Acclaimed in the Spanish-speaking world for his originality, he found a calling in Mexico, where he became the leader of a group of fringe poets (the infrarealistas, or "visceral realists") who ridiculed the Mexican literary establishment with a style that was triumphantly eclectic: part apocalyptic vision, part pulp and noir, existential meditation, surrealist dream sequence and more. But it is since his death that Bolano has become a totemic figure. Now he is seen as a martyr to literature when literature seems to matter less and less.
Such is the craze around the world for Bolano's oeuvre that almost everything he wrote is being made available in translation at a dizzying pace. In English, his luminous short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and his masterful novellas Distant Star and By Night in Chile have made it into the canon in Spanish departments and creative writing programs. In 2007 his magnum opus The Savage Detectives, which had been awarded in 1999 the Romulo Gallegos Prize, the highest distinction for a novel in the Hispanic world, was offered in translation. The story of Arturo Belano (the author's alter ego) and another visceral realist, who both search for the mysterious founder of the movement, it has been embraced by critics as proof that literature may be losing readers but it isn't losing its guts.
Two other books by Bolano have also recently been released in English: a collection of poetry called The Romantic Dogs: 1980-1998 and his last, posthumous, novel 2666. They further serve to measure the extent of his genius.
His rhythmic sentences and his accumulating paragraphs build his plots tangentially, as if he wanted to make us impatient. He's showing us that while the world in which we live may appear to make sense, it is a chaotic landscape where everyone is lonely and confused, morality has broken down and the best anyone may do is escape - escape from one's self and from the idea of living with others - and indulge in the immediate satisfaction of instinctual needs.
In 2666, the central motif is moral inversion: good is evil and vice versa. The plot takes place in a US-Mexico border town called Santa Teresa, which resembles Ciudad Juarez and where hundreds of young women have been killed with impunity by a serial killer or killers in the past couple of decades. In Santa Teresa, nothing is real.
In one section that is a novella of its own, a group of international literary critics searches for Benno von Archimboldi, a German author and eternal Nobel Prize nominee who has disappeared from the public eye and may have ended up in Santa Teresa. In another, a black reporter for a Harlem magazine arrives in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, only to realise there's a larger story in the murdered senoritas. In a third part, a philosophy professor, Amalfitano, and his daughter make their way to Santa Teresa.
There are five sections and the diverse plots intersect by way of serendipitous connections among characters. 2666 is an extraordinary book, as ambitious a project as a Spanish-language fiction writer has embarked on. But it isn't altogether satisfying, not in the way earlier works such as The Savage Detectives were. Bolano wrote his last mega-narrative (in Spanish it has 1125 pages, 912 in English) in the last years of his life, with a death sentence hanging over him: He knew he would die soon of liver disease. So he gathered every bit of his energy to complete the manuscript just before he collapsed. What we have isn't quite a finished work. Ignacio Echevarria, a critic, Bolano's friend and executor of his estate, made some minor changes and sent the book to the printer.
Several sections feel incomplete, as if Bolano were merely accumulating material. And the last novella is somewhat of a disappointment. The mystery behind most of 2666, surrounding Archimboldi's Pynchonesque identity - Who is he? Where does he live? What does he even look like? - is resolved too easily, depriving the core of the plot of value. According to Echevarria, Bolano intended the narrator of 2666 to again be his alter ego, Belano. But the narrative is delivered in a third-person voice that belongs, at least as it stands, to no one in particular.
The novel (is that what it is?) feels like a tribute, if not a rewriting, of Jorge Luis Borges's fictitious review cum short story The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, which revolved around an invented Mumbai attorney and involved a search in which the searcher and the object of the search are the same. In similar fashion, The Savage Detectives was a stepchild of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, a playful novel that asks to be read in multiple ways, each allowing for a different narrative. In other words, Bolano wanted his books to feel infinite, and his readers to be mischievous.
Witnessing Bolano's canonisation in academe has been fascinating. Barely a few years ago, he was a supreme nobody; now The New Yorker puts its imprimatur on him with a review, he's a household name at symposiums and he's taught as a refreshing perspective, a kind of Jack Kerouac for the new millennium.
Alas, Bolano's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago I had a student who wrote his thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolano and illness, Bolano and the whodunit, Bolano and the beatniks, Bolano and eschatology, and so on. Since then, interviews, photographs, email messages - everything by or about him - are seen as discoveries, even though most of it was never lost to a Spanish-language audience.
The rapture must have been the same when Borges, long a commodity among a small cadre of followers in Argentina, shared with Samuel Beckett the International Publishers Prize in 1961. Suddenly he became an overnight sensation in translation across the world. Such instant celebrity occurs when writers are able to prove that the local is universal. They exist in their corners of the world but are able to re-create the world entire. For Borges, that happened because after World War II readers were eager to look at Latin America, and the so-called Third World in general, as a cradle of a world view that was different and refreshing.
And why Bolano now? Because once again, literature in the West seems to have grown complacent: it isn't so much written as manufactured. The genres dictated by mainstream publishing are suffocating. We're in need of a prophet - or an enfant terrible - to wake us from our slumber.
Of course, the way to neutralise a prophet is to tame him through acclaim. Bolano would have laughed at his arrival in Spanish departments. His mordant tongue frequently attacked the holy cows. He described writers such as Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende and Diamela Eltit as complacent, solipsistic and tedious. With Borges, he built his own parallel aesthetic tradition, a rebel's gallery of outlaws and pariahs. Yet he is moving steadily to the centre of the curriculum.
The attention, however, adds a welcome supplement to the repetitive teaching of the so-called boom masters of the 1960s. How many times should Carlos Fuentes's Aura, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Elena Poniatowska's Dear Diego be taught? They are all programmatic in their left-leaning politics. Bolano's work doesn't hew to any correct ideology. He is critical of the conformity of leftist writers, whom he describes as complacent and partners of the status quo. But he sees the right as bizarre. In the fictional Nazi Literature in the Americas (published in Spanish in 1996 and translated into English this year), the catalogue of perversions in an encyclopedia of right-wing writers emulates Borges's A Universal History of Infamy. And in By Night in Chile, an Opus Dei priest and literary critic reveals his connection to the Pinochet regime. Politics is often dark in the Southern Cone, but Bolano offers an underside that goes beyond easy-to-handle polarities.
All that produces a welcome whiplash for students. Studying him shatters the traditional boundaries of Latin American letters. This Chilean's Spanish is the most dazzling Mexican Spanish I've read. So translation is at the core of Bolano's endeavour: not the standard rendering of sentences from one language into another but the reimagining of a country's linguistic self.
Bolano didn't hold academic life in any esteem. Knowledge, his work suggests, comes to us in chaotic ways, when we least expect it. Whenever he portrays academics, they are dissatisfied types, looking for signs of intelligence everywhere but in their own profession. The model student for Bolano is irreverent, intolerant and self-taught.
Indeed, I doubt that a novel such as 2666 can be taught, for it begs to be found by readers in an accidental fashion, without instruction. Therein may lie the lesson to be learned from Bolano: rebellion and success do not rest easily with each other.
Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in the US. His latest book is Resurrecting Hebrew (Schocken, 2008).
From The Australian
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