Roberto Bolaño
Encyclopedia
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (April 28, 1953 – July 15, 2003) was a Chile
an novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo 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."
, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. 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 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.
A key episode in Bolaño'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, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño 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 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 Ángeles." The episode is also recounted, from the point of view of Bolaño's former classmates, in the story "Detectives." Nevertheless, since 2009 Bolaño's Mexican friends from that era have cast doubts on whether he was even in Chile in 1973 at all.
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile
, Mexico, El Salvador
, France, and Spain.
In the 1970s, Bolaño 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 Martí 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.
Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector. He worked by day and wrote at night. From the early 1980s 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 Bolaño 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 Bolaño "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 The Romantic Dogs.
Bolaño 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
.
Bolaño's death in 2003 came after a long period of declining health. It has been suggested in the English media that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C
, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question given the emphatic denials from Bolaño's wife and from his close friend Enrique Vila-Matas. It is true, however, that he suffered from liver failure and was near the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.
Six weeks before he died, Bolaño'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 Fresán
and Enrique Vila-Matas
; Fresán'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," Fresán 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 Fresán'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." Wrote Larry Rohter of the New York Times, "Bolaño 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."
Bolaño 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, Bolaño 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....") Bolaño named his son Lautaro, after the Mapuche
leader 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.
, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño 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 telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
, translated by Chris Andrews, which was published by New Directions in 2003. His prose work since has largely been in the hands of Chris Andrews as well as Natasha Wimmer
. Andrews translated the first four releases of Bolaño's work in English and is greatly responsible for bringing Bolaño's work to the attention of English-reading audiences. Wimmer's translations of The Savage Detectives
in 2007 and 2666 in 2008-—published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux--brought Bolaño his widest recognition among English readers. Both of these were published after Bolaño died in 2003. Since these works have garnered a large measure of critical praise almost the entirety of Bolaño's works in Spanish have been slated by New Directions to be translated and published with either Andrews or Wimmer penning the translations.
A collection of his poetry, entitled The Romantic Dogs, was published in 2008 by New Directions in a translation by Laura Healy.
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.
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 Autónoma de México (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, Bolaño's alter ego. Unlike The Savage Detectives, Amulet stays in Auxilio's first-person voice, while still allowing for the frenetic scattering of personalities Bolaño is so famous for.
is a bizarre 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.
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 Bolaño's works, these characters stand out by force of the heinousness of their political philosophy. The last portrait was expanded into a novel in Distant Star.
has been compared by Jorge Edwards
to Julio Cortázar
's Rayuela
and José Lezama Lima
's Paradiso
.
In a review in El País, the Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarría
declared it "the novel that Borges
would have written." (An avid reader, Bolaño often expressed his love for Borges and Cortázar's work, and once concluded an overview of contemporary Argentinian literature
by saying that "one should read Borges more.") "Bolaño'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 País, 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 Belano–an alliteratively named alter-ego, who also appears in other stories & novels–and Ulises Lima between 1976-1996. 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. The reports are sandwiched at the beginning and end of the novel by the story of their quest of Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of "real visceralismo", a Mexican avant-garde literary movement of the twenties.
The aspiring 17-year-old poet García 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
. Bolaño called The Savage Detectives "a love letter to my generation."
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. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaño's final intentions — a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer
) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book's present form.
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 Bolaño's death. Focused on the unsolved and still ongoing serial murder
s of Ciudad Juárez
(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 Bolaño's literary estate.
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.
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.
to be the big bang of the Bolaño universe, the loose prose-poem novel was written in 1980 when Bolaño 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 anecdotes—many of which went on to become common material for Bolaño: crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits. The back of the first New Directions edition of book contains a quote from Bolaño about Antwerp: "The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp."
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.
In one of his stories, "Dentist", Bolaño 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 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 Bolaño's work, this conception of fiction manages to be at once elusive and powerfully suggestive. As Jonathan Lethem
has commented, "Reading Roberto Bolaño 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."
Bolaño'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".
