Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño Ávalos ( listen) (Santiago de Chile, April 28, 1953-Barcelona, July 15, 2003) was a Chilean writer and poet, author of more than two dozen books, among which his novels stand out. The wild detectives, winner of the Herralde Prize in 1998 and the Rimulo Gallegos Prize in 1999, and the postuma 2666.

After his death, he has become one of the most influential writers in the Spanish language, as evidenced by the numerous publications devoted to his work and the fact that three novels —in addition to those already mentioned Los detectives salvajes and 2666, the brief Estrella distanta— appear in the top 15 places on the list made in 2007 by 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics, with the best 100 books in Spanish from the last 25 years.

His work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and Dutch. At the time of his death he had 37 publishing contracts in ten countries. Posthumously the list grew to include more countries, including the United States, and amounted to 50 contracts and 49 translations in twelve countries, all of them prior to the publication of 2666, his most ambitious novel. In addition, the author enjoys excellent reviews from both contemporary writers and literary critics and is considered one of the great Spanish-American authors of the 20th century, along with other writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Julio Cortázar, with whom is usually compared.

Biography

Childhood in Chile

Son of the trucker and boxer León Bolaño and the teacher Victoria Ávalos. His grandfather was a soldier (who possibly sparked his later fondness for war games). He was born into a lower-middle-class family, far from the world of letters, although his mother used to read best sellers relatively frequently. He only had one younger sister.

Roberto was born in Santiago de Chile, but never lived there. He spent part of his childhood in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, where he did his first studies in Quilpué and Cauquenes. However, where he lived most of his His first years were in Los Ángeles, Biobío province. In Quilpué, where he lived between 1960 and 1964, he did his first job at the age of ten, as a ticket clerk for a bus line on the Quilpué-Valparaíso route. It is believed that he suffered from dyslexia in his childhood, but this is due to a comment made by the author at a conference in Venezuela, despite the fact that there is no proven medical diagnosis. In any case, it was not a problem for learning from him.

His parents' relationship was unstable, with continuous separations and reunions. Her mother, who had visited Mexico on a few occasions, convinced León to go live together in Mexico City.

Youth in Mexico

The future writer moved with his family to Mexico in 1968, when he was fifteen years old, the same year as the student movement that caused the army to invade the Ciudad Universitaria de la UNAM and Casco de Santo Tomás, and later the Massacre of Tlatelolco. These events, which occurred at the end of the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (PRI) and which cost the lives of hundreds of Mexicans, would later be narrated by Bolaño in his novel Amuleto (1999).

In Mexico City Roberto continued his secondary studies for a short time, leaving them permanently at sixteen, to dedicate himself to reading and writing daily. He never finished high school and therefore did not start higher education either. He was a voracious reader from his adolescence, reading from Mexican literature and police thrillers to classic works by Horace, Ovid and Archilochus. During this time he was a regular visitor to the public library of the Mexican capital, city in which he developed doing different jobs, such as journalist, or even selling lamps of the Virgin of Guadalupe, at the same time that he wrote plays and poetry. According to the Chilean poet Jaime Quezada, a friend of Victoria Ávalos and that between 1971 and 1972 he lived in Roberto's house, Bolaño had very few friends at that time and rarely left home.

It is in the Mexican capital where Bolaño's literary career began to take shape. Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez are the settings for his most famous books, The Wild Detectives and 2666 , respectively, in the latter adopting the fictitious name of Santa Teresa.

In Mexico City, Bolaño's family lived in the Lindavista neighborhood, then in the Nápoles neighborhood, and later in the Guadalupe Tepeyac neighborhood.

Brief return to Chile

Bolaño arrived in Chile a few days before the coup. In the image, the Palacio de La Moneda bombarded during September 11, 1973.

Bolaño frequented the Bar Valle de Oro, now called Santiago, located in Alameda and Portugal, in Santiago Centro.

In 1973 he returned to Chile with the purpose of supporting the process of socialist reforms of Salvador Allende through the Popular Unity, at the same time as to experience the sensation of extreme freedom manifested by the Beat Generation. After a long trip by bus, hitchhiking and by boat (crossing practically all of Latin America) he arrived in Chile in August of that year, a few days before the coup d'état on September 11, staying in Santiago at the house of Jaime Quezada, who had recently returned from Mexico, where he lived in the house of the Bolaño family.

In Chile, he took the opportunity to visit his relatives in Los Angeles, Mulchén and Concepción. However, he was arrested in November on a bus on his way from Los Angeles to Concepción to visit a friend, being released eight days later thanks to the help of an old fellow student in Cauquenes who was among the policemen who had to guard him. His story Detectives is based on this experience, published in Telephone calls and where he appears under his literary alter ego Arturo Belano. After this experience and added to the pressures of his mother, Bolaño decided to leave his native country, not visiting it until twenty-five years later.

Return to Mexico

Mario Santiago at the Zócalo of Mexico City. He was Bolaño's best friend, and the founder along with him of infrarrealism.

