Roberto Bolao

Roberto Bolao
Roberto Bolao

Born

Roberto Bolao valos 28 April 1953 Santiago, Chile 15 July 2003 (aged50) Barcelona, Spain Writer, poet Spanish

Died

Occupation Language

Roberto Bolao valos (Spanish:[roerto olao aalos]) (28 April 1953 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999, Bolao won the Rmulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages."[1]

Life
Bolao was born in 1953 in Santiago, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher.[2] He and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile. By his own account, he was a skinny, nearsighted, bookish, and unpromising child. He was dyslexic and was often bullied at school, where he felt as an outsider. In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist, and became active in left-wing political causes.[3] A key episode in Bolao's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolao was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody.[4] He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolao describes this experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was not tortured as he had expected, but "in the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was

Roberto Bolao about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. . . . I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los ngeles."[5] The episode is also recounted, from the point of view of Bolao's former classmates, in the story "Detectives." Nevertheless, since 2009 Bolao's Mexican friends from that era have cast doubts on whether he was even in Chile in 1973 at all.[6] For most of his early adulthood, Bolao was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France, and Spain. In the 1970s, Bolao became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives. After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible, "a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings," his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behavior had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic lifestyle. Bolao moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, on the Costa Brava, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector. He worked by day and wrote at night. From 1981[7] to his death, he lived in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes. He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolao said that he began writing fiction because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolao "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title Los perros romnticos (The Romantic Dogs). Bolao had conflicted feelings about his native country, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer," commented Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman. Bolao's death in 2003 came after a long period of declining health. He suffered from liver failure and was near the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.[8] Six weeks before he died, Bolao's fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville. Among his closest friends were the novelists Rodrigo Fresn and Enrique Vila-Matas; Fresn's tribute included the statement that "Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates 2666 and all his work." "His books are political," Fresn also observed, "but in a way that is more personal than militant or demagogic, that is closer to the mystique of the beatniks than the Boom." In Fresn's view he "was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so, created a new way to be a great Latin American writer."[9] Larry Rohter of the New York Times wrote, "Bolao joked about the 'posthumous', saying the word 'sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated,' and he would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead."[10] Bolao was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland." (In his last interview, published by the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, Bolao said he regarded himself as a Latin American, adding that "my only country is my two children and wife and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me....") Bolao named his son Lautaro, after the Mapuche leader

Roberto Bolao Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic La araucana. His other child, a daughter, was named Alexandra.

Works
Although deep down he always felt like a poet, in the vein of his beloved Nicanor Parra, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections.[11] Although Bolao espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters. In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefnicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.

By Night in Chile
By Night in Chile is a narrative constructed as the loose, uneditorialised deathbed rantings of a Chilean Jesuit priest and failed poet, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. At a crucial point in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two agents of Opus Dei, who inform him that he has been chosen to visit Europe to study the preservation of old churches the perfect job for a cleric with artistic sensitivities. On his arrival, he is told that the major threat to European cathedrals is pigeon droppings, and that his Old World counterparts have devised a clever solution to the problem. They have become falconers, and in town after town he watches as the priests' hawks viciously dispatch flocks of harmless birds. Chillingly, the Jesuit's failure to protest against this bloody means of architectural preservation signals to his employers that he will serve as a passive accomplice to the predatory and brutal methods of the Pinochet regime. This is the beginning of Bolano's indictment of "l'homme intellectuel" who retreats into art, using aestheticism as a cloak and shield while the world lies around him, nauseatingly unchanged, perennially unjust and cruel.

Amulet
Amulet focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, who also appears in The Savage Detectives as a minor character trapped in a bathroom at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (UNAM) in Mexico City for two weeks while the army storms the school. In this short novel, she runs across a host of Latin American artists and writers, among them Arturo Belano, Bolao's alter ego. Unlike The Savage Detectives, Amulet stays in Auxilio's first-person voice, while still allowing for the frenetic scattering of personalities Bolao is so famous for.

Distant Star
Distant Star is a novella nested in the politics of the Pinochet regime, concerned with murder, photography and even poetry blazed across the sky by the smoke of air force planes. This dark satirical work deals with the history of Chilean politics in a morbid and sometimes humorous fashion.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Nazi Literature in the Americas is an entirely fictitious, ironic encyclopedia of fascist Latin and North American writers and critics, blinded to their own mediocrity and sparse readership by passionate self-mythification. While this is a risk that literature generally runs in Bolao's works, these characters stand out by force of the heinousness of their political philosophy.[12] The last portrait was expanded into a novel in Distant Star.

