is especially remarkable
considering the general state of book publishing in the U.S.
Scott Esposito: One of the distinctive things about TWO LINES is that its printed multi-lingually. I
think something around 15 separate languages are represented in Beautiful Signal--there are some
particularly uncommon ones in this volume, like Zapotec and Uyghur. As someone whos not fluent in 15
languages, what do you think is the value of having those original languages in there?
Natasha Wimmer: The look of an unfamiliar script on the page is beautiful in and of itself. Beyond that,
I think its nice to remind readers that there is an original text, and one of the best and most immediate
ways to do that is to simply present that text. And when the alphabet is familiar, the diligent reader can
get some sense of the sound and rhythm of the original, even if the meaning isnt comprehensible.
Scott Esposito: Lastly, I wanted to ask you about the piece you translated for this volume, Roberto
Bolanos essay La traduccion en un yunque, which you translated as Translation Is a Testing Ground.
Its an interesting piece about the limits of translation, which it illustrates by talking about those authors
who will and can be translated versus those who cant or wont. What was the thought-process that got
you from yunque to testing ground? And did your own extensive experience with translation inform
your decision to go for this interpretation of yunque?
Natasha Wimmer: Yunque means anvil, so the suggestion is that translation is the anvil on which
literature is tested. If its good enough, it will survive even the worst translation, or the most brutal
pounding of the hammer. It seemed to me that the meaning of La traduccin es un yunque was more
immediately obvious in Spanish than in English, so I gave the title an interpretive rather than a literal
translation. In retrospect, though, I wonder whether it wouldnt have been better to leave it as
Translation is an Anvil, which also (it occurs to me now) suggests that translation is a heavy weight
falling from a great height on a poor unsuspecting text. Maybe Ill change it for the book version (the
essay will be published in the forthcoming collection Between Parentheses)check in and see!

On a trip to Barcelona several years ago, I had drinks with the Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresn. We
discussed our favorite U.S. writers. Rodrigo loved Chuck Palahniuk and J ohn Cheever; I spoke highly of
Alice Munro and George Saunders; we agreed on David Foster Wallace. But when I asked Rodrigo what
Spanish-language writers I should read, the answer was unequivocal. Bioy Casares! he said. You
havent read The Invention of Morel? And he whisked me off to the Barcelona bookstore and institution
La Central and bought me a copy on the spot.
Not only had I not read it, Im ashamed to say I hadnt even heard of it. As anyone with more than a
passing acquaintance with Argentinian literature will tell you, this was a travesty. Once youve read
Borges, you read his great friend and collaborator, Bioy. The cult classic The Invention of Morel is
perhaps the defining work of fantastic literature in Spanish, and as Rodrigo would say, fantastic literature
may be the Argentinian literature par excellence.
I hadnt heard of Bioy, but somehow I had heard of Silvina Ocampo, the writer who became Bioys lover
when he was 19 and she was 30, and who later married him. In my mind, there was some romance
attached to Silvina and to her sister Victoria Ocampo (editor of the influential literary journal Sur). I
associated them with the Woolf sisters as leaders of influential intellectual circlesand, frankly, as icons
of upper-crust style. I remember seeing dusty copies of elegant editions of Silvinas stories in Mexico
City, and I may even have bought one, later to be misplaced, unread. It wouldnt have surprised me to
discover (as I later did) that she had first learned to write in French and English and had been tutored in
painting by Giorgio di Chirico.
As might be expected, a delicious hypersensitivity to luxury and foreign refinement permeates Bioys and
Ocampos sole collaborative novel, The Thin Line between Love and Hate, an excerpt of which will
appear in the forthcoming edition of TWO LINES. Theres something almost painful about the way the
narrator savors the artifacts of civilization: The last drops of arsenic (arsenicum album) dissolve in my
mouth, insipidly, comfortingly. To my left, on the desk, is the copya beautiful Bodoniof Gaius
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Petroniuss Satyricon. Ocampos and Bioys language is just as cultivated and delectable, as silky as
some expensive fabric (imported, of course).
I didnt realize it until later, but the other Spanish-language excerpt included in this volume of TWO
LINES is a perfect sequel to the intense stylings of Bioy and Ocampo. Samanta Schweblin, born in 1978,
also writes in excruciating sensory detail, the clarity of her prose bringing her surreal scenarios into sharp
focus. After reading Birds in the Mouth, the crunch of tiny bones and feathers lingers unpleasantly
even sinisterlyin the readers consciousness. Theres no denying the cultish mix of seduction and horror
that permeates Schweblins stories: they, too, are cult classics in the making.