Bolaño returned to Mexico in January 1974, again traveling overland from Chile, stopping for a time in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Regarding this brief stay, the writer affirmed that it was there that he met the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrilla of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, some of whose members had to do with the murder of Dalton. However, there are scholars who deny this fact and think that it is probably a myth.

Back in Mexico, he met what would become his best friend, the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, and the Chilean Bruno Montané (whom Bolaño would represent, respectively, through the characters of Ulises Lima and Felipe Müller in his award-winning novel The Savage Detectives).

A year later, in 1975, with Papasquiaro, Montané and other friends they would found the infrarealist movement that, arising from meetings and bohemian gatherings at Café La Habana on Avenida Bucareli, radically opposed the dominant powers in Mexican poetry and the literary establishment of that country, which had Octavio Paz as its preponderant figure. During this time in Mexico, Bolaño began to write practically every day from dawn to dawn, maintaining a rigorous constancy.

In addition to the infrarealists and friends related to the movement, Bolaño met more adult Mexican poets, such as Hugo Gutiérrez Vega and Efraín Huerta, or the Chileans exiled in Mexico Poli Délano, Hernán Lavín Cerda and the Ecuadorian Miguel Donoso Pareja.

In the mid-1970s, his mother moved to Spain, while his father stayed in Mexico and started a new family. In 1976, shortly before the Infrarealists published their first anthology, Bird of heat, Lisa Johnson, who was his greatest Mexican love, broke up with him, this being one of the main reasons why he left Mexico and decided to go live in Europe. At first, Bolaño thought travel to Sweden, where she had a more or less secure job. However, her mother was ill in Barcelona, so it was decided to go with her to this city, staying permanently in Catalonia. Carla Rippey, Bolaño's friend and of the infrarealists at that time, he provides another reason that motivated the writer's departure, related to "unfair harassment" by the authorities towards his family, due to a police accusation against an ex-boyfriend of his sister.

Infrarealism

The roundabout of the Chinese Watch at the Bucareli Avenue, Mexico City, where the Café La Habana where the underrealists met.

In 1975, Bolaño, Mario Santiago and eighteen other young poets, most of them Mexican, founded the poetic movement of infrarealism in Mexico City, led by both of them. The movement was founded as such in the house of the poet Bruno Montané, in Mexico D. F., in 1976.

That same year, Bolaño published his first book of poetry, Reinventar el amor, in the artisan printing press of his friend Juan Pascoe called Taller Martín Pescador. Also that year he wrote the first infrarealist manifesto, which ends with a sentence that, according to the journalist Montserrat Madariaga, summarizes the "literary canon" that accompanied the writer throughout his life:

"Leave it all, lancense again to the ways."

Roberto Bolaño, first infrarealist manifest. Mexico, 1976

The origin of the term is French, and the intellectual Emmanuel Berl attributes it to one of the founders of Surrealism, the writer and politician Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), who was also one of the promoters of Dadaism. According to Bolaño, the name initially arose from the hand of the Chilean Roberto Matta (1911-2002), an artist who coined the term "infrarealism" in the 1940s, after André Breton expelled him from surrealism, thus being its only practitioner until the term is recovered as a literary current.

In addition to Bolaño, Mario Santiago and Montané, the infrarealist movement included among its co-founders poets such as José Vicente Anaya, Rubén Medina, Ramón Méndez Estrada and the Peruvian José Rosas Ribeyro, among others. At that time, Bolaño, in the presence of Bruno Montané, burned some seven hundred pages that he had written in plays, as a symbolic act that reaffirmed his exclusive dedication to poetry from then on.

The movement sought to break with the official and establish itself as the vanguard, boycotting literary acts by different artists, including Octavio Paz. The poet and writer Carmen Boullosa, on one occasion, expressed her fear to Bolaño that he with the « infras» will boycott his poetic reading.

Through infrarealism, the poetry of Bolaño and Mario Santiago was characterized by its everydayness, its dissonance and its dadaist elements. Papasquiaro cultivated this genre until the end of his life, but Bolaño gradually abandoned it for prose, although he himself never stopped considering himself a poet.

Regarding his relationship with this movement, the writer Juan Villoro commented:

"It could be argued that underrealism determined it as a writer in the same way that the distance from the current allowed him to start his career as a novelist. Mexico was central to him, because he determined it as a writer (...) Mexico's nightlife, Mexico's streets, everyday speech, a broken and sometimes tragic fate and humor captivated him. It is no accident that their two greatest novels have focused them on Mexico, The wild detectives and 2666».

Juan Villoro

Posthumously, infrarealism was called by the critical American press on various occasions "visceral modernism" and "visceral realism". The latter name is the one used by Bolaño to refer to the movement in his novel Los detectives salvajes, which he wrote from numerous notes of that time where he was immortalizing what happened to him and the other infrarealists.

In Spain

Arrival in Barcelona

The poet Bolaño emigrated to Spain in 1977, specifically to Catalonia, where his mother already lived, shortly after the other infrarealist Bruno Montané did. Around the same time, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro also passed through Europe, especially Paris, before continuing on to Israel. Bolaño himself stated some time later that this was the last time he saw his friend Mario Santiago in person —although they never lost contact through correspondence and some phone calls— and that at the Port-Vendres Station in France they gave up finished infrarealism. This last was indeed the case for Bolaño, who would progressively leave poetry to dedicate himself more to narrative, but Papasquiaro returned to Mexico City in 1979, and managed to revive the movement, with some old members and some new ones.

