Roberto Bolaño, who wrote the majority of his 10 novels and collections of stories in the final years of his life (he died in 2003, of chronic liver failure, still writing the ending words to his masterwork, “2666”), has crossed over from literary folk hero to mainstream celebrity. Days after “2666” was published in English, in November, 2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), his North American publisher, rushed out a second printing. Lorin Stein, editor at FSG, has called him an “intellectual Harry Potter.”
All this is very strange to readers like me, because Bolaño is not an accesible author, nor is reading him a particularly enjoyable experience. When I first read “The Savage Detectives,” I remember instead being frightened of the book, being frightened at times of falling asleep with it there on the bedside table, being frightened of its ghostlike characters, those émigré fathoms who soon enough slept beside me, being frightened by the ferocity and ugliness of his words, being frightened by the cruel way he dealt with sex, with violence, with identity, with love. And his latest translated work, the 900-page chronicle of bloodletting, “2666,” is nothing short of horrifying.
But Bolaño never sought to console. Accepting Latin America’s highest literary award, the Rómulo Gallegos prize, in June, 1999 (gringos are slow on the uptake: When “The Savage Detectives” was published, in 1998, Bolaño was already being hailed by many as the greatest writer that Latin America had ever produced), he said:
“What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s 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.”
To understand him fully, we need to understand his story. He is unlike many Latin American writers, those he has since equaled in stature, different from Borges, from Neruda, writers who we can and should unlink from their histories and politics, if for nothing else than to be able to enjoy their verse (reading Borges’ magical fictions, should it matter that he supported the Argentine military junta?; reading Neruda’s love poems, should it matter that he adored Stalin?). For Bolaño, his creations were just as real as his daily life, both worlds populated by the same ideas, the same people, the same menaces: for him the line between his millions of words and what was before him was imaginary, where one began and the other ended unknown. As he said, shortly before his death: “You never finish reading, even if you finish all your books, just as you never finish living, even if death is certain.”
For this reason, with Bolaño it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction. Was he a heroin addict? Was he dyslexic? Chilean writers on the subject, and his wife, maintain that he was neither. The New Yorker and the New York Times have run extensive profiles that assert he was both. But we know the skeletal facts.
Bolaño, who in photos is always smoking, always brooding behind thick glasses, always slightly wiser than his observer, was a rootless wanderer, a post-national vagabond. (For a time he even, hilariously, carried around a card that read Roberto Bolaño, Poet and Vagabond.) In the jargon of this magazine, he was a Global Nomad, though his unglamorous words capture not the glitter and promise of globalization, but instead the freedom, the lawlessness, the anonymity of statelessness.
He was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. His mother was a teacher, his father a truck driver and an amateur boxer (and perhaps this is why Bolaño turned out so rancorous, so pugilistic, fists always up, ready for a fight). The family moved throughout Chile with his father’s job, and in 1968, to Mexico. Bolaño had trouble in classes, and spent most of his teen years reading poetry and literature, which he devoured like an anteater snorting up food; he dropped out of highschool, and worked briefly as a journalist. He grew interested in left-wing politics; he became a Trotskyite and traveled to El Salvador, where he met likeminded activists and poets. He returned to Chile in 1973, buoyed by the victory of Allende’s Socialist government. Shortly after the September 11th, 1973 coup, he was stopped at a checkpoint, and, because of his Mexican papers and altered accent, was arrested and kept in jail for being a foreign agitator. He was not harmed, but from his cell he recalls hearing the cries of those being tortured. After a week Bolaño was let out of jail by luck or fate or fictitious recreation (as usual, we learn all these details in one of his stories, “Dance Card”)—the guard, he claims, turned out to be an old classmate—whereupon he returned to Mexico.
In Mexico City he dedicated himself to poetry, writing it at times—he published two short volumes of poetry there—and with his friend Mario Santiago formed a group, a gang of poets, who called themselves the infrarealists, much like the visceral realists we find in ”The Savage Detectives.” In 1978 a doomed romance forced him to leave Mexico; he traveled through Europe and North Africa. He settled in Barcelona for a period, then kept moving up and down the Mediterranean coast, working as dishwasher, campground nightwatchman, shopkeeper, grape picker. Eventually, his health deteriorating—here the English-language press inserts: because of his heroin addiction—he settled in the late 80’s in Blanes, an old tourist town on Spain’s Costa Brava. He cleaned up his lifestyle (replaced alcohol with food and generally took better care of himself), though he would never regain proper function of his liver, and was told by doctors he only had a few years to live; married; had two children. And it was this—his settling, the need to provide for his family, his impending death, which meant the death of his ability to write—it was this that turned him away from his beloved poetry, and drove him to write fiction. He’d get a real kick out of the popstar that decision has now made him.
So where did Bolaño belong? Where do his words belong? His writing undoubtedly is part of the Latin American canon. The vast majority of his work is centered here, including the stunning novel that is both an homage to, and tirade against, his birthplace, “By Night in Chile.” But he wrote his most famous novels in Spain, where Latin Americans, he said, were “never exiles,” and Spain was where he raised his family—and where he died. Yet Mexico is where he found his reason, poetry.
Reading him though, we get the sense that he was from nowhere and everywhere, that he was most at home drifting, scattering his hopes and experiences, leaving cities and lands, bravely, brashly, as his characters do, and perhaps coming back, perhaps not.
In the above-mentioned acceptance speech, Bolaño offers his own idea of homeland:
“What’s true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. A writer’s homeland…is his language… Although it’s also true that a writer’s homeland is not his language, or not only his language, 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. 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.”
For those of us brought up like Bolaño, for those of us who continue to live like him (which I argue is many of us), this quote might define our generation: we are not our national anthems, we are not our Bibles, we are not our wallets. Instead we are our language, we are our friends, we are our passions. When I read Bolaño I feel this. He liberates us from the old conventions of God and State. But he also strips us of what we know; he makes us lonely, without home, without reference point. If we keep, as he did—and as his characters do—traveling to escape our boredoms, will we ever feel settled?
Chris Lenton was born in Delhi and raised in Sri Lanka, and has British and Argentine passports. He has lived all over Asia, Europe, and Latin America, but has settled (for now) in Chile, where he is a writer.
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