LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS

About the series This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in litera- ture in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical bound- aries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in tra- ditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist approaches.

Series Editor Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She has published widely in the areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border studies. Her numerous publications include the award-winning novel, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in Laredo, Texas. The (co)edited volumes: Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, Paths to Discovery: auto- biographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science and Engineering, Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes, and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams. She is cofounder of CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in Vandal, Prairie Schooner, and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues.

Books in the Series: Radical Chicana Poetics Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez Rethinking Chicano/a Literature through Food: Postnational Appetites Edited by Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercurrents Paulo Moreira Mexican Public Intellectuals Edited by Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature Edited by Brian L. Price, César A. Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics Edited by Ellie D. Hernández and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America: Noteworthy Protagonists Marco Katz Montiel New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon Edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star Critical Essays

Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo ROBERTO BOLAÑO, A LESS DISTANT STAR Copyright © Ignacio López-Calvo, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49517-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-50488-6 ISBN 978-1-137-49296-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137492968 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberto Bolaño, a less distant star : critical essays / edited by Ignacio López-Calvo. pages cm. — (Literatures of the Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003—Criticism and interpretation. I. López-Calvo, Ignacio, editor. PQ8098.12.O38Z79 2015 863.64—dc23 2014035190 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my niece and goddaughter, Sara López Gandur This page intentionally left blank Contents

Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño ix Siddhartha Deb

Introduction 1 Ignacio López-Calvo

Part I General Overview Chapter 1 Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star 17 Rory O’Bryen Chapter 2 Roberto Bolaño’s Flower War: Memory, Melancholy, and Pierre Menard 35 Ignacio López-Calvo

Part II Two Major Novels Chapter 3 666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bolaño’s Double Time Frame in 2666 67 Margaret Boe Birns Chapter 4 Ulysses’s Last Voyage: Bolaño and the Allegorical Figuration of Hell 85 raúl rodríguez freire viii CONTENTS

Chapter 5 “Con la cabeza en el abismo”: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, and the Maquiladora of Death 105 Martín Camps

Part III Short Novels and Short Stories Chapter 6 Valjean in the Age of Javert: Roberto Bolaño in the Era of Neoliberalism 131 Nicholas Birns Chapter 7 Literature and Proportion in The Insufferable Gaucho 149 Brett Levinson

Part IV Prose Poetry and Poetry in Prose

Chapter 8 Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita 171 Luis Bagué Quílez Chapter 9 Roberto Bolaño’s Big Bang: Deciphering the Code of an Aspiring Writer in Antwerp 189 Enrique Salas Durazo

Notes on Contributors 211 Index 215 Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño

Siddhartha Deb

At the age of 20, an aspiring writer goes back to his country to help build socialism, an ideal that comes to a premature end with a right-wing coup. After a brief period of imprisonment, the young man begins a wanderer’s existence, crossing countries and continents, finding fellow exiles scattered in large cities and provincial towns, gathering moments of existential qualm that are transmuted into fic- tion. His stories are full of wine and tobacco smoke, fittingly so for an author often photographed pondering over a cigarette. At 50, as he begins to make a reputation as a writer, he dies in exile, waiting for a liver transplant.1 It sounds, at first, like a thumbnail sketch from some lost age of literature, closer to Parisian exiles and the International Brigades than the world we know, but the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was born a little over half-a-century ago. Considerably younger than the celebrated writers of the Latin American “Boom”—Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar—he died in Barcelona in 2003, so that what initially seems anachronis- tic about his life is nothing other than the disorientation created by literary circumstances unfamiliar to many of us reading and writing from the metropoles in the age of globalization. These seemingly anachronistic circumstances include the idea that writing, and the life within which such writing is shaped, must often function with- out a safety net; that literature must engage with politics even when politics has foreclosed literature; and that a writer will often have to subvert established forms in order to capture the nature of contem- porary reality. These are not new perspectives, but they seem to have been aban- doned in the last 20 years, especially in the West. There, fiction often guides readers along a cultural superstructure that might offer occa- sional glimpses of politics but in general rises far above it, giving them instead an exuberance of style that in turn suggests an exuberance x FOREWORD of lifestyle. Bolaño’s life, by contrast, doesn’t seem to offer a model worth celebrating; after all, this is a writer who was so short of money and hygiene during his wandering years that he had lost most of his teeth by the end of his travels. Still, even Bolaño’s life would not, by itself, be capable of shaking up received ideas of literature and forcing us to reconsider what we have come to accept as the limits of fiction. I came to Bolaño’s work in piecemeal fashion, in translation, and the strange, asynchronous notes I picked up in his biographical details became for me the rever- berations of the sounds I heard in his work and that I found exciting as a writer of fiction for whom politics is a force that shapes the condi- tions that shape our art. What follows, then, is less an introduction to Bolaño’s oeuvre and more a series of thoughts on some of his works. The omissions are considerable—there is no discussion of his poetry, or his essays and lectures, or of much of the fiction, including the massive 2666, which I am still absorbing, uneasily—but I imagine the critical essays in this volume will more than make up for such lapses. And then, of course, there is always the work itself.