In Spain and other countries such as France, he held various trades, such as dishwasher, bellboy, waiter, garbage collector, campsite night watchman, boat unloader, grape harvester during the summer or seller in a warehouse neighborhood. His spare time was spent writing, and on some occasions when money was scarce, he chose to steal books.

House where Roberto Bolaño lived in the street Workshops, in El Raval, Barcelona. Photography of 2012.

The first city where Bolaño established himself on a stable basis was in Barcelona. After staying for a short time on what was then called Avenida José Antonio —currently the Gran Vía de las Cortes Catalanas— he lived for a year on the cobbled Calle Tallers, located in the El Raval neighborhood, two blocks from Plaza de Cataluña. His humble apartment, measuring 25 square meters, was on the fourth floor of an old convent, with a bathroom shared with the other neighbors, without an electric bell and with two exterior windows that looked towards another building, on the other side of the street.. With his friends, writers and poets, they used to meet at the table football located in the Tallers itself, in front of the Cèntric bar and close to the Parisienne bar, where Bolaño would have a coffee when he had money. The Chilean used to take long walks through the neighborhood. Later he moved to live with his sister, her mother and her partner in a modernist building on Gran Vía, near Plaza España. It is then that he got a job as a night watchman at the La Estrella de Mar camp in Castelldefels, 24 kilometers from Barcelona and where Bolaño had to travel daily, during the summers and some winters between 1978 and 1981.

From Barcelona, Bolaño maintained contact with Juan Pascoe, trying to publish a second book of poems in Mexico at the Martín Pescador Workshop. Although this project did not come to fruition, the Chilean managed to appear in 1978 in the anthologies Some poets in Barcelona —along with his friends Bruno Montané and A. G. Porta— and Newest Latin American poetry, the latter published in D. F. In addition, the following year, Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoíris de fuego was published, also in Mexico City. Eleven young Latin American poets, an anthology whose appearance he had arranged with Editorial Extemporáneos before his departure for Europe, which includes a presentation by Efraín Huerta and his poems, by Mario Santiago, Bruno Montané, Hernán Lavín Cerda, Jorge Pimentel, Enrique Verástegui and Orlando Guillén, among others.

During these first years in Spain, Bolaño also created, together with Bruno Montané, the poetry magazine RVAC (Rimbaud vuelve a casa), the only issue of which was financed by the latter. Through it they formally said goodbye to infrarealism. Then they tried to turn it into a mini-publishing house under the name Rimbaud Comes Home Press, and published two or three issues of a low-circulation magazine called Berthe Trépat, in which they included poems by Enrique Lihn, Soledad Bianchi, Waldo Rojas, Claudio Bertoni and Diego Maquieira, among others.

The difficult years in Girona

The writer left Barcelona in 1980, having already written a first version of his novel Antwerp, and moved to Girona, specifically to Capuchinos street, in the old town, where he began contact by correspondence with one of his favorite Chilean poets, Enrique Lihn. During the 1980s he was able to begin to support himself financially, although only in part, winning municipal literary contests, in which he is urged to participate thanks to the advice of the writer Argentinean exiled in Spain Antonio Di Benedetto, to whom he dedicates his short story "Sensini" for this reason.

In 1981, in this city, he met Carolina López, twenty-year-old (Bolaño was twenty-eight), a Catalan who works in social services and who would be his future wife. Carolina remembers that he approached her on the street and invited her to dinner.

In 1983, together with Bruno Montané, they launched a single issue of the magazine Return to Antarctica, with three poets (including Bolaño himself) and three cartoonists. The copies were mere photocopies and reached few people besides the participants themselves.

In the winter of 1984 Roberto and Carolina began to live together. That same year he also published his first novel, Advice from a Morrison disciple to a Joyce fanatic, written as a duet with the Catalan A. G. Porta and winner of the Ámbito Literario Award. In the same year, he was the winner of the Félix Urabayen Award for his novel La senda de los elefantes , which had already been nominated previously, under another name, to another literary contest This novel would later, in 1999, be republished by Editorial Anagrama under the name Monsieur Pain.

Establishment in Blanes

Blanes, located in the Costa Brava, Catalonia, is the small municipality in which Roberto Bolaño was established after leaving Gerona.

The premature couple married in 1985. That summer they moved to Blanes, a small town located on the Costa Brava in Catalonia, 70 kilometers from Barcelona, so that Roberto could work in the jewelry store set up by his mother in 1983. Carolina gets a social service job there at the town hall that same summer, and for this reason, in 1986, they settle there permanently.

They would have two children with Carolina: Lautaro and Alexandra. With the birth of their eldest son in 1990, Bolaño, who until then had almost only written poetry, decided to turn to narrative, as a way to make his trade more profitable and thus be able to support his growing family. In 1992 he learned of the disease that afflicted him, and with which he would carry for little more than a decade, often prioritizing his work as a writer over his health care.