Stacy D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/books/review/D-Erasmo-t.html
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize
Rómulo Gallegos Prize
The Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize was created on 6 August 1964 by a presidential decree enacted by Venezuelan President Raúl Leoni, in honor of the Venezuelan politician and President Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara....
for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
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."
Life
Bolaño was born in SantiagoSantiago, Chile
Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...
, the son of a truck driver (who was also a boxer) and a teacher. 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 an outsider.
In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist, and became active in left-wing political causes.
A key episode in Bolaño'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
Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....
. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolaño 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 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 Ángeles." The episode is also recounted, from the point of view of Bolaño's former classmates, in the story "Detectives." Nevertheless, since 2009 Bolaño's Mexican friends from that era have cast doubts on whether he was even in Chile in 1973 at all.
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, Mexico, El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
, France, and Spain.
In the 1970s, Bolaño became a Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. He affectionately parodied aspects of the movement in The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
.
After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton
Roque Dalton
Roque Dalton García was a Salvadoran poet and journalist. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets...
and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front is, since 1992, a left-wing political party in El Salvador and formerly a coalition of five revolutionary guerrilla organizations...
, 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.
Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector. He worked by day and wrote at night. From the early 1980s he lived in the small Catalan
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
beach town of Blanes
Blanes
Blanes is a town on the Costa Brava in the province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain.The coast of Blanes has 4 km of different kinds of beaches, including the Blanes beach and S'Abanell beach.-Main sights:...
.
He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño 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 Bolaño "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 The Romantic Dogs.
Bolaño 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
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean writer with American citizenship. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful...
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
Ariel Dorfman
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.-Personal...
.
Bolaño's death in 2003 came after a long period of declining health. It has been suggested in the English media that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C is an infectious disease primarily affecting the liver, caused by the hepatitis C virus . The infection is often asymptomatic, but chronic infection can lead to scarring of the liver and ultimately to cirrhosis, which is generally apparent after many years...
, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question given the emphatic denials from Bolaño's wife and from his close friend Enrique Vila-Matas. It is true, however, that he suffered from liver failure and was near the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.
Six weeks before he died, Bolaño's fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville
Seville
Seville is the artistic, historic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level...
. Among his closest friends were the novelists Rodrigo Fresán
Rodrigo Fresán
Rodrigo Fresán is a fiction writer and journalist.He has published Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra and Jardines de Kensington and El fondo del cielo. They have been translated into many languages.Mantra, a portrait of Mexico City...
and Enrique Vila-Matas
Enrique Vila-Matas
Enrique Vila-Matas is a Spanish novelist who has had a long and outstanding literary career and is one of the most prestigious and original writers in contemporary Spanish fiction...
; Fresán'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," Fresán 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 Fresán'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." Wrote Larry Rohter of the New York Times, "Bolaño 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."
Bolaño 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
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
magazine, Bolaño 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....") Bolaño named his son Lautaro, after the Mapuche
Mapuche
The Mapuche are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. They constitute a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who shared a common social, religious and economic structure, as well as a common linguistic heritage. Their influence extended...
leader Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic La araucana
La Araucana
La Araucana is an epic poem in Spanish about the Spanish conquest of Chile, by Alonso de Ercilla; it is also known in English as The Araucaniad...
. 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 ParraNicanor Parra
Nicanor Parra Sandoval is a mathematician and poet born in San Fabián de Alico, Chile, who has been considered to be a popular poet in Chile with enormous influence and popularity in Latin America, and also considered one of the most important poets of the Spanish language literature...
, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño 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
By Night In Chile
By Night in Chile, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, was first published in 2000. Chris Andrews' English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions, was also the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English...
), and, posthumously, the novel 2666
2666 (novel)
2666 is the penultimate novel written by Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Released in 2004, it depicts the unsolved and ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juárez , the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers...
. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
Translation of his works into English
The first of his works to appear in English was By Night In ChileBy Night In Chile
By Night in Chile, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, was first published in 2000. Chris Andrews' English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions, was also the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English...
, translated by Chris Andrews, which was published by New Directions in 2003. His prose work since has largely been in the hands of Chris Andrews as well as Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English....