http://conversationalreading.com/nine-questions-for-natasha-wimmer-on-the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/
Ni ne Quest i ons f or Nat asha Wi mmer
on The Thi r d Rei c h by Rober t o Bol ao
Roberto Bolao and Natasha Wimmer are two people who require no introduction for readers of this blog.
So instead, lets introduce the book at hand: The Third Reich, the latest Bolao book to be published in
English.
The Third Reich was unpublished at the time of Bolaos death, but there are indications that he meant it
to be published one day: he had begun typing it up, as he did with earlier unpublished novels that were
eventually published in his lifetime. The book follows the transformation of one Udo Berger, a German
tourist in Spains Costa Brava as he plays a board game called The Third Reich.
Wimmer corresponded with me on the actual board game that inspired The Third Reich, reading fast for
pleasure vs reading slow for translation, the role of creativity in the process of translation, and readings
and misreadings of Roberto Bolao. She is currently translating Bolaos Los sinsabores del verdadero
polica, which takes as its protagonist Amalfitano from 2666.
Scott Esposito: To start, you once described this book to me as Bolao in farce mode, and youve
also told me its Bolaos funniest book. Given that this book deals with a lot of the familiar Bolao
tropeshorror, fascism, exile, that vague sense of existential menace we all seem to live with these
daysin other words, some fairly unfunny stuff, Im curious to know what youre keying in on as
the humorous aspect of the book. What indicates to you that this is humor, and what kind?
Natasha Wimmer: Its truethe first time I read The Third Reich I was so struck by the audaciousness of
the humor that I had to keep putting the book down to snort in disbelief. I should say that I think Bolao
is generally a funny writer, and maybe especially so in his most apocalyptic moments. A fair number of
tragic scenes in 2666Hans Reiters lover dying of consumption in The Part About Arcimboldi, for
exampleare so florid that I, at least, cant take them entirely seriouslyand I dont think Bolao
expects us to. In The Third Reich, the cheerfully banal hotel setting struck me immediately as a stage for
farce. The early scene in which Udo clashes with the hotel staff when he demands a proper-sized table for
his gaming is a brilliant comic set piece. Then theres the outrageous self-seriousness of Udo, the
protagonist (compare him to The Savage Detectives Garca Madero, who is full of himself but also
vulnerable). The game itself almost demands to be mocked. And the whole world of gaming zines that
Udo is so eager to break into struck me as a parody of the literary world, with its conferences and
eminences and publishing contretemps. Most of all, though, I feel that in this book Bolao exploits to
humorous ends the very sense of foreboding that is arguably the trademark of his fiction. Over and over
again he sets the reader up to expect some terrible occurrenceand particularly some terrible clash with
El Quemado, the hideously scarred pedal boat manand then fails to deliver. The climactic dream-scene
in which Udo is pursued by a phalanx of pedal boats, for example, is truly and deliciously silly. The
pacing of the book overallwhich I think is one of its most distinctive stylistic featuresbreeds a sense
of anticlimax, as Udos stay at the hotel is endlessly drawn out.
SE: Its interesting that you read the novels lack of a strong climax as a positive thing, since Ive
seen a number of reviewers ding The Third Reich for not having that one culminating scene of
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horror that many of Bolaos other novels accustom you to expect. (For my own part, I liked the
anti-climax, regarding it more as a failure of Udos transformation than of Bolaos imagination.)
To tie this in to your reading of the book as a farce, do you think theres a certain perception out
there of what Bolao represents and that a book like Third Reich will be judged in terms of whats
accepted Bolao instead of simply on its own terms?
NW: Yes, I do think that there is a certain expectation of what a Bolao novel will be, and I worried from
the beginning that critics wouldnt appreciate The Third Reich. Mostly I thought they would have
problems with it on a sentence level, because Bolaos 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 its one giant oblique-lyrical moment, and that the pacing is what
gives it its stylistic edge and distinctiveness. Its 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 Udos transformation, although I do think that hes changeddiminished,
or somehow shrunkenby his loss of faith in gaming, absurd or creepy as that faith was.
SE: Was this reading of the book as a farce something you came across on your initial read, or did
it come out as you took the book apart for the translation? And could you talk a little generally
about how a book changes in your perception from that first read to the subsequent readings as you
translate it?
NW: It was definitely something I came across on my initial read, and it didnt change. As for the way my
perception of a book shifts in the course of translation: as I work, I almost always become fonder and
fonder of the book in question. I pick up on all kinds of details and correspondences that I wouldnt notice
as a casual reader (Bolao in particular is a massive tapestry of correspondences), and I develop a kind of
personal allegiance to the book even if I didnt love it at first. It may help that Ive never translated a book
I out-and-out hated.
Also: George Steiner says somewhere that translating is like loosening the weave of a fabric until you can
see the light through it. He considers this to be a negative effect, but its something I must admit I enjoy.
As a civilian reader, I tend to read too quickly, skimming over small tangled bits without even noticing,
but as a translator I have to shine a light on every phrase and decipher what I think the author means, even
if theres no way to know for sure, and even if it happens to be a phrase that was obscure to the author
himself. This is especially true when the author is dead, of course. The result is a text that is perhaps too
brightly lit, but the experience of total illumination can be an exhilarating one for the translator.
SE: Given that theres a range of opinion as to how to untangle those bits (or how much to), and
also given that different translators will read texts in different ways (and thus produce slightly
different versions in English), to what extent do you view translation as a creative or interpretive
act?
NW: Only to a minor extent. I think critics tend to overemphasize the importance of individual phrases
and bits and dont take into account the extent to which plot and subject matter (things a translator has no
power to alter) affect our experience of a novel, and even our sense of the novels style. Small things do
add up, but I would argue that as long as the translation is consistent and confident (and competent), the
degree to which its tilted in any particular direction by the translator is so slight as to be insignificant.
SE: Since youve written a lot of book reviews, Id like to ask where you think reading books for
review fits on this continuum between reading very quickly for pure pleasure and reading very
slowly for translation. For my own part, I tend to like to read a book Im reviewing very quickly on
a first pass to get a very hot impression of the book as a whole, but I always go back through
more slowly to pick up nuance and fill out my impression.
NW: Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican essayist and poet Ive translated, has some great things to say about the
importance of reading quickly. He goes so far as to claim that unless you move along at a decent speed,
you arent really getting a sense of the book at allI think he compares it to getting a slugs-eye view of
a mural. I do think thats true for me. I cant say it applies especially to books that I read in order to
review, but it does explain why I find it so depressingly difficult to read now that I have small children,
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and why I so often cant manage to finish a book. I simply cant move fast enough to get up the proper
momentum.
SE: Fascism and the Nazis in particular were important touchstones to Bolao throughout all of his
major novels, so its obviously notable that he titled this book The Third Reich, of all things. But
then, being Bolao, he turns that in to something of a red herring, as he never actually discusses the
thing that we all immediately think of when we hear the words third reich. Instead, Bolaos
third reich is a Risk-like board game played by a nerdy subculture (thats the name of the game,
The Third Reich), sort of like Dungeons and Dragons. How do you see this game functioning in the
book?
NW: I guess I see it as a stand-in for literature, as something at once ridiculously trivial and deadly
important. I think theres a consciousness of that tension in most of Bolaos novels, but here the triviality
is played up to an unusual degree. Its this triumph of the trivialthe conclusion that yes, gaming is
meaningless, and literature too, by extensionthat gives the novel an unfunny edge. Incidentally, the
game referred to in the book is a real game, called Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. I bought an old
copy of it on Ebay for research purposes.
SE: Im surprised to hear that the game exists, but not that surprised, since I read that Bolao was a huge
enthusiast of these games. (I love the idea of the author of By Night in Chile and Distant Star playing this
game.) It would be interesting to actually see the game as a real, physical object, since in The Third Reich
Bolao only grants the game a kind of piecemeal presence, where you feel like you only ever have access
to bits and pieces of this whole that you never come into contact with. With all that said, I dont know that
Ive ever heard of a translator purchasing a board game as a translation aid. Was it strange to see the game
after having it presented in The Third Reich?
NW: It was exciting to see the gameyou rarely have that kind of tangible connection to a novel youre
translating. It was mostly useful to me as a source of vocabulary: the instructions are very long and
detailed, and the terminology corresponds pretty closely to Bolaos descriptions in the book. To fully
immerse myself, I really should have played a match, but its not an easy game to pick up quickly.
SE: Given the plot arc of The Third Reichwhere Udo inculcates a newcomer into The Third Reich,
with not-so-positive resultsits a little funny to think of you then being brought into the game as
an aspect of the novels translation. Do you see an analogue between the influence that a game like
The Third Reich works over on its participants and the influence that a book (like The Third Reich)
can exercise on its readers?
NW: Yes, to a certain degree. Though I think a great novel exerts a more powerful influence than a great
game. Gamers, of course, might take issue with that. Im not a gamer myself, but for the record I will say
that I spent one very happy winter when I was thirteen playing Dungeons & Dragons. In theory, books
and strategy games both encourage the reader or player to immerse herself in worlds of the imagination,
but I would argue that game worlds are so rule-bound and elaborately conceived that they dont actually
leave much room for the imagination. I would say theyre really more about puzzle-solving. But I do
think that game-players and obsessive readers (particularly those who fixate on a single author or book)
are often consumed by minutiae in ways that are recognizably similar.
SE: Thats a good point about game-players and obsessive readers focusing on minutiae, and
Bolao of course encourages this by distributing characters and images among his novels and
stories. Even so, I feel like with an author like Bolao focusing on the minutiae too much is to
somewhat miss out on the good stuff, which, for me, are the stand-out scenes and images, and the
ways in which they interrelate throughout a work. I would say his minutiae is more toward creating
an atmosphere and a strong sense of an idiosyncratic Bolao world than toward offering fodder
for literary interpretation. How do you prefer to read and interpret his work?
NW: Bolao himself said that he intended everything he wrote to make up part of a total novel or
roman-fleuve, so I think the reader is absolutely intended to feel as if shes entering a Bolao world. The
consistency of his vision is one of the most striking things about his work. Its so strong that after reading
one of his novels (or essaysmakes no difference), it can be hard to pry yourself out of Bolao mode.
113

But the reader who focuses on minutiae will soon discover that Bolao is absolutely inconsistent on a
detail level. Characters are constantly cropping up in different novels, but theyre never exactly the same
characters. Even specific passages (long passages!) appear in multiple forms in different places. Its like
being in a dream, in which the markers of identity are fluid (one minute youre yourself and the next
minute youre someone else) but the essences they represent remain constant.


http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/this-week-in-fiction-roberto-bolano.html
New Yorker, January 16, 2012
This Week in Fiction: The True Bolao
This weeks fiction offering is Labyrinth, by Roberto Bolao. The late authors first American
publisher, Barbara Epler of New Directions, exchanged e-mails with Willing Davidson, an editor in the
magazines fiction department.
New Directions has published Roberto Bolao since By Night in Chile, which came out in 2003. How
did you come to publish him?
Over drinks, my friend Francisco Goldman started chewing my ear off about Roberto Bolao, and, oddly,
just a few days after our date, a pal at another, larger publishing house asked me which new authors I
might be stalking, and I mentioned Bolao, along with a few other writers from abroad. And that friend
said, Oh, I saw a Harvill galley of a novel by Roberto Bolao floating around our office. So I called
Christopher MacLehose, the great English editor, and asked for a galley. (As a small publisher with not
very deep pockets, we are often not first in line.) I read By Night in Chile the night it arrived, and told
my boss Peggy Fox we had to buy it: I was bowled over, Bolao was a genius, and I explained that other
houses had the galley, too, so we had to move fast, and she said: O.K. I realized a few days later that Id
once read a Bolao story in Grand Street, and I looked it up (Telephone Calls) and read it again, and it
was very different from By Night in Chile, and that was very intriguing. When Harvill asked that we
commit to three books (to also buy Distant Star and Last Evenings on Earth), we said, Yes.
I had no idea he would catch on like wild fire. (Susan Sontags endorsement helped a lot.)
I wrote him a raving fan letter and a month later he was dead.
When and how did New Directions come to commit to publishing almost all of his work, and was it
immediately clear to you how broad his range was?
I had that first sense of his range with the Grand Street story and By Night in Chile. When Distant
Star came inthat was such a marvellous bookI felt the doors opening wider, but it was the tonalities
and various powers of The Last Evenings on Earth manuscript that blew the house wide open. Those
stories amazed meand I was already gobsmacked.
And meanwhile, Bolao caught on: The New Yorker and other magazines started publishing his stories,
everyone was talking about him, writers pounced on Bolao like catnip. Francisco was busy urging me to
get The Savage Detectives. By the spring of 2006, Bolaos rights were represented by Agencia
Literaria Carmen Balcells, and I was asking and asking them about the offer wed made for The Savage
Detectives and getting no reply. My heart sank when they e-mailed to say, Were coming to New York
and want to take you out to dinner. I knew they must be shopping The Savage Detectives. I went to
supper, and considerably (by our standards) improved my offer. Finally one of the Balcells ladies put her
hand on my arm and said, The Estate wants a larger house for the big books. I was about to cry, and
they knew wed done everything we could for the author here, so they offered, if we were willing to take
all the small books on, that we could. So we took everything we could get, everything that at that point
we knew existed. Another ten titles. (Later, to round out the Bolao list at New Directions, we bought two
poetry books from the new agent, Andrew Wylie.)
How do you approach editing the work of writers who are not only not writing in English, but are also no
longer living?
114