1 To begin with, there are the stories. Reading Last Evenings on Earth, a volume of Bolaño’s stories compiled from two separate Spanish- language collections, one might come away with the impression of uniformity. Many of the stories are narrated in the first-person, often by a fictional stand-in of Bolaño’s who goes by the name of Arturo Belano or B. They are largely about literature and the creation of literature, whereas the characters who populate the pages are usually members of a forgotten diaspora of left-wing Latin Americans afloat in their own continent or in Europe. Yet this impression of obviousness, of an author belaboring the point, is an illusion. The range of Bolaño’s stories is remarkably fluid, from 30 pages summing up an entire adult life to pieces that are almost sketches, and where alphabets denote characters and the action is traced out in swift, engulfing sentences (“Two days later I went to his boarding house to look for him and they told me he had gone up north” [73]; “Over dinner with a Chilean couple, B discovers that U has been interned in a psychiatric hospital after having tried to kill his wife” [159–60]). But it is Bolaño’s characters who are espe- cially beguiling, from the minor Spanish poet who descends into the world of paranoid UFO sightings in “Enrique Martín” to the errant teenager who strikes up a friendship with a Mexican gunfighter in FOREWORD xi

“The Grub.” We are inundated with details of their lives, and yet in the end they are not much more than silhouettes glimpsed in the fog or rain of Barcelona or Mexico City. When the characters bow out of the story, our understanding of them is never quite equal to their mystery. “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” for instance, is a story about an encounter between two acquaintances in Berlin. The narrator knows The Eye from the early 1970s, when they were part of the Chilean diaspora that had ended up in Mexico after the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government. Many years have passed when the narrator comes across The Eye again, sitting in a Berlin square outside the narrator’s hotel. They go out drinking, carrying on “a confessional and melancholic dialogue” about how they have coped with the years and the distance. The Eye, who abandoned Mexico because his homosexuality made him an outsider even among the exiled left-wingers, works as a freelance photographer. He drinks more than he used to, the narrator says, but in other ways he remains stoic and amiable. It gets late and they walk back toward the hotel, heading for what might be the point of closure in a more conven- tional short story. Instead, The Eye begins to talk about an experience of his in India, where he tried to rescue two boys from a cult that planned to castrate them as a sacrifice to some unknown, malevolent deity. The dialogue becomes a monologue, and a crack appears, separating the narrator’s account from The Eye’s story:

He sat down on the very bench as before, I swear, as if I still hadn’t arrived, as if I hadn’t yet started to cross the square and he was still waiting for me and thinking about his life and the story that he was compelled, by history or destiny or chance, to tell me. He turned up the collar of his coat and began to talk. I remained standing and lit a cigarette. (111–12)

