Roberto Bolano: Master of Tragic Realism

Chilean author Roberto Bolano is the literary discovery of the minute. His works are just now being translated in to English, and so English language critics are just now raving about him. The biggest impact he’s had was with his last book, 2666, an 800+ page phenomenon that appeared in shops at the end of last year, and which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Not bad considering that Roberto Bolano died in 2003.

Bolano died of liver failure aged 50, with heroin abuse named as a contributing factor by some sources, though his wife denies that this was the case. Details of his life are sketchy, but we know that he was a supporter of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and almost certainly a witness to General Pinochet’s military coup that overthrew it. It’s useful to know these details as background before reading Bolano, because it does affect the books.

Bolano wrote poetry almost exclusively until the age of about 43, when he decided, apparently, to write books to help support his family. His first book to appear in English was By Night in Chile. This book is narrated by a priest, Father Sebastian Urrutia, who is also a bad poet. We see how he becomes a critic under the name Ibacache, and supports Pinochet’s regime whilst turning a blind eye to its atrocities. Bolano has a clear contempt for Urrutia because he loses himself in artistic considerations as a way of avoiding the cruelty all around him. It has been noted that Bolano’s work departs from the earlier Latin American tradition of Magical Realism in that he refuses to avoid politics through his art. Magical Realism by no means excludes politics, but it has been criticised, especially lately, for obscuring a sense of reality by heaping on literary devices. Bolano seems to regard artistic endeavour as a practice that all too often becomes a distraction.

Bolano took this a stage further in Nazi Literature in the Americas, a mock encyclopaedia of fascist writers, many of whom use their works to eulogise the lost Third Reich as some sort of lost ideal, without giving any details of its policies and crimes. Bolano then expanded the last chapter into a novella, Distant Star, about a poet called Carlos Wieder who gets ahead by writing poetry at the behest of Pinochet’s military, often using a plane to sky-write his work. The coup is portrayed in this book as it affects a group of poets who knew Wieder, and it’s as shocking and terrifying as you’d expect.

Bolano’s big critical hits were to come though. The Savage Detectives uses multiple narrators to tell the story, or stories, of two poets, Arturo Belano (an alter ego) and Ulises Lima, and also the fictional visceral realist poetic movement, which is affectionately portrayed. It’s freewheeling, carnivalesque, and somehow about a Latin America you’d never quite read but knew was there all along. It confirmed Bolano’s reputation when it won him the Roman Gallegos Prize, previously won by Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, and it’s highly recommended as a place to start reading Bolano.

The last five years of the author's life were spent writing and researching 2666. It’s a five part novel beginning with ‘The Part About the Critics’ where four literary critics are drawn together by their appreciation of an obscure and reclusive German novelist, Archimboldi. Eventually they search for him, and it’s the reader who finds him in the fifth part, called, of course, ‘The Part About Archimboldi’. In between the novel centres around a Mexican town called Santa Teresa where women have been disappearing for years in a series of unsolved crimes. What relation this has to the other parts of the book is for readers to discover…

It was well known that this was Bolano’s last book, and his crowning achievement. But much remains untranslated, and so books with fantastically promising titles like The Skating Rink, Monsieur Pain, Antwerp, Assassin Whores and The Insufferable Gaucho will be appearing as quickly as they can be translated – which is over the next two or three years. This is cause for celebration, because to read Bolano is to enter his world, with unreliable narrators, poet adventurers and their crazy movements, disappearances, art used (badly) as a distraction and art used (occasionally) as a compliment to action, all part of the mix, with Arturo Belano wandering in and out of stories and Ibacache mentioned with undisguised scorn here and there too.

There was more cause for celebration for Bolano fans last month when a set of previously unseen manuscripts was uncovered. Already a novel called ‘The Third Reich’ had been shopped around publishers at the Frankfurt book fair last year, but this discovery was of two new short novels. And perhaps most tantalisingly of all, something described as the sixth part of 2666… we shall see.