. Andrews translated the first four releases of Bolaño's work in English and is greatly responsible for bringing Bolaño's work to the attention of English-reading audiences. Wimmer's translations of The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
in 2007 and 2666 in 2008-—published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux--brought Bolaño his widest recognition among English readers. Both of these were published after Bolaño died in 2003. Since these works have garnered a large measure of critical praise almost the entirety of Bolaño's works in Spanish have been slated by New Directions to be translated and published with either Andrews or Wimmer penning the translations.
A collection of his poetry, entitled The Romantic Dogs, was published in 2008 by New Directions in a translation by Laura Healy.
By Night in Chile
By Night In ChileBy Night In Chile
By Night in Chile, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, was first published in 2000. Chris Andrews' English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions, was also the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English...
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
Opus Dei
Opus Dei, formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei , is an organization of the Catholic Church that teaches that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. The majority of its membership are lay people, with secular priests under the...
, 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
AmuletAmulet (novel)
Amulet is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1999. An English translation, by Chris Andrews, was published by New Directions in 2006.-Plot summary:...
focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, who also appears in The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
as a minor character trapped in a bathroom at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (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, Bolaño's alter ego. Unlike The Savage Detectives, Amulet stays in Auxilio's first-person voice, while still allowing for the frenetic scattering of personalities Bolaño is so famous for.
Distant Star
Distant StarDistant Star
Distant Star is a novella by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, first published in Spanish in 1996. Chris Andrews’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2004...
is a bizarre 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 AmericasNazi Literature in the Americas
Nazi Literature in the Americas is a work of fiction by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1996. Chris Andrews’ English translation was published in 2008 by New Directions which was shortlisted for the 2008 Best Translated Book Award....
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 Bolaño's works, these characters stand out by force of the heinousness of their political philosophy. The last portrait was expanded into a novel in Distant Star.
The Savage Detectives
The Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
has been compared by Jorge Edwards
Jorge Edwards
Jorge Edwards Valdés is a Chilean novelist, journalist and diplomat. He is currently the Chilean ambassador to France.-Life and career:...
to Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
's Rayuela
Rayuela
Hopscotch is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Written in Paris and published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966, the English translation by Gregory Rabassa won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award. Hopscotch is an introspective stream-of-consciousness novel where characters...
and José Lezama Lima
José Lezama Lima
José Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature....
's Paradiso
Paradiso (1966 novel)
Paradiso was the only novel by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima to be completed and published during his lifetime. The narrative consists of the childhood and youth of José Cemí, told in a highly baroque experimental style, and depicts many scenes which have remarkable resonances with Lezama's own life...
.
In a review in El País, the Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarría
Ignacio Echevarría
Ignacio Echeverría is a Spanish literary critic. He is currently a staff member of El País newspaper.-References:...
declared it "the novel that Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
would have written." (An avid reader, Bolaño often expressed his love for Borges and Cortázar's work, and once concluded an overview of contemporary Argentinian literature
Argentine literature
Argentine literature is the body of literary work produced in Argentina. Among Argentina's best-known and most influential authors are Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Hernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Ernesto Sabato...
by saying that "one should read Borges more.") "Bolaño'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 País, 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 Belano–an alliteratively named alter-ego, who also appears in other stories & novels–and Ulises Lima between 1976-1996. These trips and adventures, narrated by 52 characters, take them from Mexico DF to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, San Francisco, Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
and finally to Liberia
Liberia
Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
during its civil war in the mid-nineties. The reports are sandwiched at the beginning and end of the novel by the story of their quest of Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of "real visceralismo", a Mexican avant-garde literary movement of the twenties.
The aspiring 17-year-old poet García 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
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
. Bolaño called The Savage Detectives "a love letter to my generation."
2666
The novel 26662666 (novel)
2666 is the penultimate novel written by Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Released in 2004, it depicts the unsolved and ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juárez , the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers...
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. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaño's final intentions — a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English....
) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book's present form.
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 Bolaño's death. Focused on the unsolved and still ongoing serial murder
Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez
The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish the feminicidios and las muertas de Juárez , involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993 in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El...
s of Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...