I rely on the wizardry and brilliance of our translators: in Bolaos case, we couldnt do better. Between
Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer, theyve won every prize. Theyve done us proud. (We also have
Spanish readers in house so I can ask questions pegged to the original if I feel something is off, but
usually I just edit the translators English, and point out here and there little snags in the beautiful silk
theyve woven.)
Whats your favorite Bolao book, and what are some of the qualities that you prize in his writing?
Thats such a hard question; its impossible, but, in part because it was so overlooked, Ill choose
Amulet.
Amulet begins: This is going to be a horror story.
Its qualities encapsulate those I prize in all his work: it is a breathtaking, melancholy book about violence
and absurd valor told with humor that is half poetry and half a graveyard laugh.
This magic novelset in a university ladies room, in the dark night of the soul of Mexico City, in
dreams, in ice-bound mountains and seedy cantinaswas swamped by the appearance of The Savage
Detectives, especially as our heroine, Auxilio Lacouture, also makes an appearance in the big book. (The
reviewers seem to have viewed it as a kind of outtake, rather than its own unique cosmos.)
The multiple registers Bolao can manage in a single storyin a single paragraph (wickedly funny,
terrifying, morose, tender)have always amazed me. But for his tenderness I have a special soft spot, and
this may be his most tender novel of all.
Other qualities that particularly engage me are his love of the underdog and the marginalized (drifters;
people working menial, makeshift jobs; porn stars) and his obsession with courage. While he touches on
bravery in every book he ever wrote, he explicitly talks about it in his essay collection Between
Parentheses. He writes:
Courage takes many forms. Sometimes its a ghost that hovers over our heads. Sometimes its a gleam to
which we are irrationally faithful.
Bolaos own courage extended to his fearless tackling of all genres. A poet, he reinvents fiction. Bolao
pulls off all sorts of dangerous stunts on a high wire, with no net. And I love Bolaos love for literature:
he doesnt care if it might seem cornyI love his fearlessness about irradiating every page of every book
with that love. And when you think that he was working away on 2666, that masterpiece, as he was
dying. It seems all the more extraordinary that to the very end hes so spell-binding, frightening,
entertaining, innovative, and shining. As Francisco says, Hes in a race with Death and its as if Death is
cheering him on.
He was so brave.
On the subject of courage, Id like to take this opportunity to set the record straight about Bolaos
personal, physical courage. Somehow, a mistaken impression has surfaced in the press that Bolao made
up the story (which in fact became central to several plot lines you find in his work) that in 1973 he left
Mexico and returned to his native Chile to help build socialism just before Pinochets coup. It has been
said that he never really went, was never caught and arrested. More or less, its been said he was a liar.
In fact, he did go and only by a fluke of chance survived. His friend Horacio Castellanos Moya told me:
There is a book, its title Bolao antes de Bolao (Bolao before Bolao), its author is the Chilean poet
J aime Quezada and it was published by the publishing house Catalonia, in Chile, 2007. There you have
the testimonies of J aime Quezada, who was Bolaos mothers friend and in whose house Bolao stayed
in Santiago when he went in 1973. (Moya also sent me an article in Ugarte magazine: There is
information on Bolao coming back from Chile, passing through El Salvador.)
He didnt lie about the 1973 trip, and after all the pleasure he has given us, I think Bolao deserves better.
But all in all, for me, with Bolao, as with all truly great writers, I cant say just how he casts the spell
whereby we sense something essential about life and death, something weve always known but cannot
say, or how he gives me so much joy: he just does.
115

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/this-week-in-fiction-roberto-
bolano.html#ixzz1jfUGLHjA

http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/war-games-on-roberto-bolanos-the-third-reich.html
The Millions
War Games: On Roberto Bolaos The Third Reich
By ANTHONY PALETTA posted at 6:00 am on February 10, 2012
Gaming in literature tends to come in two varieties; the high-brow and highly abstract, and the demotic
and irredeemably nerdy. Look to puzzles in Perecs Life, A Users Manual or chess in Nabokovs The
Luzhin Defense, for the former, and sci-fi literature for the latter. Historically-based wargaming has
largely fallen through the gap; there is Uncle Toby and Corporal Trims effort to recreate the siege of
Namur in Tristram Shandy but otherwise it is a hobbyist corner given little literary attention. Until, oddly
enough, Roberto Bolaos latest exhumed English translation, The Third Reich. This novel, to be clear,
takes its name not from that short-lived empire, but from a multiplayer strategy game depicting its span,
of which the books protagonist is an avid devotee.
Udo Berger, vacationing on the Catalan coast with his girlfriend Ingeborg, is not particularly given to
sunshine. He spends much of the novel in his hotel room, unfurling scenarios for The Third Reich and
soon launching into a fraught match with a local. Reviewers of the novel, written in 1990, but released in
an English translation late last year, seem to be at some loss to describe just what, in fact, Bergers
wargaming constitutes, with most quickly settling upon the notion that it is obsessive. Thats not
inaccurate, but its a sort of obsession rendered by a clear kindred spirit, with a detail of gameplay
description impossible to anyone who wasnt deeply familiar with the topic. Bolao, a known enthusiast
for these very games (which also cropped up in his Nazi Literture in the Americas), clearly was.
The novel offers a deep look into a pre-electronic world of dizzyingly complex and varied historical
boardgaming, in an age when games depicting the Zulu Wars, the Six-Day War, or the hunt for the
Bismarck did a brisk business, whether around a table or in elaborate games by mail. The company
Avalon Hill, creator of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, spent four decades creating willfully
arcane games, with diffuse efforts to simulate the diving speed of a Sopwith Camel, the morale of
American Civil War units after a march, and the particular effectiveness of chainshot (two cannonballs
chained together) when fired at a sailing ships rigging. It should come as no surprise that turns can
require more than an hour to complete, even when all players are around the same table. A mail-in card in
my copy of Richtofens War: The Air War 1914-1918? reads, pre-printed Please send me your colorful
brochure describing all Avalon Hill games and Play-by-Mail kits and your exclusive gaming magazine. I
swear that I have the necessary grey-matter to enjoy your games.
It wouldnt be unfair if this brings to mind the minutiae of role-playing gaming, with one crucial
difference: the referent for historical gamers, however quixotic in practice, is history itself, not, say, the
Star Wars C-Canon (the third level of verisimilitude in the Star Wars universe). Games invariably
include design notes about historical accuracy and many feature separate simply historical accounts of the
events depicted. In early years, Avalon Hill advertised a beribboned military advisory staff (featuring
Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, of Nuts fame at the Battle of the Bulge) and provided a forum for heavily
footnoted historical arguments on gaming accuracy in its monthly magazine The General. There,
arguments over scenarios, tweaks, and historical fealty unfolded, issue after issue. If sci-fi gaming offered
countless occasions for spiritual and factual improvisation, board wargaming is a realm for high-church
scriptural literalists.
The Third Reichs protagonist, Udo Berger, is not merely a gamer, but a participant in these very
arguments: a contributor to The General and several of its peers, and a holder of spirited opinions on real-
life magazine contributors (it might please Michael Anchors, genuine wargaming author, to learn
Bergers opinion that he is original and full with enthusiasm.) Bergers contributions run in the range of
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gameplay, obliterating essays by Benjamin Clark (Waterloo #14) and J ack Corso (The General, #3, vol.
17) in which each advises against the creation of more than one front in the first year.
Bergers projects entail substantial hours spent in solitary indoor play, an admittedly curious direction for
a beach vacation. As the hotel owners wife comments A winter sport; at this time of year youd do
better to swim or play tennis. His gameplay reveries stretch considerably into the technical:
In any deployment the strongest hex will be the one where the English armored corps is located, whether
P23 or O23, and it will determine the focus of the German attack. This attack will be carried out with very
few units. If the English armored corps is in P23, the German attack will be launched from O24; if, on the
contrary, the English armored corps is in O23, the attack must be launched from the N24, through the
south of Belgium.
And so on. Much of this must sound like shorthand for obsession, yet this sort of thinking is precisely
what is required in playing a game such as The Third Reich. You need not necessarily abandon the
outside world entirely (and Berger does not) but a commitment of time and thought is essential to any sort
of viability in the game. J ust as Nabokovs Luzhin undertakes:
At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments he would
rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that
move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been
beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that
remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one
returned to the main channel.
Luzhins father, aware of these locked-up hours, comes to suspect that Luzhin is looking for pictures of
naked women. Undistracted calculations of such sort are essential to any complex game; it is a solitary
vice which would no doubt be more easily understood were it lubricious.
Berger, though, as indicated, is more than an ordinary player, and while he plots inside, his girlfriend,
Ingeborg, takes up more conventional frolics, in the company of another German couple, Charley and
Hanna, and itinerant Spaniards known as the Wolf and the Lamb. Soon Hanna shows up with a black eye,
suffered at Charleys hand, and Charley simply disappears. In the aftermath of the investigation of his
disappearance both Ingeborg and Hanna depart; Udo stays on beyond the term of his vacation, in a
morbid wait for Charleys corpse, intensifying a flirtation with the wife of the hotels owner, growing
increasingly curious about the reclusive ailing owner, and drifting into a game of The Third Reich with
El Quemado, a laconic and severely burned beach paddleboat renter.
Udo, unsurprisingly, first routs the amateur El Quemado, He doesnt know how to stack the counters, he
plays sloppily, he has either no grand strategy or one that is too schematic, he trusts in luck, he makes
mistakes in his calculations of BRP, he confuses the creation of units phase with the SR. And yet soon
this formerly abstracted game takes on a very personal charge, as Udos macabre wait for a corpse
continues. Udo, along the beach one evening, overhears someone providing El Quemado advice on the
game; a figure he suspects is the hotel owner, who he suspects is opening a second front, as it were, in
response to Udos flirtations with his wife.
Thus, Frau Elses husband has news of me from two sources: El Quemado tells him about the match and
his wife tells him about our flirtation. Im the one at a disadvantage; I dont know anything about him,
except that hes sick. But I can guess a few things. He wants me to leave; he wants me to lose the match;
he doesnt want me to sleep with his wife. The Eastern Offensive continues. The armored wedge (four
corps) meets and pierces the Western front at Smolensk, then goes on to take Moscow, which falls in an
Exploitation move.
It neednt be explained at this point that the only conceivable drive on Moscow would originate with the
Axis player Berger, of Stuttgart, which raises a second crucial aspect of the game and its role in the
novel. Perhaps lost in the myopia of the board, I hadnt considered, for years until reading the novel, the
implacably strange appearance of spending countless leisure hours in order to achieve victory not for say,
Team Red, but for Nazi Germany, and in The Third Reich several characters wonder about this very
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reasonable question. A hotel maid asks Udo, are you a Nazi? The question acquires increasingly dire
weight as, over time, the fall of Berlin looms in the game itself. As the hotel owner observes: Ah, my
friend, in that poor boys nightmares the trial may be the most important part of the game, the only thing
that makes it worthwhile to spend so many hours playing it. A chance to hang the Nazis!
In fact, Berger declares that hes more like an anti-Nazi and were given no reason to doubt him
whatsoever; that said, its no surprise that the enthusiasm of a German for steering Germany would raise
eyebrows. This brings to the fore the aspect of gaming that Bolao exploits most deftly: the almost
unavoidable historical romanticism that attends most wargaming.
Despite the profusion of novelty chess sets, a chess piece seems most frequently a blank signifier, a store
of potential for movement; a Knight rarely seems imbued with the qualities of Lancelot or Gawain.
Historical wargaming, however, tends to inevitably accentuate links between a subject and its
representation. Berger fantasizes about symbolic figures with the ability to storm into your dreams,
recalling favorite maneuvers, Rommels ride with the 7th Armored in 40. Student falling on Crete,
Kleists advance through the Caucasus with the First Panzer Army, Manteuffels offensive in the
Ardennes with the Eleventh Army.
Is this something only a German would do, a sign of some latent crypto-fascism? No, its something that
countless wargamers do, and nothing unusual in a recreation reliant upon the approximated capacities and
skills of very real former generals, units, and armies, about whom there are countless very specific
monographs published each year (conduct an Amazon search for upcoming history books; the number of
volumes on military history is typically only slightly below the number on American history). Ambrogio
Spinolas actual function in a battle might be to provide an outflanking factor of 6, but hes also the victor
depicted in Velazquezs The Surrender of Breda. Albrecht Von Wallenstein may prove functionally
inferior to Gustavus Adolphus in leadership points, but hes also the subject of three Schiller plays;
background that one does not simply forget. Berger, of course, takes this a bit father.
If El Quemado had the slightest knowledge or appreciation of twentieth-century German literature (and
its likely that he does) Id tell him that Manstein is likeCelan. And Paulus is like Trakl, and his
predecessor, Reichenau, is like Heinrich Mann. Guderian is the equivalent of J nger, and Kluge of Boll.
Is this typical? Well, no, it is mildly absurd, and yet a sense of just where Bergers enthusiasm rests offers
a captivating puzzle; is this crypto-nationalism or is it merely gaming ad absurdum? At one point, Else
asks And what does it mean to be German? Berger responds, I dont know exactly. Something
difficult, thats for sure. Something that weve gradually forgotten. Is this an effort to construct some
untroubled national identity through fantasy, to reconstruct devastation into art, reducing war to its
tactical essence and leaving out anything that is unsavory? Perhaps. Whatever the case, its been a pursuit
with essentially no consequence until the game with El Quemado begins and Berger begins to suspect
that darker consequences may loom.
Its clearly not unusual to append dire consequences to the outcome of a game; one can always play chess
with death. It is unusual to align these antagonists with any sense of national identification; most games
do not lend themselves to the practice. A German playing Germany in a World War II simulation makes
for a far different landscape, however. And whether Bergers fears are those of a fantasist recluse
imagining threats or of a suppressed recidivist realizing that refashioning history might have some
consequence is a tantalizing question, all made possible through Bolaos superb exploration of just what
conflating these two tendencies might produce. An attack on Moscow might merely involve a roll of the
dice, but it might involve quite more.