The circular temporality, the idea that they are undertaking a rep- etition (but with a slight variation), owes something to Borges. It also evokes the phobia that the Germans call platz angst: the illusion that one has made no progress at all while attempting to cross a vast, unending square.2 But most of all, The Eye’s story and the way it is brought into the larger narrative shows that Bolaño’s exiled charac- ters frequently encounter a strain of platz angst no matter where they go. They repeat the same generous impulses and face similar horrify- ing outcomes, so that even as The Eye emphasizes how strange India xii FOREWORD was for him, the reader begins to feel that it was not very different from Chile; that as a non-violent man running away from the violence of his country, The Eye was only running toward another realm of violence. The story within a short story—repeating, embellishing, clarify- ing, or obscuring the main theme—is an unusual choice, but it tells us something about Bolaño’s use of narrative. It shows us, and the other pieces in Last Evenings on Earth reinforce this display, that the short story can be as capacious a form as the novel. It can pause or diverge, and even pick up a subplot or two along the way. In Bolaño’s hands, the short story often needs to do so; his narrators are obses- sive storytellers, handling an abundance of material and offering their own version of platz angst in the way they seem unable to traverse the boundless tracts of fiction. “Anne Moore’s Life,” one of the longest pieces in Last Evenings on Earth, ranges across 30 years; has an itinerary that includes the United States, Mexico, and Spain; and brings in two dozen char- acters. The progression of its many elements is so relentless that it threatens to derail our understanding, were it not for how the accre- tion of details is at the very heart of the story. People cut loose from their moorings, whether by choice or by destiny, are often seen as traveling light. But in other ways, Bolaño suggests, they carry such weight and collect so much experience that sometimes only an exter- nal observer can discern a pattern in their chaotic lives. This is true of the way Anne is presented to us, as a sixties flower child whose string of relationships comes perilously close to self-abuse, and who often seems far too absorbed in immediate predicaments to reflect upon her life as an entirety. But Anne’s life comes to have a shape of sorts in the hands of the narrator, a man who devours her diaries and absorbs the details of her adventures, converting seemingly formless experience into a narrative with design and intention. Like the figure in the Berlin Square listening to the Eye, the narrator in “Anne Moore’s Life” is a necessary adjunct to the protagonist, a figure whose storytelling and pattern-making is so compulsive that it can bridge the protago- nist’s gaps in self-knowledge. And because this storytelling is com- pulsive, constantly on the lookout for material that can be shaped, it is sensitive even to the experiences residing inside peripheral char- acters. At the end of “Anne Moore’s Life,” therefore, when the nar- rator goes to Anne’s old attic room in Girona to see if there are any traces of her, he meets a Russian who could easily turn into another narrative fulcrum, and who is kept to the margins of the story only FOREWORD xiii with some effort: “A very old man came to the door, walking with great difficulty and the aid of a spectacular oak stick, which looked rather like it had been designed for ceremonial occasions or combat. He remembered Anne Moore. In fact he remembered almost all of the twentieth century, but that, he admitted, was beside the point” (104).

