Let me take a few minutes out of your day to introduce you to a writer who, if you haven’t read yet, will probably make you feel just that much more mediocre.
I would like to discuss Roberto Bolano, if for no other reason than to try and find out why he writes so much better than you and me.
But the good news is that once you’ve recovered from the fact that there are only a handful of people in this world like Bolano ““ people who are blessed enough to sit down and write with an angel over their shoulder ““ the sheer virtuosity of the prose and the life-affirming nature of the characters in Bolano’s novels will make you feel a lot of different things, all of them very good.
One might be that when you finish the last page of one of his novels and close the book, you’ll rub your eyes as if you just awoke from a wonderful dream. Another might be that you’ll feel incomprehensibly cool, like you just found something that none of your friends did.
I found Roberto Bolano the way any other upper-middle class American college student has in the last couple of years: reading The New Yorker.
I came across an essay on Bolano, proclaiming him the great modern Latin American writer, albeit earning this meteoric rise in the canon of late 20th century literature, after his death. Bolano, a Chilean-born, down-and-out poet of the ’60s and ’70s, grew up in Mexico City following the violence and mayhem of the Pinochet regime.
After that, Bolano spent the better part of three decades bumming around Mexico City, Chile, Spain, France and Israel, writing poetry that wasn’t earning recognition and living off the land.
A 40-year-old poet who considered himself perhaps the world’s best writer that nobody ever heard of, two seminal moments drove Bolano to write full-length novels.
One was when he and his longtime partner had two children, a son and a daughter. Suddenly faced with the responsibility of providing for his child, Bolano turned to novels as a way to make a living. The other was his failing health; Bolano had chronic liver and kidney problems throughout his life, and he knew that his life was destined to be cut short.
The result is a tumultuous decade of writing that gave us nine novels and five collections of short stories, which completely broke down any barriers between Latin American magical realism, 20th-century naturalism or any other literary establishment that is not stapled to the floor.
Bolano passed away in Madrid, Spain, where he spent the last 15 years of his life, in 2003 at the age of 50, having already seen his literary star rise. Unfortunately for him, he never got to the see the true global reach of his work, which was nothing short of an affirmation of the destruction of bordered cultures and ideas. “My home country is the Spanish language,” Bolano famously once said. Unfortunately for us, we have no more Bolano books to be written.
So now that I have alerted you to your need to read Bolano ““ if you must, stop reading this column now and go out and buy one of his books ““ perhaps it would be useful to explain a little bit about the writing that is so explosive. Well, there is so much being produced in literary magazines about the brilliance of Bolano that I don’t want to simply rework the same riffs on the author’s pseudo-Marxist politics, his thematic devices or his narrative structure.
And I thoroughly believe in respecting one’s own reading experience, so let me just say that “The Savage Detectives,” his most recent novel to be translated to English, is a 622-page sprawling achievement laid bare by diary entries of the two protagonists’ closest friends and family members.
The reader never hears from the two main characters, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, who are self-described “visceral realists” and who move seamlessly from one place to another over the course of 27 years, which are all chronicled in the first-person diary narratives.
It’s difficult to confine “The Savage Detectives,” or any of Bolano’s stories for that matter, into genre definitions. So let’s just say that reading Bolano is like sharing a joint with Jorge Luis Borges and Allen Ginsberg, only to find out that their ideas have been reformed for the early 21st century.
But reading any other piece on Bolano won’t fill in the spaces left by not reading him ““ trust me. Bolano spent his creative energy shooting his wad of poetic rhythm, but he doesn’t leave any mess on the floor. The writing is bursting with style but not without substance.
Everything he put down on paper has a purpose waiting for a new reader. Go forth!
If you prefer to get book recommendations from The New Yorker, don’t worry, Alex LaRue’s music column will be back next week. E-mail de Jong at adejong@media.ucla.edu.