The Millions, 7 May 2012
Bol aos Last , Gr eat Sec r et
By R.B. MORENO posted at 12:00 pm on May 7, 2012
118

We are poor passing facts
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Robert Lowell, Epilogue
1.
Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolao, the prolific genre-bender whose
narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New
Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine,
including J anuarys Labyrinth,
1
which accompanied a curious photograph. But Ill get to that in a
moment. First, a bit about Bolaos following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said
world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, Gomez Palacio,
2
his
posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote
Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which Gomez Palacio
appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: I was glad the doctor was running late, she
wrote later in reviewing
3
Last Evenings on Earth, so I could read the story twice, and still have a few
minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and
(at least to me) entirely new.
Francisco Goldman, who likened The Great Bolao
4
to Borges in a profile for The New York Review
of Books, dates the ex-Chileans rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives won a coveted Venezuelan
prize for the best Spanish-language novel. The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the
relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bolaos writings, reads Goldmans
summary of his subjects legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections.
(Bolaos drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666, a far-flung novel involving the murders of
women in the Sonora desert, is thought
5
to have exacerbated his liver condition.) Its as if Bolao is
satirizing the routine self-pity of exile, adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (Mauricio
The Eye Silva). Yet the storys mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive
sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.
Separating facts from other kinds of truthfulness in Bolaos oeuvre becomes a difficult task, to say
nothing of counting up the authors works themselves. The Millions began keeping A Bolao Syllabus
6

in 2009 and has updated
7
that list since. Oh! an anxious reader posted the following year. But what
about all the new and recent translations out from New Directions? What of them? What indeed; lets
recap. With the help of American translator Natasha Wimmer and Melbourne-based Chris Andrews, who
first brought Bolao to English and continues to handle his shorter works, New Directions has
published more than a dozen
8
posthumous volumes ranging from poetry to newspaper columns. In
an interview
9
that coincided with Labyrinth, Barbara Epler, president of New Directions and a longtime
editor, relates the story of her houses 2006 windfall to The New Yorker:
Bolaos rights were represented by Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, and I was asking and asking
them about the offer wed made for The Savage Detectives and getting no reply. My heart sank when they
e-mailed to say, Were coming to New York and want to take you out to dinner. I knew they must be
shopping The Savage Detectives. I went to supper, and considerably (by our standards) improved my
offer. Finally one of the Balcells ladies put her hand on my arm and said, The Estate wants a larger
house for the big books. I was about to cry, and they knew wed done everything we could for the author
1
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/01/23/120123fi_fiction_bolano?currentPage=all
2
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/08/050808fi_fiction_bolano?currentPage=all
3
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/books/review/09prose.html?pagewanted=all
4
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jul/19/the-great-bolano/
5
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski/?currentPage=all
6
http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/a-bolano-syllabus.html
7
http://www.themillions.com/2010/11/the-bolano-syllabus-updated.html
8
http://ndbooks.com/author/roberto-bolano
9
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/this-week-in-fiction-roberto-bolano.html