2 If a short story by Bolaño can be forced to do the work of a novel, his novels can also aspire to the condition of other forms. The short story, the prose poem, the dramatic monologue: these are all possibilities that come to mind when reading three of his shorter novels, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, and Amulet. The first of these is narrated as the deathbed confessional of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Jesuit priest and literary critic. An extended monologue of more than a hundred pages where the only paragraph break comes before the final sentence, it contains bit roles for Augusto Pinochet (keeping his dark glasses on even when indoors), Ernst Junger (discussing evil in occupied Paris while pouring out cognac from a silver hip-flask), and Pablo Neruda (reciting verses to the moon). The novel is at once a feverish recollection on Father Urrutia’s part, a final bid to wrest a semblance of meaning from a life lived deceit- fully, and a narrative superbly modulated by Bolaño, introducing an aside, a shift of scene, or an almost self-contained vignette just as the narrator’s obsession gets unbearably claustrophobic. Distant Star, an earlier work (but one that came later into the hands of Anglophone readers), is simpler in some ways, grafting a story about fascism and art onto the structure of a detective novel. Set for the most part in the psychotropic nightmare of Pinochet’s Chile, it reconstructs the career of a minor poet called Carlos Wieder. An untalented if mysterious figure before the coup, Wieder is elevated to a position of importance by the Pinochet regime, writing poetry in the sky from a Nazi-era fighter aircraft, creating verses that are larger than life and yet eva- nescent in the wind. The importance of the mostly tormenting—and occasionally pro- ductive—relationship between art and politics in Bolaño’s novels is one of the ways in which they differ from his short stories. In the stories, the intersection between politics and art serves as a backdrop, as a kind of nagging memory borne around by the figures stranded in Europe. But in the novels, set for the most part in Latin America, politics and art are magnetic poles that create a field of stress, laying xiv FOREWORD down an axis of disturbance along which the human protagonist quivers and then goes still. By Night in Chile’s Father Urrutia, caught in the torque of pol- itics and art, decides to ignore politics entirely, taking recourse to Greco-Roman classicism when confronted with the possibility of dis- sidents being tortured in basements. In Distant Star, on the other hand, Carlos Wieder enjoys the tension so much that he replicates the domination and terror of the political system in his art. He is the poet coming at the reader in jackboots, truncheon in hand, a Chilean version of the artists F. T. Marinetti envisioned in his Futurist mani- festo: “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap . . . We will sing of . . . the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd” (n.p.). This artist—the one who, instead of evading a repressive political system or challenging it, chooses to become its stormtrooper—seems to have haunted and fascinated Bolaño in equal measure. It allowed him to envisage an entire body of right-wing literature in the story collec- tion Nazi Literature of the Americas, a work that comes with its own Borgesian bibliography and to which Distant Star is meant to be an appendix or a coda. The idea may appear outdated to us, sounding, once again, that anachronistic note we heard at the beginning; who takes artists, even fascist artists, so seriously anymore? But art, for Bolaño, is a belief system that comes into its own in the Americas, stirring into anarchic life in Mexico City and Santiago long after it has been domesticated and neutered in Europe. It functions just like politics and religion in Latin America, engendering a special kind of fervor, producing mythologies and creating deities and saints, devo- tees and heretics. Amulet, the third of Bolaño’s novels to be translated into English, is unusual in that it is built around an artistic fervor that nurtures rather than destroys. Centered loosely around the student protests of 1968 in Mexico, it is a curiously joyful novel that delights in its storytelling even as it struggles with the question of how art might be sustained under conditions resolutely opposed to it: when an authori- tarian state squeezes out dissent, when the economy marginalizes art, and—this perhaps the hardest and most familiar condition of all— when an individual who is committed to art appears inconsequential even to other artists. The figure around whom all these factors converge is Auxilio Lacouture, the female narrator of Amulet who calls herself the “mother of Mexican poetry” (1). It is an unusual self-description, FOREWORD xv made all the more so by her marginal position among the producers of Mexican poetry. An undocumented Uruguayan migrant in Mexico City, self-appointed cleaner at the houses of famous poets, and part- time assistant at the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, she is an outsider among outsiders, a “female Don Quixote” (25). Lacouture’s particular act of quixotic courage at the beginning of the novel is to remain in the woman’s bathroom when the riot police break into the university to evict all professors and students. She stays there for nearly two weeks, without food, reciting poetry to herself. When she finally emerges from the bathroom, her act will become part of the collective memory of 1968 in Mexico (which involved, among other things, the killing of over two hundred student protest- ers in Tlatelolco Square on October 2):

Often I would hear my story told by others, who said that the woman who had gone without food for thirteen days, shut in a bathroom, was a medical student, or a secretary from the administration building, not an illegal alien from Uruguay, with no job and no place of her own to lay her head. Sometimes it wasn’t even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal problems. (176–77)

The protest in the woman’s bathroom is not merely a dramatic epi- sode or the encapsulation of a theme, containing ideas to be expanded or echoed in the rest of the novel; it also functions as a shared act of resistance between Lacouture and the readers. Since the entire novel is narrated from the vantage point of Lacouture’s confinement, her stream-of-consciousness ranging into the future as well as the past, the reader is forced to share her incarceration. Our point of view, too, is the woman’s stall, the toilet paper, the stained mirror, and the moon tracing patterns on the tiles. Only through Lacouture’s recol- lections of the past and visions of the future can we experience the streets and cafés of Mexico City, although we are never entirely sure about which events have actually taken place and which are being imagined.