Roberto Bolao

The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives has been compared by Jorge Edwards to Julio Cortzar's Rayuela and Jos Lezama Lima's Paradiso. In a review in El Pas, the Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarra declared it "the novel that Borges would have written." (An avid reader, Bolao often expressed his love for Borges and Cortzar's work, and once concluded an overview of contemporary Argentinian literature by saying that "one should read Borges more.") "Bolao's genius is not just the extraordinary quality of his writing, but also that he does not conform to the paradigm of the Latin American writer", said Echeverria, former literary editor of El Pas, Spain's leading daily. "His writing is neither magical realism, nor baroque nor localist, but an imaginary, extraterritorial mirror of Latin America, more as a kind of state of mind than a specific place." The central section of The Savage Detectives presents a long, fragmentary series of reports about the trips and adventures of Arturo Belanoan alliteratively named alter-ego, who also appears in other stories & novelsand Ulises Lima between 19761996. These trips and adventures, narrated by 52 characters, take them from Mexico DF to Israel, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vienna and finally to Liberia during its civil war in the mid-nineties.[13] The reports are sandwiched at the beginning and end of the novel by the story of their quest of Cesrea Tinajero, the founder of "real visceralismo", a Mexican avant-garde literary movement of the twenties. The aspiring 17-year-old poet Garca Madero tells us first about the poetic and social scene around the new "visceral realists." He later closes the novel with his account of their escape from Mexico City to the state of Sonora. Bolao called The Savage Detectives "a love letter to my generation."

2666
The novel 2666 was published in 2004. Allegedly a first draft submitted to his publisher prior to his death, the text of 2666 was the major preoccupation of the last five years of his life. At more than 1,100 pages (898 pages in the English-language edition), the novel is divided in five "parts", four and a half of which were finished before Bolao's death[citation needed]. Focused on the mostly unsolved and still ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Jurez (Santa Teresa in the novel), the apocalyptic 2666 depicts the horror of the 20th century through a wide cast of characters, including the secretive, Pynchon-like German writer Archimboldi whom four literary critics are engaged on a quest to find. In 2008, the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The award was accepted by Natasha Wimmer, the book's translator. In March 2009, The Guardian newspaper reported that an additional Part 6 of 2666 was among papers found by researchers going through Bolao's literary estate.[14]

Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth is a collection of fourteen short stories narrated by a host of different voices primarily in the first person. A number are narrated by an author, "B.", who is in a move typical of the author a stand-in for the author himself.

The Romantic Dogs

Bolao has stated that he considered himself first and foremost a poet and took up fiction writing primarily later in life in order to support his children. The Romantic Dogs is his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, appearing in a bilingual edition in 2008 under New Directions and translated by Laura Healy.

Roberto Bolao

The Skating Rink

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told by three male narrators, revolving around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Mart. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in a local ruin of a mansion, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene.

Antwerp
Considered by his literary executor Ignacio Echevarra to be the big bang of the Bolao universe, the loose prose-poem novel was written in 1980 when Bolao was 27. The book remained unpublished until 2002, when it was published in Spanish as Amberes, a year before the author's death. Antwerp contains a loose narrative structured less around a story arc and more around motifs, reappearing characters and anecdotesmany of which went on to become common material for Bolao: crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits.[15] The back of the first New Directions edition of book contains a quote from Bolao about Antwerp: "The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp."

English translation and publication

Bolao's first American publisher, Barbara Epler of New Directions read a galley of By Night in Chile and decided to acquire it, along with Distant Star and Last Evenings on Earth, all translated by Chris Andrews. By Night in Chile came out in 2003 and received an endorsement by Susan Sontag; at the same time Bolao's work also began appearing in various magazines which gained him broader recognition among English readers. By 2006 Bolaos rights were represented by Carmen Balcells, who decided to place his two bigger books at a larger publishing house; both were eventually published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (The Savage Detectives in 2007 and 2666 in 2008) in a translation by Natasha Wimmer. At the same time New Directions took on the publication of the rest of Bolaos work (to the extent that it was known at the time) for a total of 13 books, translated by Laura Healy (two poetry collections), Natasha Wimmer (Antwerp and Between Parentheses) and Chris Andrews (6 novels and 3 short story collections).[16] The posthumous discovery of additional works by Bolao has thus far led to the publication of the novel The Third Reich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, translated by Wimmer) and The Secret of Evil (New Directions, 2012, translated by Wimmer and Andrews), a collection of short stories. A translation of the novel Woes of the True Policeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated by Wimmer) was released on November 13, 2012.

Themes
In the final decade of his life Bolao produced a significant body of work, consisting of short stories and novels. In his fiction the characters are often novelists or poets, some of them aspiring and others famous, and writers appear ubiquitous in Bolao's world, variously cast as heroes, villains, detectives and iconoclasts. Other significant themes of his work include quests, "the myth of poetry", the "interrelationship of poetry and crime", the inescapable violence of modern life in Latin America, and the essential human business of youth, love and death.[17] In one of his stories, "Dentist", Bolao appears to set out his basic aesthetic principles. The narrator pays a visit to an old friend, a dentist. The friend introduces him to a poor Indian boy who turns out to be a literary genius. At one point during a long evening of inebriated conversation, the dentist expressed what he believes to be the essence of art: "That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk

Roberto Bolao already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie." Like large parts of Bolao's work, this conception of fiction manages to be at once elusive and powerfully suggestive. As Jonathan Lethem has commented, "Reading Roberto Bolao is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."[18] When discussing the nature of literature, including his own, Bolao emphasized its inherent political qualities. He wrote, "All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, its a reflection on politics, and second, its also a political program. The former alludes to realityto the nightmare or benevolent dream that we call realitywhich ends, in both cases, with death and the obliteration not only of literature, but of time. The latter refers to the small bits and pieces that survive, that persist; and to reason." [19] Bolao's writings repeatedly manifest a concern with the nature and purpose of literature and its relationship to the life. One recent assessment of his works discusses his idea of literary culture as a "whore". Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolao, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolao, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel "The Savage Detectives," two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolao's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else? Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review, 24 February 2008[20]

Further reading
In English
Will H. Corral, "Roberto Bolao: Portrait of the Writer as Noble Savage". World Literature Today LXXXI. 1 (November-December 2006). 51-54. Roberto Bolao, Sybil Perez, Marcela Valdes. Roberto Bolao: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House Publishing, 2009.

Other languages
Celina Manzoni. Roberto Bolao, la literatura como tauromaquia. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2002. Patricia Espinosa H. Territorios en fuga: estudios criticos sobre la obra de Roberto Bolao. Providencia (Santiago), Ed. Frasis, 2003. Jorge Herralde. Para Roberto Bolao. Colombia, Villegas Editores, 2005. Celina Manzoni, Dunia Gras, Roberto Brodsky. Jornadas homenaje Roberto Bolao (19532003): simposio internacional. Barcelona, ICCI Casa Amrica a Catalunya, 2005. Fernando Moreno. Roberto Bolao: una literatura infinita. Poitiers, Universit de Poitiers / CNRS, 2005.

Roberto Bolao Karim Benmiloud, Raphal Estve (coord.). Les astres noirs de Roberto Bolao. Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007. Edmundo Paz Soldn, Gustavo Favern Patriau (coord.). Bolao salvaje. Canet de Mar (Barcelona). Ed. Candaya, 2008. (Includes DVD with documentary, Bolao cercano, by Erik Hasnoot.) Will H. Corral, Bolao traducido: nueva literatura mundial. Madrid, Ediciones Escalera, 2011. Myrna Solotorevsky, 'El espesor escritural en novelas de Roberto Bolao' . Rockville, Maryland, Ediciones Hispamrica, 2012. ISBN 978-0-935318-35-7.

References
[2] Goldman, Francisco. "The Great Bolao", [[New York Review of Books (http:/ / www. nybooks. com/ articles/ 20395)], 19 July 2007] [3] Rohter, Larry. 'A Writer whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career', [[New York Times (http:/ / www. anagrama-ed. es/ PDF/ 2666 - NYT. pdf)], August 9, 2005] [4] Schama, Chloe. 'Dust and Literature',The New Republic, May 8, 2007 (http:/ / www. tnr. com/ doc. mhtml?i=20070507& s=schama050707) [7] Bolao, Roberto (2002). "Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later", 2002 introduction to Antwerp. Bolao explains how he wrote this book in 1980, his last year in Barcelona, then moved to Blanes in 1981. [10] Rohter, Larry. 'A Writer whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career,' New York Times, August 9, 2005 [11] http:/ / www. poetryfoundation. org/ archive/ print. html?id=182491 [13] Durn-Merk, Alma (2010): Representaciones de la experiencia migratoria en la literatura: Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolao. Opus: Augsburg, onlinne available under: http:/ / opus. bibliothek. uni-augsburg. de/ volltexte/ 2010/ 1660/ . [15] http:/ / www. ndpublishing. com/ books/ BolanoAntwerp. html [16] This Week in Fiction: The True Bolao (http:/ / www. newyorker. com/ online/ blogs/ books/ 2012/ 01/ this-week-in-fiction-roberto-bolano. html) - interview with Barbara Epler. "The Book Bench", The New Yorker website, 16 January 2012. [17] Goldman, Francisco. "The Great Bolao" (http:/ / www. nybooks. com/ articles/ 20395), New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007. [18] Lethem, Jonathan. "The Departed" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2008/ 11/ 09/ books/ review/ Lethem-t. html), New York Times Book Review, 9 November 2008. [19] Boullosa, Carmen. "Roberto Bolao" (http:/ / bombsite. com/ issues/ 78/ articles/ 2460), Bomb Magazine, Winter 2002. Retrieved on 25 July 2012.

External links
"The Caracas Speech", Roberto Bolao accepting the Rmulo Gallegos Prize, translated in Triple Canopy (http:// canopycanopycanopy.com/2/the_caracas_speech) "Literature + Sickness = Sickness" translated in (http://www.bu.edu/trl/16/bolano.html) News from the Republic of Letters Entry (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bolano_roberto) in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (http://souciant.com/2012/02/literary-game/) Literary Game, in Souciant

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