119

here, so they offered, if we were willing to take all the small books on, that we could. So we took
everything we could get, everything that at that point we knew existed.
With the close of the post-Bolao decade, it seems that the tide of the authors original works is finally
ebbing. New Directions latest release, much to my delight and that of other genre boundary-watchers,
is The Secret of Evil, a thin collection of fictions that occasionally read as essays. Or is it the other way
around? At times, were not sure. In turning the title page, explains the books jacket, we open a certain
computer file: BAIRES, Bolao called it a nickname for Argentinas metropolis. There are multiple
indications that Bolao was working on this file in the months immediately preceding his death,
writes Ignacio Echeverra, the authors executor, in his prologue. But the task of gleaning 19 semi-
finished works from BAIRES, STORIX (another riddle), and about 50 other files was not without
complications namely Bolaos poetics of inconclusiveness, which Echeverra compares
to Kafkasabruptness. Decisions as to the wholeness and self-sufficiency of particular pieces, he warns
the critic, became inevitably subjective. Thus, along with a couple of previously-published lectures
(Vagaries of the Literature of Doom and Sevilla Kills Me) as well as the story of a Spanish familys
decimation in a bus accident (Muscles, likely an unfinished novel), the bulk of The Secret borders on
flash fiction two, four, and six-page sketches ranging from the swimming pools and watering holes of
Mexico City, Guatemala, Santiago, and Buenos Aires, to Madrid, Berlin, and most luminously, Paris.
As with The Insufferable Gaucho and Last Evenings before it, The New Yorker had the honor in J anuary
of cherry-picking from The Secret. Unlike the task of compiling this years collection, the choice was
obvious: at 18 pages, Labyrinth stands apart. It narrates the comings and goings of a cadre of European
intellectuals, including a brush with Z, a foreigner who ambushes the offices of Tel Quel, the Paris
journal of the avant-garde whose disappearance in 1982 roughly mirrored the waning of structuralism.
Who else knows Z? Our narrator presumably Bolao poses the question, which gradually nags at
the reader. No one, or at least there is nothing to suggest that his presence is of any concern to the
others. But then a few clues: Maybe hes a young writer who at some stage tried to get his work
published in Tel Quel; maybe hes a young journalist from South America, no, from Central America,
who at some point tried to write an article about the group.
2.
The startling thing about Labyrinth, beyond Zs ghostly presence on the page, is the way the story
unfolds, almost by way of evasion. (A footnote: Bolao quit the Americas in 1977 after being imprisoned
and nearly tortured by Pinochets forces in 1973; Barbara Epler vouched for this sometimes disputed
fact in her J anuary remarks.) For an illustration, try picturing the opening scene:
Theyre seated. Theyre looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J.
Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Rveill, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade.
Theres no photo credit.
Theyre sitting around a table. Its an ordinary table, made of wood, perhaps, or plastic, it could even be
a marble table on metal legs, but nothing could be less germane to my purpose than to give an exhaustive
description of it.
What Bolaos last masterpiece does proceed to describe, with East Germanic voyeurism, is the web of
relationships on display. Why? Because (1) unlike many tableside portraits in Paris, this image was not
intended for a magazine spread; and (2) because, importantly, not everyone is paying attention to the
photographer. Two of the women pictured gaze off-camera, in the same direction. They might be
preoccupied with an object of affection and its precisely this quality of deduction that fuels Bolaos
narrative.
What of the photo itself? Unfortunately for readers, it cant be found in The Secret of Evil. But it did
appear in The New Yorkers publication of Labyrinth, spread right across the opening pages. What more
can be said of the seated figures, we begin to wonder? This Henric, Goux, Sollers, Kristeva, Rveill,
whose gaze might betray surprise, her companion, Guyotat, and Mr. and Ms. Devade, one of whom wears
a half-smile? Quite a lot, we discover, as the story wanders away from the table, into streets and garages
and bedrooms, and back again in the evening, when night falls over the photograph. Yet these figures
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their vigorous couplings and jealousies are not at all figments of Bolaos imagination. A peculiar
hint of this reality can be found in a credit omitted from print but included in the storys online
publication, just below the magazines end sign: PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY J ACQUES HENRIC.
There are other signs, amid his wanderings, that our narrator is employing a fact pattern that Bolao
found more intriguing than outright fiction: The photo was probably taken in 1977 or thereabouts; The
photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer;
Lets suppose, for the moment, that its in a caf. By the storys midpoint, first names have emerged,
via conjecture and supposition, along with a few biographical details. Jacques Henric is a broad-
shouldered French novelist, born in 1938. Philippe Sollers, editor in chief of Tel Quel, has the look of a
man who enjoys a good meal. Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian seminologist at Sollerss elbow? His wife.
And Pierre Guyotat, author of Prostitution, among other works? A balding pervert whose temples
resemble nothing so much as the bay leaves that used to wreathe the heads of victorious Roman
generals. Rveill and the Devades come into focus, too, but Bolaos chess game is already a thing to
behold. Hes built for himself not just a labyrinth of the houseplants that obscure our view of the table
(there are three plants a rhododendron, a ficus, and an everlasting), but a living-breathing, true-to-
life mystery with so many shades of exposure, the storys inconclusiveness seems preordained,
exquisitely inevitable.
3.
In Reality Hunger, David Shields manifesto on societys latter-day enthusiasm for art rooted in fact (and
often troubled by genre), some 600 hastily-sourced meditations, including this essays epigraph, narrate
the authors own evolution as a consumer of literature, in a sort of collage. Im interested in the generic
edge, the boundary between what are roughly called nonfiction and fiction, reads an from entry
from Jonathan Raban (no. 191). But in the end Shields, like Bolao, crosses over the border, leaving
behind the dusty Republic of the Make-Believe. Take the following passage, one of the few in Reality
Hunger that doesnt need sourcing: I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that
presents itself unself-consciously as a novel, since its not clear to me how such a book could convey
what it feels like to be alive right now (Shields, no. 212). Plotlines, for this kind of writer, begin to feel
like artifice something to be stripped away and replaced by shape-shifting narratives open for
business way past closing time. Photographs, it just so happens, do just that. Why take them so
constantly, so obsessively? So that Ill see what Ive seen (Janette Turner Hospital, no. 137). Its
just this breathtaking world thats the point. The storys not important; whats important is the way the
world looks. Thats what makes you feel stuff. Thats what puts you there (Frederick Barthelme, no.
142).
Bolao goes missing from Shields collage, but I imagine Bolao would have enjoyed following its leads
in the manner of a good detective or a wayward journalist. I would have liked to be a homicide detective,
much more than a writer, Bolao told the Mexican edition of Playboy, in his last interview.
10
Of that
Im absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of
the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts. That fondness for investigation and self-projection becomes
recognizable throughout Bolaos fiction, but especially in later stories such as The Insufferable
Gauchos Police Rat, about four-legged Pepe, a rodent cop assigned to a vacant sewer. The Secret of
Evils title story, a three-page sketch of J oe A. Kelso, an American journalist in Paris stalked by a pale
man, a watcher with no one to watch him in turn, someone its going to be hard to get rid of, carries a
similar paranoia. And the same holds true for Labyrinth, whose shadowy, off-camera Z seems not a
stand-in for Bolao but a kind of alter ego: the handsome-but-nervous sort of exile desperate to join a
circle of writers sitting just beyond his reach.
Ive said enough about the above gathering already, but there is one further mystery worth noting. The
photo that appeared this past J anuary the same arrangement of eight figures from 1977 or
thereabouts, courtesy of Henric can be found published 14 years earlier, in a French history of Tel
Quel by Philippe Forest (Histoire de Tel Quel, Seuil, 1998). In translation, Forests caption reads Party
of LHumanit, 1970. From left to right: J acques Henric, J ean-J oseph Goux, Phillip Sollers, J ulia
10
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/stray-questions-for-roberto-bolano/

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Kristeva, Thrse Rveill, Pierre Guyotat, Catherine and Marc Devade (photo D. R.). LHumanit, the
Internet tells us, is a Paris daily still in print today, although its circulation rose and fell with the French
Communist Party, which began a slow decline that same decade. Where was Roberto Bolao in 1970?
Not, as the overexcited reader might assume, leaning against the bar, drawing stares from the table, but
working as a journalist in Mexico City, already involved with liberal causes and preparing to return, three
years later, to socialist Chile.
4.
We could go on in this vein, asking questions about Henric and D. R. and wondering whether Bolao
happened on Forests book late in life. Perhaps he recalled reading Tel Quel during his first days in Paris,
still shaking from what hed escaped, and decided to change a few details in service of a last, great story.
But we should, in fairness, allow Bolao a few secrets, and instead pause to marvel at the whole
collection. In some respects, The Secret of Evil fails to cohere: two brilliantly speculative shorts about a
roving V. S. Naipul vexed by the origins of sodomy end in confusion; another promising piece about
Bolao and his son playing a game of turning invisible turns into a rant. Still, the range and reality of
the writing left behind in cryptic BAIRES and STORIX, from an artist whose days were numbered, will
enchant even the uninitiated Bolaonista. And taxonomists, myself included, should praise New
Directions for a small thing that happened somewhere between the uncorrected proof and the finished
hardback that arrived at my door the other day: FICTION, on the books jacket, now reads
LITERATURE.