3 In many ways, such a narrative choice creates a coherence that makes Amulet the obverse of The Savage Detectives, a magnum opus of serial narration and collective testimony that features dozens of voices (Lacouture’s included), hundreds of events, settings in Mexico, Los Angeles, Paris, Barcelona, Jerusalem, and Liberia, and plays with both xvi FOREWORD surfeit and absence, especially when it comes to the literary movement called “visceral realism.” If we had to speculate on the features of this movement, we might assume that it is built around a particularly gritty description of life. It is a forensic style, we could say, where the writer wields pen or computer cursor as a scalpel, producing literature that lies on the page like viscera on a laboratory table. In its sentences and paragraphs, we would have to read flesh and bone, organs and blood; we would see the inner workings of corporeal existence. But whether this is an accurate description of visceral realism or not, it is impossible to tell from The Savage Detectives. Although ostensibly about visceral real- ism, with the phrase in its various permutations ringing through six hundred-odd pages, there are no examples of its art to be found in The Savage Detectives. Instead, we learn about the practitioners, the visceral realists who held Mexico City’s literary scene hostage in the mid-1970s; who hijacked readings and poetry workshops; who split hairs over various grades of Marxism; who drank, quarreled, had sex, and sold marijuana to finance their activities; and who then inexpli- cably disappeared, leaving behind not the viscera of their art but the ghostly memories of their excesses. Much of The Savage Detectives, indeed its formally inventive mid- dle section, is dedicated to tracing those memories, even if it begins in a relatively conventional manner. Narrated as a series of diary entries by aspiring poet and errant law student Juan García Madero, it describes his initiation into visceral realism by the movement’s two leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. The young man is delighted by the anarchy this introduces him to, spread out over two months at the end of 1975. It includes strange aesthetic theories, obscure but eclectic references to literature, and lots of sex: with waitresses at the Veracruzana bar, and with Maria Font, whose house and family func- tion as a vortex around which the visceral realists wheel and spin. But like most of the characters in the novel, García Madero remains uncertain to the end quite what visceral realism is:

In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it’s completely in earnest. Many years ago there was a Mexican avant- garde group called the visceral realists, I think, but I don’t know whether they were writers or painters or journalists or revolutionaries. They were active in the twenties or maybe the thirties . . . According to Arturo Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. (7)

A kind of double absence hangs over the modern visceral realists, then, in their mimicry of a past movement whose members vanished FOREWORD xvii into a desert. Lima puts it another way to García Madero, claim- ing that the present-day visceral realists walk backward, “gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown” (7). They are like street-smart versions of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, unable to turn their sight to the future or the present, their gazes irrevocably fixed to the past even as they speed away from it. At the same time, it is worth remembering that Lima and Belano do not refer to themselves as a “group” or a “movement.” The visceral realists are a “gang,” dealing in the contraband of literature, ideas, and Acapulco Gold marijuana, and what sets the principal plot of the book in motion is their collision with another gang. On New Year’s Eve, when the Font family find themselves besieged by a thug called Alberto because they have given shelter to Lupe, one of his prostitutes, Belano and Lima offer to take off with Lupe. There is a quick brawl at the gate, García Madero leaps into the white Chevrolet Impala loaned to the visceral realists by Señor Font, and then they head out of the city, three poets and a prostitute with a pimp on their tail. This exit of the visceral realists is followed by something like a roving microphone. The microphone moves across time and space, covering the 20 years from when Lima and Belano left Mexico City, recording the monologues of 52 characters as they recall their interac- tions with Belano or Lima. The principal visceral realists themselves do not have speaking parts, so their lives can only be pieced together from the fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, accounts given by lovers, friends, enemies, and acquaintances. As a technique, it falls somewhere between serial narration and collective testimony, and its effects are both seductive and disorienting. The monologues are of varying lengths, and not all the characters are allowed to depict their own lives in the process of talking about Lima or Belano. Yet some of the characters stand out sharply in their own right: Ramírez, the Chilean stowaway who makes it big in Barcelona because of a sudden, uncanny ability to see winning lottery numbers; Edith Oster, an unhappy Jewish Mexican woman who tries living in California for a while; the Austrian neo-Nazi Künst, who strikes up a friendship with Lima. The veins of these stories are amazingly rich, bristling with the comic energy of the picaresque, full of sudden encounters in airports, rooming houses, streets, and cafés, yet the tone eventually gets darker, demonstrating how the visceral realists bring instability as well as excitement into the lives of people they meet. Their excess and entropy show how ideas of art and freedom run aground eventually, and how people, in growing old, lose their youthful idealism, but they also reveal large social changes, especially xviii FOREWORD how the world of late capitalism grows ever more inhospitable to uto- pian dreams. It is this engagement with the larger world that makes The Savage Detectives different and, to my mind, superior to North American narratives like On the Road and Easy Rider with which it has been compared. The obsessive, extended circle of the visceral real- ists exists as part of a larger movement of people from what used to be called the Third World, of places in upheaval that send their teeming millions to wealthier countries. In one of the most moving passages in the book, Edith Oster recalls the telephone booths in Barcelona where the lines have been rigged to make free international calls:

The best and the worst of Latin America came together in those lines, the old revolutionaries and the rapists, the former political prisoners and the hawkers of junk jewelry. When I saw those lines, on my way back from the movies, around the phone booth in Plaza Ramalleras, for example, I would freeze and start to shake . . . Adolescents, young women with nursing children, old men and women: what did they think about out there, at midnight or one in the morning, while they waited for a stranger to finish talking, able not to hear but to guess at what was being said, since the person on the phone would gesture or cry or stand there without speaking for a long time, just nodding or shaking his head? (436)

In a way, of course, the visceral realists have been at one end of a long-distance telephone line from the very beginning. They have been people past their prime even in their youth, and the final sec- tion of the novel deals with this explicitly and brilliantly, as it cuts back from the microphone to García Madero’s diary and shows us what happened in 1976 when the visceral realists left Mexico City and headed into the Sonora desert.

4 If The Savage Detectives makes a point different from By Night in Chile or Distant Star, it is that even without deliberate political repression, the writer’s craft is a matter of indifference to the mod- ern world. Writing, no matter what charge the visceral realists might attempt to give to it, is not a heroic profession. When it is, it is often because of the figures on its periphery rather than those who occupy its center. Lacouture in Amulet, for instance, is the most self-effacing of storytellers, denying any authorial ambition, covering her mouth with her hand when she speaks so as to hide her missing teeth, saying to herself in a “tiny little voice” that she’s “had it with adventures” FOREWORD xix