The following year he published his third novel, La pista de hielo, and Los perros románticos, a compilation of his poems written in Spain since his arrival in 1977 until 1990, with which he won the 1994 City of Irún Literary Prize and the Kutxa Ciudad de San Sebastián Literary Prize, for the best book of poetry in Spanish.

In 1996 he published the novels Nazi Literature in America and Distant Star, with excellent reviews and which began to give them a certain prestige, and the following year his first short story book, entitled Telephone calls, with which he obtained the Municipal Award of Santiago de Chile, the Ámbito Literario de Narrativa Award and the Kutxa Ciudad de San Sebastián Literary Award, the latter for his short story "Sensini".

Blanes was the last place where the writer lived, until his death. He lived in Loro and Ancha streets, parallel and contiguous, located very close to the beach towards the Mediterranean Sea.

Literary consolidation

Bolaño books for sale and translated into Japanese.

The writer's critical recognition and fame abruptly consolidated in 1998, the year in which he became the first Chilean writer to win the Herralde Novel Award thanks to his work Los detectives salvajes. On August 2 of the following year, he repeated the novelty by obtaining the Rómulo Gallegos Award for the same novel, about which Enrique Vila-Matas wrote:

«The wild detectives — seen thus—would be a crack that opens up gaps in which new literary currents of the next millennium will circulate. The wild detectives is, on the other hand, my own breach; it is a novel that has forced me to rethink aspects of my own narrative. And it is also a novel that has inspired me to continue writing, even to rescue the best that was in me when I started writing."

Enrique Vila-Matas

In Los detectives salvajes Bolaño portrays himself through his alter ego Arturo Belano, sharing with his real-life best friend, the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, for whom he uses the nickname of Ulises Lima. Papasquiaro died on January 10, 1998, shortly after Bolaño had finished correcting the novel, and therefore did not manage to read it.

After Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño began to be frequently invited to attend interviews and conferences, as well as to write publications in magazines and the press. At the end of 1998, he accepted the commitment to write an approximately weekly column for the Diari de Girona , a Catalan-language newspaper in the province of Gerona (to which Blanes belongs) where the writer also published Jose Maria Gironella. The first installment of it (which were written in Spanish, and later translated by the editors into Catalan) is published in January 1999, and these extend until the first half of 2000, totaling approximately fifty columns and literary reviews. After his regular collaboration with that medium was suspended, Bolaño accepted the proposal of his friend Andrés Braithwaite to collaborate in the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias (which at that time had not yet become a celebrity medium). and publish a column similar to the one he had in the Diari de Girona and which, at Braithwaite's initiative, was called Between parentheses. The vast majority of these publications, between May 1999 and January 2003, as well as those of the Diari de Girona, plus conferences and interviews, can be found in his posthumous book, which bears the title of his Chilean column (2004).

Parallel to the above, in November 1998 he traveled to Chile for the first time after 25 years of absence, invited to serve as a jury in a short story contest organized by Paula magazine. The writer, in the company of his wife and son Lautaro, is received by a delegation that includes his grandmother María Olga, Alexandra Edwards (director of the magazine), and the journalist and writer Totó Romero. During his stay he performs at television programs and is interviewed by different national media, such as the newspapers Las Últimas Noticias, and La Nación, a newspaper from La Serena, and the magazines Paula and Ercilla. He also took advantage of greeting Pedro Lemebel by phone on his birthday, as well as visiting Nicanor Parra, for Bolaño "the best living poet in the Spanish language ».

Despite this busy life of interviews, awards and new job openings, the writer continued to maintain an austere lifestyle, without luxury or ostentation. As for the sales of his books in life, except for The Savage Detectives he was a minority author, who did not receive a large income. His work studio, located in Blanes on the same street as the house which he shared with Carolina López, did not have heating and lacked any comfort.

In 1999 he published Amuleto, which delves into one of the stories told in Los detectives salvajes, and in November of that year he traveled again and for the last time to Chile, for the Book Fair. On this occasion, however, the reception of some of his fellow writers was more surly, due to his critical comments on Chilean literature published in May of that year in an interview for the magazine Ajoblanco in Barcelona. On that trip, in the company of his wife Carolina López and their son Lautaro, as well as the young writer Lina Meruane, they visited the writer Diamela Eltit and her husband, the leftist politician Jorge Arrate, who in turn invited Pablo Azócar. Back in Spain, he wrote a book inspired by this trip, Nocturno de Chile, which was published in 2000, and the following year he published his second book of short stories, Putas asesinas.

In 2001 the Spanish writer Javier Cercas published his testimonial novel Soldados de Salamina, in which Bolaño appears as the character who encouraged him to finish the book, while in 2003 he was honored by the Mexican Jorge Volpi in his book The end of madness.

Last days and farewell

Bolaño did not usually travel much, but during the last semester of his life he made several trips. He visited London, at the invitation of the editor Christopher MacLehose, who published Nocturno de Chile in English; he also Paris and Turin, invited by the French publisher Christian Bourgois and by the Italian publishers Elvira and Antonio Sellerio, respectively. In Paris and Turin he also met his friend and Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde.

