Las obras de Roberto Bolaño

The Prospect takes a literary look at the novel of the year:

Throughout 2666, literary devices are deployed, violently extended past their limits and discarded. At one point, the number of times different words appear in a conversation is precisely listed; later, an entire page is devoted to the names of human phobias; we also get two solid sides of sexist jokes. All these are just warm-ups, however: Bolano’s testing-to-destruction of literature’s possibilities reaches its apex in his descriptions of the murdered, violated bodies of over 100 women, one-by-one—an incandescent imaginary inquiry that shadows a similar plague of real killings in the Mexican border-town of Ciudad Juarez. In Bolano’s telling, the detail is at once coolly forensic yet never generic: to each there is a story, a circumstance, a particular human absence from the world. It is literature as a kind of after-image, alternately numbing and blinding but always insistent on one point—that no one can consider themselves safe from this violence, which crosses borders and categories as easily as it leaps between words and deeds.

From an interview with writer Edmund White:

What books are currently on your bedside table?

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. He is the most relentlessly fascinating author I’ve read in the past 10 years. Also Belly of Paris by Zola and a hundred books for a literary contest.

2666 is indeed Bolano’s master statement, not just on account of its length and quality but also because it is the fullest expression of his two abiding themes: the writing life and violence. Bolano’s interest in the former is easy to explain – he believed that a life dedicated to literature was the only one worth living. But his fascination with violence is more complex. One explanation can be found in his background. As someone who came of age during the era of South America’s dirty wars, it is understandable that he should side with the view he attributes to one of the characters in 2666, who sees history as a “simple whore… a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness”.

Full review here.

Long article by Michael Saler in the Times Online today.

Roberto Bolano 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 Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was a disillusioned romantic with a passion for exposing evil and fortifying hope.

Not the greatest copyediting or proofreading, but hey, times are tight, right?