(105). But she cannot close herself off from the world and the people she loves, or from the work they create, which is why she will follow each of her demurrals by showing us another combination of artistic ambition, sexual desire, and political repression. She will go on being the mother of Mexican poetry, a surrogate mother to Belano, and in the final mystical vision that provides the climax of the novel, mother to an entire generation of Latin America’s “lost children” marching toward annihilation. The stories in Last Evenings on Earth take place at a greater dis- tance from such holocausts, but the struggle of the writer is no less poignant for that. In “Sensini,” the narrator enters into a correspon- dence with an Argentinian writer whose son, named Gregorio in homage to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, is one of the many disappeared in Argentina. Both the narrator and Sensini are exiled in Spain, and their friendship begins when they win prizes at a literary competi- tion, leading to a correspondence between them that revolves par- tially around the subject of literary contests. It is characteristic of Bolaño that he should take this most banal aspect of literature for his subject and still succeed in slashing open the veins of a writer’s life. Sensini and the narrator are not untalented or superficial writers, but the quality of their craft or the pain of their exile is of little relevance to their entries. The stories, when sent out to the municipal councils, credit unions, and railway companies sponsoring the contests, inevi- tably become something other than art. They enter a world in which a writer submitting a story is like a traveling salesman offering a low- grade product. Even success, in this world, will bring no more than a minor reward. This unflinching account of the mismatch between the different aspects of a writer’s existence is made bearable only by the friendship between the two characters, by the ability of each to perceive in the other the promise of literature. For Bolaño, this also seems to mean the promise of being human. Although the act of writing estranges, or leads practitioners like Father Urrutia and Carlos Wieder to embrace the “Horror Zone,” it also allows people to know each other and to keep on living. “Dentist,” perhaps the finest story collected in Last Evenings on Earth, offers a redemptive vision of writing, with its long, somewhat shapeless, and slightly feverish account of the narra- tor’s visit to a provincial Mexican town where he stays with a dentist friend. The friend is depressed, maybe because of the death of an old Mexican Indian woman at a cooperative medical clinic where he volunteers. But there are other possible reasons for his depression, if we can trust the narrator, who is himself burdened by the break-up xx FOREWORD of a relationship. The dentist has a strange story about being insulted and threatened by an artist whose works he admired. He might be gay and reluctant to admit it, and he could be in a relationship with a teenage Indian boy who lives on the outskirts, in a darkness beyond an “unreal landscape” that looks like “a cross between a garbage dump and an idyllic picture postcard of the Mexican countryside” (195–96). In a way, “Dentist” is a story about the collapse of ideals, of love, and, most of all, of art. Both the narrator and his friend agree, during one of their interminable barhopping sessions, that their “insatiable appetite for Culture” (200) has been exhausted, with each mouth- ful leaving them “poorer, thinner, uglier, and more ridiculous than before” (200). Yet the two characters are not ridiculous, in spite of their ineffectual posturing and their hopeless excursions into a city that, when not decrepit, is remarkably sad. They visit José Ramírez, the Indian boy. He is apparently a writer, and the dentist claims that he is better than any of Mexico’s famous writers. One expects this drunken claim to be dispelled, but it is not. At the Indian’s dwelling, the narrator reads one of the boy’s stories: “The story was four pages long; maybe that’s why I chose it, because it was short, but when I got to the end, I felt as if I had read a novel” (207). That, of course, is the effect of many of Bolaño’s stories. But what is striking is that Bolaño doesn’t attempt to explain how it is possible that in the large-scale entropy of culture, a poor, semiliterate Indian can be one of the best writers in Mexico. And Bolaño does not need to explain, because there is nothing in the experience of reading the story that makes one think that he is using Ramírez merely to make a political point and render explicit the opposition between modern and premodern, wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity. The Indian and his genius seem an inextricable part of the world Bolaño has cre- ated, a product of the same strange vision that has given us the forlorn narrator, the depressed dentist, and the uncanny provincial city where they meet. That promise should exist on the same plane as exhaustion can seem like a trite conclusion. But Bolaño makes “The Dentist” go beyond such obviousness, primarily because the world he has cre- ated, like Kafka’s, is perfectly logical in its strangeness, quite believ- able even though we can never see where its horizon lies. A story that reads like a novel about a story that reads like a novel naturally resists boundaries. It inevitably blurs into Bolaño’s other works, which keep appearing, posthumously. “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death FOREWORD xxi is certain” (207), says the narrator in “Dentist.” As each work of Bolaño’s appears in our hands, offering new perspectives on char- acters and episodes we may have already encountered, it is possible that we will begin to feel like Bolaño’s narrators, starting afresh on a story whose end we thought we knew, seeking patterns and corre- spondences in work that is both familiar and strange. Books and lives end, but the act of storytelling goes on. It is one of the pleasures we can depend on in our state of exile.

Notes * This essay is adapted from reviews that appeared in Harpers magazine and the Times Literary Supplement. 1. See “Vagabonds: Roberto Bolaño and his Fractured Masterpieces,” by Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker. 2. See David Trotter’s review essay on agoraphobia, “Platz Angst,” in London Review of Books.

Works Cited Bolaño, Roberto. Amulet. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2008. Print. ———. By Night in Chile. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2003. Print. ———. Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2004. Print. ———. Last Evenings on Earth. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2007. Print. ———. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Picador/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print. Marinetti, F. T. “Manifesto of Futurism.” Trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Norton Topics Online. Web. January 29, 2013. Trotter, David. “Platz Angst.” London Review of Books. July 24, 2003. Web. January 29, 2013. Zalewski, Daniel. “Vagabonds: Roberto Bolaño and his Fractured Masterpieces.” The New Yorker March 26, 2007. Web. January 29, 2013.