In mid-2003, a few weeks before his death, during a meeting of Latin American writers in Seville, the Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán referred to Bolaño as the undisputed leader of both him and other contemporary writers, such as Jorge Volpi or Gamboa.

Hospital Universitario Valle de Hebron, where the writer died.

On July 1, Carmen Pérez de Vega, his partner for the last six years, took him urgently from Blanes to the Valle de Hebrón University Hospital in Barcelona, where he was admitted. The day before, in a very poor state of health, spoke extensively and as usual with Jorge Herralde in the offices of Editorial Anagrama, about literature and his novel in progress 2666, and gave him the manuscript of his latest book of short stories, The Insufferable Gaucho, which would shortly become his first posthumous work. Bolaño died on Tuesday the 15th, after spending ten days in a coma as a result of liver failure while waiting in vain for a donor to undergo a heart transplant. liver. His son Lautaro was thirteen years old and his daughter Alexandra, two. He left the rights to all his written work in the hands of his wife and children. His body was laid to rest at the Les Corts funeral home, where a secular funeral was also held on July 16, where Herralde gave a farewell speech. His ashes were then thrown into the Mediterranean Sea.

His last interview was entitled "Distant Star", like his homonymous book, and was conducted by journalist Mónica Maristain from Playboy magazine in Mexico. In addition to the finished book of short stories The insufferable gaucho, left several works unfinished, as well as manuscripts, unpublished poems, and life diaries, among other documents. He also left works almost finished, such as his monumental novel 2666, which left him thinking in which it was distributed as five independent books, in order to ensure the livelihood of his wife and children, despite which they agreed to publish it as a single unit, as it had been intended since its conception. novel Bolaño took his storytelling capacity to the extreme, this time around a character, Benno von Archimboldi, through which he takes up the figure of the writer who disappeared in the middle of Santa Teresa, a transcript of Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, a city in which successive with multiple horror multiple femicides.

Bolaño spent his last years rarely leaving home. He was very overprotective of his children. Until the end of it, however, according to what his close friends say, he kept his warmth, his sense of humor and his irony intact, as well as his taste for long conversations, polemics and debate.

Posthumous Tributes

Roberto Bolaño in Barcelona in 2012

In 2004, a year after his death, Bolaño won the Salambó Award for the best novel written in Spanish, for 2666. The jury highlighted the level and diversity of the five finalists, all of them "noble, respectable and very notable books", however considering this "the summary of a very weighty work, where the best of Roberto Bolaño's narrative is decanted." (...) which involves a great risk and takes the author's literary language to the extreme".

After his death, Bolaño's work spread even more in the Spanish-speaking world, but also in France and the United States, where it was on the list of the 10 best books of the year by some of the most prestigious media, such as The New Yorker, Slate and Bookforum. In 2006 the book Last Evenings on Earth was published in the United States. i>, made up of stories about Telephone Calls and Killer Whores, which was chosen by The New York Times as one of the books of the year The remaining short stories that were not collected in the novel appeared in 2010 under the name The Return.

In an interview on March 25, 2010, American singer and poet Patti Smith, whom Bolaño admired, stated that "2666 is the first masterpiece of the 21st century" and that " reading Bolaño has been a revelation for me». On Sunday, March 28 of that year, she dedicated a recital to the writer, closing the Gijón Word and Music festival, premiering a poem-song that talks about the Chilean.

His wife and children continued to live in Blanes. The author's posthumous books have been published by Editorial Anagrama under the strict supervision of Carolina. Bolaño's widow, who shortly after his death contacted Carmen Balcells' agency to administer the rights to the Chilean's work and who in mid-2009 opted for the famous American literary agent Andrew Wylie, in December In 2010, he had agreed to give only four press interviews, with specific purposes: to deny Bolaño's supposed addiction to heroin, to express his disagreement with the appearance of Adolf Hitler on the cover of the book Nazi literature in America, and deny the existence of film contracts for The Savage Detectives.

Tributes in Chile

The young Bolaño, a student of the Lyceum of Men of Los Angeles, the work of the Angel sculptor Juan Carlos Rivas.

On October 23 of the same year of his death, during the Book Fair held in Santiago de Chile, the Spanish writer Jorge Herralde, editor of Anagrama and friend of Bolaño, delivered a long speech in homage to Bolaño, who most It was later published in his book Para Roberto Bolaño.

In 2006, the CNCA's Book and Reading Council established the Roberto Bolaño Awards for Young Literary Creation, which recognize the best unpublished works of poetry, short stories and novels by Chilean authors between the ages of 13 and 25 years.

On July 20, 2013, a plaque in his name was inaugurated in the town of El Retiro, belonging to the Quilpué commune, where the writer lived part of his childhood.

In August 2018, a statue of a young Roberto Bolaño seated on a plaza bench was erected on the campus of the Universidad de Concepción in Los Angeles.

Tributes in Spain

La Sala Roberto Bolaño de la Biblioteca Comarcal de Blanes in 2010, prepared for a children's event.

