Between Parentheses
From The Nation back in March:
Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolaño 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 Bolaño 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 Bolaño, who’d 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.”
The Caracas Speech
In 1999, Bolaño won the Gallegos prize for his novel The Savage Detectives.
“The Caracas Speech†is his acceptance of that prize.
What’s true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I must abandon Jarry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is his tongue. I don’t remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in English or French. A writer’s 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 it’s also true that a writer’s homeland is not his tongue, or not only his tongue, but also the people he loves. And sometimes a writer’s homeland is not the people he loves but his memory. And other times a writer’s only homeland is his loyalty, and his courage. In truth, a writer’s homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on whatever he is writing at the moment.
Best lists
No doubt 2666 will be popping up on tons of “Best Book of the Year” lists coming up soon. It’s only mid-November and already 2666 is mentioned on Tyler Cowen’s Meta-list of Best books of the year:
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Duh. After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl. A clear first choice in almost any year.
Writing about Writers
Good Readings reviews 2666:
Those familiar with the work of Roberto Bolaño will not be surprised to hear that numerous writers,
critics, and other literary types populate the pages of his newly translated posthumous masterpiece 2666. Normally I’m highly suspicious of novels about writers or writing—most often it’s an excuse for self-obsessed navel-gazing or indulgence in tired, predictable metafictional exercises. Either way, the results are almost always profoundly boring.And yet I absolutely love the fiction of Roberto Bolaño. To date I’ve read four of his books—2666, The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and By Night in Chile—all of which feature writers as characters, as well as extensive discussions of writing and literature. Given my general distaste for this kind of content in fiction, it would stand to reason that I shouldn’t particularly care for Bolaño. But if you asked me right now to name the best novels of the past decade, 2666 and The Savage Detectives would top the list.
The Invisible Library
This post about 2666 at Blographia Literaria mentions Bolaño in relation to The Invisible Library project by Levi Stahl and Ed Park. The Invisible Library catalogs books fictional books and book titles that are mentioned in works of fiction. There are some great titles in there from Nabokov and Pynchon, but I’m thinking there are some from Infinite Jest that are missing (The Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices?).
Watch this space
The Book Design Review blog takes a quick look at the cover of 2666:
The hardcover and one of the paperbacks features a detail of Gustave Moreau‘s Jupiter and Semele (below; click to enlarge). Jupiter is, of course, Zeus; Semele is the mother of Dionysius.
This blog will be a clearinghouse for all links and topics related to Bolaño and his books,
but it will also be the home of bolano-l, the mailing list. Subscriptions to the list will be active before the end of November. Plans are underway for a group read of 2666 to begin on the list in early 2009.
The cover of 2666
The Book Design Review blog takes a quick look at the cover of 2666:
The hardcover and one of the paperbacks features a detail of Gustave Moreau‘s Jupiter and Semele (below; click to enlarge). Jupiter is, of course, Zeus; Semele is the mother of Dionysius.
Scott reminds us
That Bolaño has another book publishing this month: The Romantic Dogs: Poems (translated by Laura Healy).
“Appearing and Disappearing Like True Poetry”
Ben Ehrenreich expands on his LA Times review in the Poetry Foundation’s Journal:
Of course Bolaño himself was first of all a poet. Only in his last decade, with a family to support and death swiping at his heels—he learned in 1992 that he was terminally ill—did Bolaño turn to prose, fiction being a more gainful grit than verse. He wrote furiously during those years, publishing four novels, as many novellas, and three short story collections before his death at the age of 50 in 2003. His last and greatest novel, the gargantuan 2666, was released posthumously and is only now available in English. Relatively few poets appear in its 900-plus pages. All of his other longer works, though, are swimming with them. Most of them are very, very bad.
So many of these reviews are long rehashes of Bolaño’s life and bibliography that one wonders if a compelling (or at least neatly packaged) biography is necessary for literary greatness. Perhaps this is what Pynchon and Salinger were trying to avoid–although their withdrawal from the celebrity-author complex gives them a compelling and neatly packaged biography. Bolaño is a unique case in that he is truly being launched into the English-speaking literary stratosphere (post-mortem) without a cumulative appreciation of his works or “story.” It’s all being crafted as we watch.