The Independent, Friday 12 July 2013
Fame af t er deat h:
Why Roberto Bolao became a literary superstar posthumously
Essay: Bolao died ten years ago. Novelist Andrs Neuman salutes a friend and accounts for his fame
by ANDRS NEUMAN
Ten years ago (although it seems like it was either yesterday or centuries ago), Roberto Bolao left. The
idea of disappearing, of leaving people stranded at the least expected moments, always entertained him.
His work is full of fugitives taking flight for unknown reasons. In 2666, Beno von Archimboldi is a
literary absence pursued over a thousand pages. In The Savage Detectives, even before they start
wandering the world, Belano and Lima spend their youth disappearing from Mexico City. Visceral
realists are fugitives from their own writing.
One day Bolao called me from his house in Blanes and asked me to read out loud an article about the
Buenos Aires Book Fair. When I went to look for the newspaper, I saw a huge photo of him. The article
announced that Bolao was in Argentina. "What do you make of that?" he asked me, accentuating his
hoarseness. "You see? I'm here and not there, now I'm not here but there, now I'm neither here nor there,
this is a recording, bye, this message will self-destruct in five seconds, four, three, two, one..." And the
call was cut off. This anecdote, which appears invented but isn't, reminds me of the interrupted
conversations in his short story "Phone Calls".
There are several reasons for Bolao's worldwide acclaim. The first is obvious: his immense talent,
capable of adding sex to Borges, muscle to Nicanor Parra, lyricism to Rodolfo Wilcock. But in addition to
this undeniable gift, other factors contributed to drawing attention to his voice. One of these was a lack of
clearly identifiable reference-points in the Latin American literature of the last few decades. Following
the Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a certain sense of an empty throne. Bolao deservedly filled
this vacuum. He was the last writer to revolutionise Latin American literature in the 20th century. This
was confirmed with The Savage Detectives, a compendium of the author's literary world: his combination
of short-story writer and novelist; his poetry that plants a Beat tree-trunk in the garden of French
Surrealism; his ludic, sarcastic understanding of the essay.
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Another factor is the generational one: Bolao poeticised the trajectory of rebellion, search and disillusion
experienced by young people whose formative years took place between the Cuban revolution and May
'68 in France. Then there is a third cultural factor: the Latin American literary tradition, as it had been
understood ever since the Boom, needed a change of theme. Bolao fulfilled this role perfectly.
Besides being a colossal writer, like all profound people Bolao was an extremely contradictory
individual. He was capable of a child's tenderness and lacerating cruelties, of complete freedom when he
wrote combined with an unconfessed concern for the rumours of the profession. I only knew him for three
years. Despite, or perhaps because of this, I dwell on every moment that this brief friendship offered me
like someone revising an unfinished manuscript.
I remember his devotion to each and every page of Borges, including his worst poems, which he was
capable of defending like a swordsman saving his grandfather's honour. I remember a lengthy game of
chess in his home, and the raucous protest-rock music from Alex Lora in the background, that Bolao
took it upon himself to howl along to. And I remember the study he had opposite his house: that musty
shack full of boxes and empty of furniture that Bolao never refurbished, the very same place where he
plotted his vast pages, and on whose flimsy walls he was always pinning scraps of paper and cuttings
from newspapers.
Bolao kept the daily routine of a vampire: he went to bed at dawn, got up for lunch, and barricaded
himself in his study at night. Spending the early mornings awake left him out of kilter with the world, that
dislocation which he describes in the short story "Sensini": "all I ever did was write and take long walks
that began at seven in the evening after I woke up, a moment when my body experienced something
similar to jet-lag, a sensation of being and not being somewhere".
This passage takes me back to the only night I spent in Bolao's study, on a very uncomfortable camp-
bed. I had to catch the first train to Barcelona, and as I was going to bed I realised that there was no
alarm-clock in the study. This may sound odd today, but in those days I hadn't a mobile phone. Bolao
had just left, and the thought of going across to his house, ringing the bell, and startling his family at four
in the morning seemed terrible. So I decided to concentrate my mind on an imaginary clock and promise
myself I would open my eyes at the appointed time an experiment that had never worked for me in the
past. To my amazement, when I woke up I discovered day was dawning.
HOSPITAL
Of late, apart from the amazing multi-tentacular edifice of 2666, our thirst for Bolao has been quenched
by irregular posthumous works. The first one was The Insufferable Gaucho. Particularly impressive is the
piece entitled "Literature +illness =Illness", which can be read as a testament, a masterly lesson on how
to undermine a lecture, an autobiographical short story, and text commentary. Those 20 sombre pages
speak of writing as a conversation with death, as a fight from the centre of sickness. Bolao lived for
many years like a man close to death, saying goodbye. That was how he wrote as well: with the fury of
last chances, the life-affirming melancholy of the seriously ill. Nowadays I think that is what we should
have to do: always to write like people close to death. Like healthy people close to death.
The second of these posthumous books, Between Parentheses, was a compilation of speeches, articles,
reviews and occasional texts. That book ends with an interview published in Playboy shortly before his
death. In a hypnotic game of ping-pong, Bolao paints his last self-portrait. Whom would he like to meet
in the great beyond? "I don't believe in the great beyond. What a surprise if it did exist. I would study a
course taught by Pascal." What sort of things make you laugh? "My own and other people's misfortunes".
What sort of things make you weep? "The same: my own and other people's misfortunes".
The character that emerges from this interview is remarkably like the emotional, unshaven person that
was Roberto Bolao. In response to a question about what changes he noted when he learned of his
illness, he replies: "I realised I was not immortal, which, at the age of 38, was high time I realised it".
Such was Bolao's wisdom: a mixture of zen maestro and old cowboy, of tramp and chess-player.
DESERT
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What desert do writers go to when they depart, leaving behind an unfinished book? One day Bolao told
me on the phone about a huge, thousand-page long novel he had been writing for some time, and which
could be no other than 2666. A novel, he explained in anguished tones, "as long as the Thousand and One
Nights". I suggested he leave it at 1001 pages, something he of course did not do. At one point in our
conversation, Bolao said that perhaps he would abandon it. Unaware of the state of his health, I asked
him why. His reply was: "Because I'm not Tolstoy".
If I had to pick out just one of Bolao's gifts, I think I would choose desperation. Bolao did not tell
stories: he needed them. His writing has a profoundly agonising quality about it; perhaps that is why it is
so moving, whether it is talking about crimes or encyclopedias, sex or metonymies. As he points out in
Nazi Literature in the Americas, the contemporary novel tends to lack compassion, to be unable to
"understand pain and therefore to create characters". Bolao lays bare his characters' intimate life while
they are busy reflecting on literary minutiae. Nothing exists as a fact in Bolao's texts: everything is a
death rattle.
At the start of The Unknown University, a compilation of his juvenile poetry, we read about Bolao's
frustration with all the publishers' rejections he had received. These poems operate like a self-affirmation
in the desert. If I am alone in the desert, Bolao appears to prophesy, then that desert is mine. And so it
turned out: he staked his claim to a new, huge space nobody else had occupied. A century after Virginia
Woolf, Bolao had a desert of his own. Almost all his books share a fascination for images of a desert:
literal or metaphoric, claustrophobic or open to the skies, walls or landscapes. The epiphany of the
deserted plain that somebody is staring at all alone, like a low-life Caspar David Friedrich.
The meaning of the desert fluctuates in Bolao's work. Sometimes it is seen as a kind of exile, that alien
space where you do not want to be. At others, it is more ambiguous, a visitable mystery. Or again, it is
suggested that the desert might be a home, the only one possible for the rootless. These three senses can
be clearly observed in his poetry collection Tres.
Bolao's literature creates a fanatical pole of attraction for readers, who end up searching for its author
just as his characters search for weird poets. Of course, the example of such a rebellious figure should
inoculate us with both the Bolao virus and its anti-bodies. "All poets, even the most avant-garde," as we
read in The Savage Detectives, "need a father. But these were orphans by vocation". I suspect that, rather
than a taste for avant-gardes or messianism, the aspect that most attracts my generation has to do with this
idea.
The difference between Bolao and other writers was not purity, that cowardly or hypocritical virtue. Nor
was it bravery, which the author himself over-valued thanks to a certain romantic penchant. The
difference was his unshakeable conviction that, whatever might happen, whether their dreams of grandeur
were fulfilled or not, true writers learn writing, live writing, and die writing. Against all the odds. Against
everything and everyone. Also against themselves. That was Bolao's radical university.
Translated by Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia. 'Traveller of the Century' by Andrs Neuman (Pushkin
Press) won the Alfaguara Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the 'Independent' Foreign Fiction Prize.