Commemorative plaque of Bolaño outside the street building Workshops in El Raval, Barcelona, where he lived for a year. Photograph of 2018.

On October 4, 2008, the Roberto Bolaño Room was inaugurated at the Blanes Regional Library, in homage to the writer who lived there for more than fifteen years and until his death. The commemorative plaque, discovered by his children Alexandra and Lautaro, says the following:

"I only hope to be considered a South American writer more or less decent, who lived in Blanes, and who loved this people. »

Roberto Bolaño

His writer friends Enrique Vila-Matas, A. G. Porta and Rodrigo Fresán participated in the discussion that followed the inauguration. Both Porta and the Chilean Jorge Morales, who participated in the question session, questioned having dedicated Bolaño to only one room, and not the entire library. Victoria Ávalos, mother of the honoree, died a day before the event, in which she was not mentioned.

In November 2010, Chilean director Ricardo House, who lives in Mexico, premiered in Madrid the first of three parts that make up the documentary Roberto Bolaño, the future battle, which delves into the life of of the writer during his youth in Mexico.

On June 18, 2011, a street named after him was inaugurated in the Spanish city of Gerona, in Catalonia, at an event attended by Mexican writer Juan Villoro and poet Bruno Montané, Catalan literary critic Ignacio Echevarría, and the editor of Anagrama Jorge Herralde, all friends of the writer. Her wife Carolina, as well as her children Lautaro and Alexandra, did not attend the ceremony, due to feuds between her and part of the attendees.

Opening of the exhibition Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003on 5 March 2013 at the CCCB in Barcelona.

In January 2012, the second part of Roberto Bolaño, the future battle premiered, first in Barcelona and then in Girona. In it, he delves into his life in Catalonia. Finally, the trilogy was completed at the end of the same year, concentrating on his childhood in Chile and his return to the country from Mexico, just before the coup d'état. The entire documentary premiered on November 23, 2012 in Barcelona, with the presence of Ricardo House and Ignacio Echevarría.

Between March and June 2013, a tribute was paid to him in Barcelona after a decade since his death, presenting the exhibition Archivo Bolaño. 1977-2003 in the framework of the sixth biennial edition of Kosmopolis, an event held at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), located in the El Raval neighborhood where the writer lived. In said exhibition, sketches of various unpublished works by the author were presented, as well as letters, photographs and notes, among others. This exhibition was later presented in other places, such as the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. On the same dates, in Turin, in northern Italy, a tribute was also paid to him at the International Book Fair. After this event, other tributes were made in Chile and in Blanes. In the latter city, a project called "Bolaño a Blanes» (in Catalan, «Bolaño en Blanes») that included a «Bolaño Route», and an activity called «Nocturn de Bolaño», alluding to the author's novel Nocturno de Chile, in the poems by the writer were read, a documentary was screened and a musical concert was held.

In April 2015, a commemorative plaque with his name was placed on Tallers street in the El Raval neighborhood of Barcelona.

Style

Since the beginning of the 21st century, many specialists and literary critics have analyzed Bolaño's work. One of his most dominant features is the constant connection between life and literature. His books often reflect reflections on the values of reading or the virtue of "courage" in the act of writing, an activity that he usually associates with death and violence. His multiple characters, each of whom enjoys their own individuality, are mostly writers both unsuccessful and unsuccessful. as successful for whom literary activity is everything, not only in an aesthetic sense but also ethically, and who also tend to be avant-garde or take advantage of the heritage of the avant-garde. Many writers and specialists agree that their work is strongly linked to a melancholic aesthetic, and that there is also a strong connection between aesthetics and politics. As an author of open novels, his prose, usually made up of fragmented scenes, stories, is also usually almost devoid of descriptions and commonly adopts two possible strategies: a historicist and omniscient narrator, or an indirect descriptive, based on the confessional account in the first person, of a person other than the protagonist who addresses a anonymous interlocutor or detective.

On several occasions, Bolaño stated that after finishing a book, he tried to forget it immediately, so as not to repeat the plot or the characters in his subsequent works. Despite the foregoing, the material for his works was normally compiled for years, and before finishing the final version to deliver it to the editor, he used to write several previous versions, some handwritten or typed, and from 1995, the year in which he bought his first computer, also digitized. The writer also stated that all his books are related, even considering his narrative and poetry together. In an interview, he stated the following:

"My poetry and my prose are two cousin sisters who get along. My poetry is platonic, my prose is aristotelian. Both abomination of the dionisiac, both know that the dionisiac has succeeded."

Roberto Bolaño

The writer's two most celebrated books, Los detectives salvajes and 2666, are set in Mexico, the country where he began to develop as a writer, and in the which he spent most of his youth. Bolaño once wrote, in a letter to his friend from Mexico City, Juan Pascoe:

“...I have discovered that ALL my theater I have done so that Mario Santiago will play the main role, so that he will play my role, stare at my dreams, do I not?”.

Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño himself, in his speech of thanks for obtaining the Rómulo Gallegos Award, also stated that all his work was dedicated to the young Latin Americans of his generation. Other frequent themes in his narrative are Nazism and fascism, as can be seen in his works Nazi Literature in America, Distant Star or The Third Reich, and to a lesser extent in other of his books. Bolaño was a scholar of the history of Nazi Germany, and he drew on this knowledge in his writing. Many also agree that while Bolaño is not a writer of detective novels or crime novels, he does share certain kinships with the genre, which can be seen more explicitly in works such as Advice from a Morrison disciple to a Joyce fanatic, The Ice Rink, Monsieur Pain, Distant Star, The Savage Detectives, and some tales of Phone Calls and Killer Whores. With regard to the latter, the researcher Valeria de los Ríos suggests that the figure of the search is very present in Bolaño's work, which is evidenced in the presence of detectives and in the use of photography as a clue, which allows "establishing a prosaic connection with reality" and that at the same time is also "a destabilizing element that points to revelation (...) although in a degraded way". Researcher Ezequiel De Rosso suggests that in the work of the Chilean "it is not so much an enigma to be unveiled, as in detective novels, but rather a secret that the text seems to hide", a dynamic secret that produces meanings and has a narrative value; In this way, De Rosso affirms, "the reader that Bolaño proposes is a conjectural reader, a reader who proposes hypotheses for certain obscure facts in the plot whose resolution is of no importance." To Juan Villoro, In this regard, he "is struck by how little interest he attaches to the subjective world of his characters (...) His writing does not depend on introspection but on recounting the data". This almost absence of descriptions is also highlighted by the critic Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, for whom the plot of Bolaño's works depend on the numerous characters, who appropriate an identity and presences distinguishable from each other; thus, "most conflicts arise precisely from the ability to to establish or prolong a relationship and of the immediate attraction and repulsion between people", allowing the author to create "a space in which things are simultaneously normal and unusual".

The writer was always of the opinion that the structure should be prioritized over the plot of the work, which can be seen in the finished structure of all his novels and short stories. Before writing, he always tried to have a very clear structure, and he shared with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges the idea that the arguments in literature, although they are important, are almost always the same, in addition that they used to come to him without looking for them. During the act of writing, he did not think about his eventual readers, but simply about the writing itself, the form, the rhythm and the plot. Throughout his life he normally wrote in silent environments but lacking any comfort. He used to write while listening to rock music, even late in his life.

Valeria de los Ríos also highlights the use in Bolaño's work of a new cartographic aesthetic, which uses the figure of the map instead of that of the archive, as is the case of the authors of the Latin American boom. Thus, de los Ríos suggests, Bolaño's cognitive map is not a Macondo, but the global village, to which he also ascribes a political dimension. As in Poe or Baudelaire, she adds, in Bolaño the territory is not described, but experienced.This literary "extraterritoriality" is also highlighted by the critic Ignacio Echevarría.

Influences

Jorge Luis Borges, of whose work Bolaño was always considered an admirer.

Bolaño has always recognized himself as an admirer of Borges's literature. His second published novel, Nazi literature in America , can be read as a tribute to this writer, and he is often associated with Julio Cortázar, which Bolaño does not doubt:

"To say that I am in permanent debt to the work of Borges and Cortázar is a wickedness."

Roberto Bolaño

His favorite poet was the Chilean Nicanor Parra, although he had a vast knowledge of and interest in French poetry, Arthur Rimbaud taking a prominent place in it, from whom he took the first name for his literary alter ego, Arturo Belano Within English literature, his favorites included Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Sidney, Edgar Lee Masters, Raymond Carver, James Ellroy, Philip K. Dick, and Cormac McCarthy. In his novel 2666, develops in geographical territories similar to those ventured by McCarthy -the border between Mexico and the United States. According to the poet and critic Matías Ayala, for whom Bolaño's prose is far superior to his "unachieved lyrical vein", In his best poems, the author manages to appropriate figures from Latin American literature of the XX century, such as the «unconscious», the "corporal vitalism" and "the earth as a space of mythical degradation".

Bolaño was also a harsh critic of various contemporary writers. The antipathy he felt during his youth for the Mexican Octavio Paz was manifest, and his sharp criticism of the Mexican Ángeles Mastretta was sharp. He also harshly criticized Chilean literature of the 1990s, including among others Isabel Allende, Antonio Skármeta, Volodia Teitelboim Marcela Serrano Luis Sepúlveda, Hernán Rivera Letelier or Diamela Eltit, although she also celebrated the work, in addition to that of Nicanor Parra, that of the Chileans Enrique Lihn, Gonzalo Rojas, Jorge Edwards and sometimes José Donoso, as well as the Argentines Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Rodolfo Wilcock, Ricardo Piglia, Manuel Puig, Copi and Osvaldo Lamborghini, in addition to the aforementioned Cortázar and Borges, and that of the Mexicans Juan Rulfo, Sergio Pitol, Carlos Monsiváis and other Spanish-American writers such as Juan Marsé, Álvaro Pombo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Augusto Monterroso. Bolaño also highlighted several writers of his generation, such as Fernando Vallejo, César Aira, Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Fresán, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Juan Villoro, Daniel Sada, Carmen Boullosa, Jorge Volpi, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Pedro Lemebel, Roberto Brodsky, Olvido García Valdés, Miguel Casado and Rodrigo Lira.

