Living with Robert Bolaño

For the last two months I have been reading Roberto Bolaño. Anything I say about him will be wrong, will feel like some sort of betrayal or failure to understand what it is that I am so grateful for when I read his novels. And this will be not least because I don't know what I am so grateful for. I think this sense that what is so good in Bolaño is precisely what is hard to convey might be related to how, when a good friend says that he would like to pick up the check, it feels best to accept his generosity without much thanks. The best response to generosity is low-key, and easeful gratitude. I like to think that would please him. And I hope that when his essays are translated perhaps he will have said something on this subject: why do his novels, which at no point presume to explain to the reader what is true, have me so interested in the word true. A word I had hoped to outgrow.

Bolaño was born in Santiago in April, 1953; his family moved to Mexico City when he was 15. And here things get hazy. The hugeness and energy of Mexico City, the weirdly metastasizing quality of Mexican politics and literary ideology, the newness of the urban slang, all seem to have exhilarated him. He returned to Chile in 1973 to support the new socialist regime of Salvador Allende, and was briefly imprisoned by Pinochet after the coup. He died of liver failure in 2003, after a long illness caused, according to series of articles informed by other articles because of an early addiction to herion. His wife and a close friend have separately confirmed that he ingested many substances but denied that heroin was one of them. In various articles and interviews with people who knew him at various times in his wanderings through Latin America and southern Europe, it is possible to find denials of almost all the facts of Bolaño's biography.

Part of this problem about the facts of his life must be because he came to attention so quickly, and was almost immediately gone. He wrote nearly all of his enormous body of work in a startling dash during his last 10 years. And so the highway has not yet been built that will soon carry news of his life and thought back and forth between his moments and his official biography as it comes to take a permanent shape. Part of the problem is that so much of his work remains untranslated. And part of the problem is his own apparent lack of concern with telling things the same way more than once. His own accounts of his life in speeches and interviews follow a logic of momentary connections that is similar to the narrative logic of his novels. He becomes interested in an object, in an idea or a book or a moment or a condition, and away he goes. Winning the 11th Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives reminds him of his childhood dyslexia, of wearing a soccer jersey with "11" and so forth.

But let’s return to don Rómulo before we get into Jarry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt. This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldn’t tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogotá, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular Ángeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would don Rómulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rómulo used to live. According to Gimferrer (although he wouldn’t put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.

The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts; for instance, if don Rómulo, during his stay in Barcelona—and I say “stay” and not “exile” because a Latin American is never exiled in Spain—had worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install itself in the novelist’s house)… As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I walked a little further, and there was the plaque. That’s what I saw, in my mind.

The connections are synaptic as often as temporal or spacial. His sentences revise themselves as they go. The habit of thought that you enter into when you spend days reading Bolaño is that the memory is a vast and interesting city to be wandered in, to be searched for good places to sit, to be eavesdropped upon, to be mined for threads and connections of all kinds. But especially ones that have to do with people, their beauty and goodness and indifference, their desires and orderliness and stray impulses. That events are to be treated the same way, as if anything might be significant or anything might be insignificant. Bolaño chronicles all these things with an even hand, scrupulous about detail and respectful of the ways that events tail off into silence.