Charlotte Viewpoint, October 3, 2011
Fr agment s of t he Fi nal Chapt er : Bol aos essays and ar t i c l es
by Patrick OBoyle
Roberto Bolaos meteoric rise to fame in 1998 was, like his death from a liver disease in 2003, a long
time coming. Those two events stand like a set of parentheses around a period when Bolao wrote with a
prodigiousness and an urgency that puts into perspective the sense of doom that looms around every
corner of his fiction. He produced a breathtaking body of prose, including his unfinished magnum opus,
2666, published posthumously by his heirs in 2004.
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In the meantime, Bolao was taking advantage of his newfound fame and submitting scores of essays and
reviews for publication. He landed two weekly newspaper columns, both of which he titled Between
Parentheses. The first wasnt published in Spanish, but in Catalan, which Bolao didnt speak. The
second appeared in the last place anyone familiar with Bolaos history would expect: a newspaper in
Chile, a country that he ridiculed mercilessly. In correspondence with an editor at Santiagos Las Ultimas
Noticias, Bolao revealed his intention to eventually publish all the columns in a book.
A year after Bolaos death, Ignacio Echevarra, a friend, literary executor, and dueling partner, did just
that. In 2004, Anagrama published the collected Between Parentheses columns. The volume also included
Three Insufferable Speeches, a collection of pieces on Bolaos return to Chile, various other pieces
published and unpublished, and an interview with Playboy that Bolao gave shortly before his death.
Echevarra introduces the collection as a personal cartography ... the closest thing, among all his works,
to a kind of fragmented autobiography.
Seven years later, delayed as all fine and noble things are that come from lands where Spanish is spoken,
Natasha Wimmers translation of Between Parentheses has finally been published by New Directions. To
describe the experience of reading this 369-page hardback, I cant think of a phrase more accurate than
instant gratification. Almost all the tantalizing one-liners from Wimmers introduction to The Savage
Detectives (Paulo Coelho... soap opera Rio witchdoctor version of Barbusse and Anatole France) can
be found in Between Parentheses.
The first section of the book, Three Insufferable Speeches, starts with a sweeping and irreverent history
of Argentine literature post-Borges, the moral of which is that everything falls apart post-Borges.
Next is Bolaos speech in acceptance of the Romulos Gallegos prize, which The Savage Detectives won
in 1999. Its hard to decide if hes being playful and self-effacing or treating the ceremony like a big joke
- a joke about his dyslexia, about Colombia and Venezuela, about the solemnity of the prize itself.
Then, in the lions den of Caracas, he uses Cervantes to explain his disillusionment with the Left and
claims that everything he wrote was a love letter to his generation, a generation who fought for parties
that if they had won would have sent us straight to labor camps. Incredible.
When I was in South America last Id meet backpackers making their way north through Bolivia and
Per, and the only bad thing anyone ever said about visiting Chile was that its expensive. In the second
section of Between Parentheses, Fragments of a Return to a Native Land, the Chilean-born Bolao
portrays the country as nothing less than a static bourgeois hell. The Corridor With No Apparent Way
Out, is the title of one of these pieces.
In 1974, 20-year-old communist Bolao fled Pinochets blood bath after five months of love, black
humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death. Afterwards he spent a chunk of his twenties in Mexico
and lived the rest of his life in Spain. He wrote far more about Mexico than either Spain or Chile.
Throughout Between Parentheses, Bolao explains that exile, for him, is not a word synonymous with
sorrow but with literature. Chile, Mexicoall of Latin America, actuallyrepresent backwardness,
corruption, and intolerance for Bolao. Only exile fully liberates the writer from the trappings of
chauvinism and transforms him/her into something without borders, something post-nationalist.
The other pole of Bolaos cartography is the Catalonian beach town of Blanes, where he settled, raised a
family, and learned the difficult art of tolerance. Nowhere does tolerance prove to be so difficult for
Bolao than during his reluctant visit to Chile in 1999 - the first one in 25 years. The newly acclaimed
author was treated like a celebrity.
He met and spent an afternoon with Nicanor Parra, whom he considered the greatest living poet in the
Spanish language. There are some magnificent pieces in Bolaos book on Parra, whose influence on
Bolao and many others cannot be overstated. (Parras Poems and Antipoems: How to Look Better and
Feel Great is available in English from New Directions.)
The other famous Chileans whom Bolao metpoliticians, beauty queens, celebrity writers, and their
hangers-ondont fare as well as Parra in Bolaos pieces. In Fragments, Bolao declares that
Santiago had not changed, that Chilean society was still absurdly austere, sycophantic, homophobic and
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patriarchal. He juxtaposes these uncomfortable encounters with horrific images and anecdotes from 1973.
Perhaps Bolao never forgave his country for the terror, the injustice, the folly that he lived through.
Perhaps he was out for revenge.
After the scorn and acrimony of Fragments, the bulk of the book proceeds on a slightly sunnier note. In
the columns, Bolao almost exclusively writes glowing reviews of books that he admires, as well as the
odd, tender vignette from his life in Blanes. Between Parentheses makes an invaluable introductory
survey to modern Latin American and Spanish literature for those North American readers ready to
venture outside of the Boom generation.
If theres one criterion for why Bolao pays attention to a writer, the word would be unclassifiable.
Youll want to keep a running list while making your way through this book, to look into writers like
Sergio Pitol, Carmen Boullosa, Horacio Castellanas Moya, Rodrigo Fresn, J avier Cercas, Roberto
Brodsky and Miguel Casado. Bolao steers readers toward living legends like Cesar Ara, the old novella-
churning eccentric of Argentine letters, who defies all classification. New Directions has published a
number of Aras novels, including How I Became a Nun, Ghosts , and The Literary Conference, in
translation by Chris Andrews.
Bolao doesnt hesitate to weave personal anecdotes into the discussion of his favorite Latin American
and Spanish writers, most of whom he knew personally. He does this in multiple columns about the
Guatemalan novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, whom Bolao considers the consummate master, the best of my
generation regarding short stories. What begins ostensibly as a book review turns into a short piece about
Rey Rosa roughing it through a backwater in West Africa.
Rey Rosas The Good Cripple, also available from New Directions, is a tight, controlled thriller on how
the privileged and the brutal both learn to be comfortable in their own obscenity and precariously coexist
with each other. Esther Allens translation doesnt overstretch its reach and preserves a rich peppering of
Central American Spanish. Its a great, dark little read.
The second way in which Between Parentheses is invaluable for fans is that it helps them get to the
bottom of this inscrutable writer - A writer whose protagonists are always writers on the trail of an
inscrutable writer. It turns out Bolao is not quite so inscrutable once you get to know him, and by the
end of Between Parentheses, youll feel like you have.
Many North American readers associate Bolao mainly with two dark novels that stand like evil
monoliths in the Sonoran desert The Savage Detectives and 2666. Its easy to be intimidated by these
books, but there are some things in life that merit our sustained attention. Bolao is one of them.The brief,
blunt, witty pieces in Between Parentheses may be an excellent place to start for readers who arent ready
to follow Moses into the abyss for a thousand pages of The Savage Detectives or 2666. And yes, it is
appropriate to approach 2666 with caution.
However, I personally retain the belief that theres no substitute for diving headlong into The Savage
Detectives before you touch anything else Bolao has done. Detectives is Bolaos designated
mythology, his delayed bildungsroman, and you should start there, if you can. The clarifications,
expansions, and revelations of Between Parentheses will mean a lot more if you do. After following
Ulysses Lima from Mexico City to Paris to Vienna to Tel Aviv to Managua, youll feel the significance
when Bolao pays homage to his friend Mario Santiago, the inspiration for the character, who was killed
by a hit and run driver the year Detectives was published.
Its easy to conceive of Roberto Bolao as a tragic character. Instead, Between Parentheses reveals a
writer approaching the end of his life with few regrets, staring into the abyss with courage (the quality he
found most important), diligence, humor, and occasional holy rage. A shameless lover of books, sex,
hitchhiking, genre novels, obscure poetry, beaches, friends, and his family. This is how you should think
of him: sitting on a beach in Blanes, inhaling the scent of sunscreen. He called it the smell of
democracy.


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The Globe and Mail, Friday, Nov. 16 2012
Yet anot her l ast vex i ng w or k f r om Rober t o Bol ao
by DIMITRI NASRALLAH
Title: Woes of the True Policeman
Author: Roberto Bolano
Chilean author Roberto Bolano, who died of liver failure in 2003 at the age of 50, has been transformed in
the past decade into the most celebrated posthumous literary discovery of our generation. Woes of the
True Policeman is the 17th of his works to see translation since 2003, and the third of a trio of never-
before-published works to appear in the past 12 months.
The first of these was the early novel The Third Reich, abandoned in a drawer after being rejected by
publishers in the late 1980s. Though flawed, it at least offered a cohesive look at the authors early
thematic concerns and stylistic experiments. The Secret of Evil, arriving a few months later, was
described in its editorial notes as stories and narrative sketches gleaned from the more than 50 files
found on Roberto Bolanos computer after his death. It reads about as compellingly as that statement
sounds.
Woes of the True Policeman lands somewhere in between. To call it a complete novel would be a stretch
by any imagination, but it also amounts to more than stories and sketches from computer files even
though it arrives with a similar editorial note by the authors widow, Carolina Lopez, explaining how it
was assembled. Spanning a period that ranges from the 1980s to 2003, Woes collects three pieces of
writing at different stages of completion, and uses logical deductions from various computer file titles
to piece together a Franken-novel.
The novel revolves around Oscar Amalfitano, a nomadic literature professor who moves to the fictional
town of Santa Teresa in northern Mexico with his teenage daughter after a sex scandal with male students
forces him to resign his post at a university in Barcelona. Readers of Bolao will immediately recognize
Amalfitano, Santa Teresa, the obscure writer Arcimboldi (here spelled slightly differently and French, not
Prussian), the spate of clinically described rapes and murders that grip the Mexican town, and much more
as significant contributions to 2666, the sprawling, 900-page masterwork that, incidentally, took the
author just as long to concoct as the computer files in this novel.
In a letter to friend and visual artist Carla Rippey, written in the mid-1990s, Bolano described a
manuscript titled The Woes of the True Policeman, which had already exceeded 800,000 pages. Where is
the rest of that book? Could it be that the manuscript was used over the years to build portions of that
other novel, and that what we have here are alternative takes and leftovers?
This line of questioning simultaneously captures the brilliance and maddening incompletion that accounts
for Bolanos oeuvre.
After all, part of the authors signature, his readers will note, is revisiting characters, settings and events
across various fictions, in effect creating a puzzle to piece together.
But unlike more refined incarnations of this technique, the novel before us feels conceptually
inconclusive in a way that none of his other novels do. The author is dead, and we will never know what
his true intentions were. All we do know is that even though these pages stayed with him for much of his
writing life, he never chose to publish them.
Incompletion, one could argue, is also Roberto Bolanos greatest achievement. Informed by his intellect,
the flaw becomes an art form that captures the senselessness of a world that doesnt care one way or
another for his characters lifelong pursuits of uncompromised passions.
This is something of the conclusion one walks away with in his masterpieces The Savage Detectives
and 2666.
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However, the conclusion readers will most likely draw from Woes of the True Policeman is that his grand
themes of inconclusiveness, so ripe for posthumous publication and myth-building, have here been
manipulated to squeeze a footnote of a novel out of an otherwise spectacular body of work.