With regard to non-romance language writers, Bolaño particularly appreciated Franz Kafka and Witold Gombrowicz, among several others. He also expressed his admiration for Antón Chekhov.

For Enrique Vila-Matas, Bioy Casares is "one of the authors most familiar to Bolaño's literary world"; for the Argentine critic Leonardo Tarifeño, he is closer to Vila-Matas himself, as well as to César Aira; while for the Argentine scholar Gonzalo Aguilar, Bolaño is especially related to J. R. Wilcock, Ricardo Piglia, Enrique Lihn, José Emilio Pacheco and Honorio Bustos Domecq, who evidently also includes the aforementioned Jorge Luis Borges.

Political ideology

Bolaño, an atheist since his youth, always considered himself to be of leftist thought, becoming a Trotskyist during his youth in Mexico, and later an anarchist. In his own words:

«(I don't like) the priestly, clerical and communist unanimity. I've always been left-wing and I wasn't going to do right-wing because I didn't like communist clerics, so I became a Trotskyist. What happens then, when I was among the Trotskyists, I did not like the clerical unanimity of the Trotskyists, and ended up being anarchist [...]. Already in Spain I found many anarchists and started to stop being anarchist. Unanimity fucks me a lot."

Roberto Bolaño

Although politics is not usually a central theme in his work, he was a very politically committed writer. In his own words, he stated that “all literature, in some way, is political. I mean: it is political reflection and it is political planning."

Regarding patriotic sentiments, he believed that it was best to forget about one's homeland, since one can have many of them, and define them in many different ways. More than Chilean, Mexican or even Spanish, Bolaño considered himself a Latin American.

Work

Roberto Bolaño's work includes poetry, novels, short stories, essays and literary speeches, mostly published in Barcelona, Spain. Several of these works have been published posthumously. All of his short story books, and almost all of his novels —except Consejos de un disciple..., reissued by Editorial Acantilado, and the posthumous The spirit of science fiction and Sepulcros de vaqueros— have been published by Anagrama, through his friend and main editor Jorge Herralde, where between 1996 and 2003 he published at least one book per year. The first edition of The Ice Rink was initially published by Editorial Planeta, Nazi Literature in America by Seix Barral, and Una novelita lumpen by Mondadori publishing house. His first narrative works were also initially published in small editions by obtaining Spanish provincial prizes.

Poetry

• 1975 - Gorrions catching height (with Bruno Montané; not published)
• 1976 - Reinventing love
• 1992 - Fragments of Unknown University (Melibea Collection, Queen's Talaver)
• 1993 - Romantic dogs
• 1995 - The last savage (East of Paradise, Mexico City)
• 2000 - Three.

Posthumous editions

• 2007 - Unknown University
• 2018 - Poetry gathered

Novels

• 1984 - Advice from a disciple of Morrison to a Joyce fan (with A. G. Porta; reissued in 2006 next to the story Daily bar)
• 1984 - The path of elephants (reissued in 1999 as Monsieur Pain)
• 1993 - The ice rink
• 1996 - The Nazi Literature in America
• 1996 - A distant star
• 1998 - The wild detectives
• 1999 - Amuleto
• 2000 - Nocturno de Chile
• 2002 - Antwerp
• 2002 - A novelty lumpen

Posthumous editions

• 2004 - 2666
• 2010 - The Third Reich
• 2011 - The synabores of the real police
• 2016 - The spirit of science-fiction
• 2017 - Sepulchres of jeans

Stories

• 1997 - Telephone calls
• 2001 - Fucking murderers

Posthumous editions

• 2003 - The insufferable gaucho
• 2006 - Daily bar (with A. G. Porta; attached to reissue Advice from a disciple of Morrison to a Joyce fan)
• 2007 - The Secret of Evil

Compilations

• 2010 - Tales
• 2018 - Full stories

Essays and interviews

• 2004 - Between parenthesis
• 2011 - Bolaño for himself: chosen interviews
• 2018 - Intemperary: Journalistic collaborations, public interventions and essays

Awards

In popular culture

Documentaries

• Close pocket. Spain: Editorial Candaya and Teveunam. 2008. Guion and address Erik Haasnoot. Distributed with the book Wild stock, II edition, March 2013.
• Roberto Bolaño: The Last Damned (TVE). Spain: Zebra Productions. 2010. Consultation on 17 December 2012.
• Roberto Bolaño, the future battle (Ricardo House). Mexico, Chile, Spain. 2010-2012. Archived from the original on December 25, 2010. Consultation on 17 December 2012.

Plays

• 2007 - 2666. Address: Àlex Rigola. Spain.
• 2013 - The rat police (count of The insufferable gaucho). Address: Àlex Rigola. Spain.
• 2014 - Advice from a disciple of Morrison to a Joyce fan. Address: Fèlix Pons. Spain.
• 2016 - 2666. Address: Robert Falls. United States.

Movies

• 2013 - Il futuro (based on A novelty lumpen). Address: Alicia Scherson. Chile, Italy, Germany, Spain.

Sculpture

• 2018 - Start of a dream