(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
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
-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
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
for Fiction. The award was accepted by Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English....
, 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 Bolaño's literary estate.
Last Evenings on Earth
Last Evenings on EarthLast Evenings on Earth
Last Evenings on Earth is a collection of short stories, published in 2006, by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño translated by Chris Andrews. The stories in this volume were selected from two Spanish language collections, Llamadas Telefonicas , and Putas Asesinas...
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
Bolaño 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 DogsThe Romantic Dogs
The Romantic Dogs is a collection of poems by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 2006. The bilingual edition, with English translations by Laura Healy, was published by New Directions in 2008....
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.
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 Martí. 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 EchevarríaIgnacio Echevarría
Ignacio Echeverría is a Spanish literary critic. He is currently a staff member of El País newspaper.-References:...
to be the big bang of the Bolaño universe, the loose prose-poem novel was written in 1980 when Bolaño was 27. The book remained unpublished until 2002, when it was published in Spanish as Amberes, a year before the author's death. Antwerp
Antwerp (novel)
Antwerp is a novella by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was written in 1980 but only published in 2002, a year before the author's death...
contains a loose narrative structured less around a story arc and more around motifs, reappearing characters and anecdotes—many of which went on to become common material for Bolaño: crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits. The back of the first New Directions edition of book contains a quote from Bolaño about Antwerp: "The only novel that doesn't embarrass me is Antwerp."
Forthcoming translations
New Directions plans to release the short story collection The Secret of Evil on April 17th, 2012.Themes
In the final decade of his life Bolaño 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 Bolaño'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.
In one of his stories, "Dentist", Bolaño 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 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 Bolaño's work, this conception of fiction manages to be at once elusive and powerfully suggestive. As Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
has commented, "Reading Roberto Bolaño 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."
Bolaño'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 Bolaño, 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 Bolaño, 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 Bolaño'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?
Stacy D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/books/review/D-Erasmo-t.html
Novels
- The Skating RinkThe Skating RinkThe Skating Rink is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. A translation from the Spanish by Chris Andrews was published by New Directions in August, 2009.-Summary:...
(La Pista de Hielo, 1993) - translated by Chris Andrews, August 2009. - Nazi Literature in the AmericasNazi Literature in the AmericasNazi Literature in the Americas is a work of fiction by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1996. Chris Andrews’ English translation was published in 2008 by New Directions which was shortlisted for the 2008 Best Translated Book Award....
(Literatura Nazi en América, 1996) - translated by Chris Andrews, February 2008. - Distant StarDistant StarDistant Star is a novella by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, first published in Spanish in 1996. Chris Andrews’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2004...
(Estrella Distante, 1996) - translated by Chris Andrews, December 2004. - The Savage DetectivesThe Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
(Los Detectives Salvajes, 1998) - translated by Natasha Wimmer, April 2007. - AmuletAmulet (novel)Amulet is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1999. An English translation, by Chris Andrews, was published by New Directions in 2006.-Plot summary:...
(Amuleto, 1999) - translated by Chris Andrews, January 2007. - Monsieur PainMonsieur PainMonsieur Pain is a novel by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. A translation from the Spanish by Chris Andrews was published by New Directions in January 2010.-Summary:The novel is set in Paris and narrated by the Mesmerist Pierre Pain...
(Monsieur PainMonsieur PainMonsieur Pain is a novel by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. A translation from the Spanish by Chris Andrews was published by New Directions in January 2010.-Summary:The novel is set in Paris and narrated by the Mesmerist Pierre Pain...
, 1999) - translated by Chris Andrews, January 2010 - By Night in ChileBy Night In ChileBy Night in Chile, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, was first published in 2000. Chris Andrews' English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions, was also the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English...
(Nocturno de Chile, 2000) - translated by Chris Andrews, December 2003. - AntwerpAntwerp (novel)Antwerp is a novella by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was written in 1980 but only published in 2002, a year before the author's death...