The Millions, July 9, 2013
The Bol ao Syl l abus: A Fi nal Rec k oni ng
By GARTH RISK HALLBERG
Four years ago, in an attempt to help readers navigate the flood tide of Roberto Bolao books appearing
posthumously in English, we at The Millions put together a little syllabus. Little did we know how rash
our promise to update as further translations become available would soon seem. Within two years, the
release of six additional titles had rendered the first version nugatory. And since then, six more have
become available.
Indeed, its hard to think of another figure in the history of weltliteratur whose catalogue has made it so
quickly to these shores, or whose literary executors have been speedier not to say more punctilious in
publishing his archive. Though Bolaos imagination seems inexhaustible, its hard not to greet the news
of yet another lost work or early work or lost early work with fatigue. (Or even, given the overlap
between certain editions, suspicion.) Yet the most recent publication, the poetry omnibus The Unknown
University, is a major work, and should be the exclamation point at the end of the Bolao boom. (Though
there was that new story in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, so maybe Andrew Wylie knows something
we dont And theres always Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a J oyce Fanatic, co-written with A.G.
Porta in 1984.)
At any rate, this seems an opportune time to revisit, once and for all, our Bolao syllabus, which has more
than doubled in size since 2009. Where originally we arranged the list as a kind of guided tour, it seems
most worthwhile at this point to divide the available work into tiers: what you need to read, what you
might want to, and what you can pass over without losing sleep.
The Essential
1. The Savage Detectives
2666 may be more admirable, but The Savage Detectives is more loveable (think Moby-Dick vs.
Huckleberry Finn). As such, its the Bolao book I tend to urge on people first. Read The Savage
Detectives all the way to the end, and youll understand why one might want to try to read this writers
entire corpus. (See our review).
2. 2666
There is no other novel of the last decade that I think about more often, years after having read it. My
enthusiastic take here now seems to me embarrassingly inadequate. A bona fide masterpiece.
3. Last Evenings on Earth
The best, by a whisker, of the five collections of short fiction available in English largely because New
Directions cant have foreseen how big Bolao was going to be, and so raided his Anagrama editions for
the best stories. Highlights include Dance Card, Sensini, The Grub, Mauricio The Eye Silva,
and Gomez Palacio.
4. The Return
Another strikingly good collection, overlooked perhaps because of its appearance in 2010, when the
Bolao marketplace was already flooded. Between it and Last Evenings on Earth, you end up with the
whole (I think) of the two collections published in Spanish during Bolaos lifetime. I especially love the
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title story. And for those inclined to read the Bolao oeuvre as a roman-fleuve, you get here the porny
Prefigurations of Lalo Cura.
5. Nazi Literature in the Americas
This early novel, a biographical encyclopedia of invented writers, offers our first glimpse of the
ambition that would effloresce in the two big books. Not incidentally, its an excellent introduction to
Bolaos peculiar sense of humor, which enjambs the absurd and the deadpan until its hard to tell which
is which. Come to think of it, its probably his funniest book. (See our review).
6. Distant Star
This is my favorite of Bolaos short novels, and the other book I tend to recommend to neophytes. An
expansion of a chapter in Nazi Literature, it yokes together two signature preoccupations: poetry and
detectives.
7. The Unknown University
This beautiful dual-language edition purports to include all of the poems of the great Roberto Bolao.
Perhaps that should be all of the great poems of Roberto Bolao; a quick comparison reveals some titles
in The Romantic Dogs that I cant find here. But you get most of that collection, plus Tres, plus the novel
in prose-poems Antwerp, as well as a couple hundred other poems. As with The Secret of Evil and Woes
of the True Policemen, the history of the book Bolaos executors provide here is weirdly hard to parse,
but concerns fall away in the reading. At every turn theres a sense that this manuscript was indeed the
lifes work in poetry of a writer who valued poetry above all other genres. Verse narratives like The
Neochileans have the impact of Bolaos best short novels. The lyric poems lose more in Laura Healys
translation, especially as Bolao likes to deal in fragments. As J eff Peer noted here, the shorter pieces
veer, albeit with a charming kind of indifference, between notebook and dream journal, genius and
juvenilia. And because there are so many of these short poems, displayed one to a page, the book looks
more tomelike than it is. Still, it is very much greater than the sum of its parts, and some of those parts are
already very great indeed. The addictive element in Bolao, more than anything else, is his sui generis
sensibility, and this book is that sensibility distilled.
8. Between Parentheses
For those of you keeping score at home, thats four genres Bolao excelled in: the meganovel, the
novella, the poem, and the short story. What are the odds that his collected nonfiction could be
indispensable? Especially when most of it consists of occasional speeches and short newspaper work?
Well, odds be damned. This book is great, in a way that reminds me of J onathan Lethems recent and
similarly loose-limbed The Ecstasy of Influence. Theres something fascinating about listening in as a
writer talks shop, more or less off the cuff. Parts two through five do double-duty as an encyclopedia of
Latin American fiction. And Beach, actually a short story, is one of Bolaos best.
9. By Night in Chile
Bolaos most formally perfect short novel, it is also the most self-contained. It offers a torrential
dramatic monologue by a Catholic priest implicated in torture during Chiles U.S.-backed Pinochet era.
Some readers I respect think this is his best book. Though it plays its source material straighter than is
typical in Bolao, it might be another good one for norteamericanos to start with.
The Merely Excellent
1. The Third Reich
This was another book that I thought got a bit lost in the shuffle of 2009-2011, when an astonishing 1,800
pages of Bolaos prose made their way into English. Otherwise, it might have been recognized as one of
the best novels published in English in the latter year. Certainly, its the strongest of Bolaos apprentice
books. Here, the master seems to be David Lynch; all is atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere, as the
failure of a plot to precipitate becomes itself a source of terrible foreboding. Im also a sucker for the
visceral realism of Natasha Wimmers translations, though I cant speak to their accuracy.
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2. Amulet
Amulet on its own is a wonderful reworking of the Auxilio Lacouture monologue from The Savage
Detectives, and a chance to get to spend more time with that books presiding spirits, Ulises Lima and
Arturo Belano. It also contains some of Bolaos most bewitching sentences, including the one that seems
to give 2666 its title: Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a
cemetery in 1974 or 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid
of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one
particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
3. The Insufferable Gaucho
Here you get the sublime Kafka takeoff Police Rat and a sort of cover version of Borgess The South,
each approaching novella length. However, the decision to pair the five stories (a version of one of which
also appears in Between Parentheses) with two (excellent) essays gives this collection as a whole a
distinctly odds and sods feel.
4. The Secret of Evil
Another posthumous gallimaufry, but one I found totally delightful. Notwithstanding the magicians
indirection with which the Preliminary Note attempts to justify the books publication, its pretty clear
that much of whats here is in rough form. But as with Between Parentheses, its thrilling to see Bolao at
work, and to see where he might have gone next. And its always nice to see a little more of Ulises and
Arturo.
5. Antwerp
One of Bolaos earliest pieces of fiction, Antwerps not much like the others, save for a hunchback who
will also pop up in The Skating Rink. But its one of the greatest avant-garde novel in fragments out
there (see our review). In fact, as the inclusion in The Unknown University of a slightly different version
(titled People Walking Away) suggests, the prose here is close to poetry. So why merely excellent
instead of essential? Well, if you already have a copy there, why buy the stand-alone version?
6. The Last Interview
Like many non-Anglophone writers, Bolao treated the interview less as a promotional opportunity than
as a form of performance art. That makes this entry in Melville Houses Last Interview series less
illuminating, but also more fun, than it could have been. And of course the posthumous cash-in angle is
right there in the title. In addition to Marcela Valdess long and brilliant introduction one of the best
pieces of critical writing on Bolao available in English you get four interviews. Though caveat emptor:
the actual last interview also shows up at the end of Between Parentheses, so again you may be paying for
what was already yours to begin with.
Necessary For Completists Only
1. Woes of the True Policeman
There was a concerted effort to market this first as a missing piece of 2666, and then as a novel proper,
but its pretty clear that what Woes of the True Policeman truly is is an early stab at the big novel. The
Amalfitano who appears here is a different character, but an equally deep one, and that and the rhetorical
pyrotechics are the real selling points. (Am I the only person who finds the opening here really funny?)
Still, aside from specialists and scholars, theres something a little unsettling about pretending that what
the writer didnt think deserved our attention deserves our attention. Our review is here.
2. Monsieur Pain
When the jacket copy for Keith Ridgways forthcoming Hawthorn & Child calls it the trippiest novel
New Directions has published in years, it must mean three years since this one came out. And damned
if I can make heads or tails of old Mr. Bread. It concerns an ailing Csar Vallejo and some mysterious
policemenor something. Bolao wrote this in the early 80s, and may have been surprised to be able to
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sell it to Anagrama in his breakthrough year, 1999. The most notable feature, for me, is formal: the
Epilogue for Voices seems to anticipate the structural innovations of The Savage Detectives.
3. The Skating Rink
More straightforward than Monsieur Pain, this early novel seems like another pass at the material in
Antwerp/People Walking Away. Its a quick, entertaining read, but for me the strange characterological
magic that makes the voices in the later novels come alive never quite happens in this one.
4. The Romantic Dogs
On its own, The Romantic Dogs is a fine collection. The same poem-to-poem unevenness that mars The
Unknown University is present here, but because the selection tends toward the longer, more narrative
poems, more of Bolao makes it through the translation. Still, if much of whats here is included there,
this edition would seem to have been superseded for all but the most ardent Bolaophiles. See also: Tres.
5. Tres
See The Romantic Dogs.