(Amberes, published 2002, written 1980) - translated by Natasha Wimmer, April 2010. - 26662666 (novel)2666 is the penultimate novel written by Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Released in 2004, it depicts the unsolved and ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juárez , the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers...
(2004) - translated by Natasha Wimmer, November 2008. - El Tercer Reich (2010) [The Third Reich] - translated by Natasha Wimmer, November 2011.
Short Story Collections
- Last Evenings on EarthLast Evenings on EarthLast Evenings on Earth is a collection of short stories, published in 2006, by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño translated by Chris Andrews. The stories in this volume were selected from two Spanish language collections, Llamadas Telefonicas , and Putas Asesinas...
- selection of stories from Putas Asesinas (Killer Whores, 2001) and Llamadas Telefónicas (Telephone Calls, 1997), translated into English by Chris Andrews, April 2007. - The ReturnThe Return (short story collection)The Return is a collection of short stories by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published in English in 2010, translated by Chris Andrews...
- remaining stories from Putas Asesinas (Killer Whores, 2001) and Llamadas Telefónicas (Telephone Calls, 1997), translated by Chris Andrews, June 2010. - The Insufferable GauchoThe Insufferable GauchoThe Insufferable Gaucho is a collection of short stories by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published in English in 2010, translated by Chris Andrews. During his lifetime, Bolaño made his name as a writer of short stories, and The Insufferable Gaucho collects a disparate variety of work...
(El Gaucho Insufrible, 2003) - translated by Chris Andrews, August 2010. - The Secret of Evil (El Secreto del Mal, 2007) - translated by Chris Andrews, forthcoming, November 2011.
Poetry
- The Romantic DogsThe Romantic DogsThe Romantic Dogs is a collection of poems by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 2006. The bilingual edition, with English translations by Laura Healy, was published by New Directions in 2008....
(Los Perros Románticos: Poemas 1980-1998, 2000) - translated by Laura Healy, 2008. - TresTres (poetry collection)Tres is a collection of poems by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, originally published in Spanish in 2000 and scheduled to be published in a bilingual edition in September 2011, translated into English by Laura Healy...
(Tres, 2000) - translated by Laura Healy, 2011. - La Universidad Desconocida (2007) [The Unknown University]
Non-fiction
- Between Parentheses (Entre paréntesis, 2004) - translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, published by New Directions, New York, June 2011.
Collaborations
- Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984) ["Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Fanatic of Joyce"]
Further reading
- Karim Benmiloud, Raphaël Estève (coord.). Les astres noirs de Roberto Bolaño. Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007.
- Roberto Bolaño, Sybil Perez, Marcela Valdes. Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House Publishing, 2009.
- Patricia Espinosa H. Territorios en fuga: estudios criticos sobre la obra de Roberto Bolaño. Providencia (Santiago), Ed. Frasis, 2003.
- Jorge Herralde. Para Roberto Bolaño. Colombia, Villegas Editores, 2005.
- Celina Manzoni. Roberto Bolaño, la literatura como tauromaquia. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2002.
- Celina Manzoni, Dunia Gras, Roberto Brodsky. Jornadas homenaje Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003): simposio internacional. Barcelona, ICCI Casa Amèrica a Catalunya, 2005.
- Fernando Moreno. Roberto Bolaño: una literatura infinita. Poitiers, Université de Poitiers / CNRS, 2005.
- Edmundo Paz Soldán, Gustavo Faverón Patriau (coord.). Bolaño salvaje. Canet de Mar (Barcelona). Ed. Candaya, 2008. (Includes DVD with documentary, Bolaño cercano, by Erik Hasnoot.)
- http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5286494.ece
External links
- "The Caracas Speech", Roberto Bolaño accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, translated in Triple Canopy
- "Literature + Sickness = Sickness" translated in News from the Republic of LettersNews from the Republic of LettersNews from the Republic of Letters is the third magazine collaboration between Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford, following Noble Savage and ANON. The journal, originally based in Boston and now operated from the editor's home in Costa Rica, publishes new and newly-discovered writings from American and...
- English translations of Bolaño's poetry and the Manifesto of Infrarealism
- "Translator Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño" Center for the Art of Translation