Roberto Bolaño: The Skating Rink

Tim Martin reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Skating Rink.

It took the English-speaking world until several years after Roberto Bolaño’s death in 2003 to get a sense of his genius in drip-fed translations, but, thanks to excellent English versions by (separately) Natasha Wimmer and Chris Andrews, a full-scale excavation of the Chilean novelist’s talent is now underway.

The Skating Rink is just one of several novels, essays and poems that are scheduled for publication or reissue this year or next. The treats in store include not only an entire unpublished novel and a collection of stories but a lost sixth part to the compendious masterpiece 2666, the last book Bolaño completed before his death at the age of 50.

As The Skating Rink is a first novel – or, to be exact, the first novel that Bolaño published after his decision to switch from poetry to prose writing, in his forties – it might seem to be facing stiff competition from this emerging legacy. But never fear: elegant, elusive and amusing, this novel is more than capable of standing alongside the rest of Bolaño’s work, and both long-time fans of the author’s writing and those coming to it fresh will find much to love.

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Roberto Bolaño

Michael Greenberg reviews Roberto Bolaño's works recently translated into English, The Insufferable Gaucho, The Return and Antwerp.

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has to be one of the most improbable international literary celebrities since William Burroughs and Henry Miller, two writers whose work Bolaño’s occasionally resembles. His subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching. His lens is largely (though not literally) autobiographical, and seems narrowly focused at first. There are no sweeping historical gestures in Bolaño. Yet he has given us a subtle portrait of Latin America during the last quarter of the 20th century — a period of death squads, exile, “disappeared” citizens and state-sponsored terror. The nightmarish sense of human life being as discardable as clay permeates his writing.
Readers trying to navigate Bolaño’s gathering body of work may find themselves wondering where to turn: since his death in 2003, 12 of his books have been published in the United States. “The Insufferable Gaucho” would be an excellent place to start. The title story of this collection is one of Bolaño’s most powerful fictions. It is a reimagining of Borges’s story “The South,” an emblematic tale of the schism that has plagued South America’s republics for almost two centuries: between the capital cities with their totems to European culture, and the vast, serenely violent countryside that surrounds them. In Borges’s story, the protagonist has survived a fever that brought him to the brink of death. He sets out from Buenos Aires to convalesce at his ancestral ranch on the Pampas. On arriving, he goes to the general store where a drunken tough lures him into a fight that honor won’t permit him to decline. Clutching a knife he hardly knows how to wield, he walks resignedly and without fear into the death that “he would have chosen or dreamt” had he been given the chance.

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Roberto Bolaño

Robert Leiter on Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño's books are suddenly everywhere, which is a fortuitous development for readers who like adventurous fiction. This literary stroke of luck is thanks in good part to the persistence of the estimable and always forward-thinking New Directions publishers. Farrar Straus and Giroux somehow beat out ND for the rights to two of the late Chilean-born novelist's longest and perhaps flashiest works, The Savage Detectives and 2666, and so received considerable media attention when the volumes were published. But it's been ND that's stood by Bolaño for years now, issuing the bulk of his smaller-scale, though highly representative works; and it's now filling in the spaces in the writer's prolific, if brief, career -- he died at age 50 -- by releasing some of his lesser-known prose pieces.
When New Directions brought out Bolaño's scathing, funny Nazi Literature in the Americas early last year, I wrote then that the novelist, a tried-and-true postmodernist (generally not my favorite type of writer), had struck me not only as an exciting talent, but perhaps one of the most profound artists of the second half of the 20th century.

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Who's Who in Savage Detectives

Juan García Madero tiene elementos de Juan Esteban Harrington y de Roberto Bolaño, aunque en la novela se dice que es mexicano y vive con sus tíos, lo que no corresponde a los chilenos. Arturo Belano es Roberto Bolaño. Julio César Álamo o “el poeta campesino” es Juan Buñuelos. Ulises Lima es Mario Santiago.

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Juan García Madero	Juan Esteban Harrington Roberto Bolaño
Arturo Belano	Roberto Bolaño
Julio César Álamo	Juan Buñuelos
Ulises Lima	Mario Santiago
Césarea Tinajero	Concha Urquiza
Ernesto San Epifanio	Darío Galicia
Rafael Barrios	Rubén Medina
Jacinto Requena	José Peguero
Felipe Müller	Bruno Montané
Pancho Rodríguez	Ramón Méndez
Moctezuma Rodríguez	Cuauhtémoc Méndez
Angélica Font	Vera Larrosa
María Font	Mara Larrosa
Joaquín Font	Manolo Larrosa
"Piel Divina"	Jorge Hernández
Laura Jáuregui	Lisa Johnson
Xóchitl García	Guadalupe Ochoa
Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo	Jorge Boccanera
Luis Sebastián Rosado	José Joaquín Blanco
Amadeo Salvatierra	Rodolfo Sanabria
Auxilio Lacouture	Alcira
Lisandro Morales	Lautaro
Vargas Prado	José Donoso Pareja
Roberto Rosas	José Rosas Ribeyro
Claudia	Claudia Kerlik
José "Zopilote" Colina	José de la Colina
Pancracio Montesol	Augusto Monterroso
Pere Ordoñez	Pere Gimferrer

Roberto Bolaño: Antwerp

Sam Munson reviews Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp.

Displayed prominently on the back cover of Antwerp, the latest of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s works to appear in English, is a quote from the author himself: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” The quote seems tailor-made to answer a common desire in literary culture: to know authors in their unspoiled youth. Antwerp, after all, is Bolaño’s earliest prose work, written in the early 1980s though not published in Spanish until 2002. It is rigorously experimental in form, and makes no concessions to anything other than his own idiosyncratic taste. And perhaps grasping after the purity of youth is a natural part of formulating any literary-biographical arc, especially one so aesthetically charged as Bolaño’s. His career in English began in 2003, the year of his death (a Bolaño-esque touch in itself) with the publication of his short 2000 novel By Night in Chile, a pseudo-memoir by a cowardly and very intelligent cultural servitor of Augusto Pinochet. In the ensuing seven years, his work has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the estimation of American critics and readers, due largely to his long novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, published in 2006 and 2007 (though written almost a decade apart): complex, daringly executed books that take as a dual theme the bestial nature of our modern life and the ultimate powerlessness of art.

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Roberto Bolaño: Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003)

Marcela Valdes reviews Roberto Bolaño's essay collection "Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003)" (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches).

Unlike many passionate young readers--who knock off two books a week when they're in high school but slow down to three or four a year once adulthood hems them in--Bolaño kept reading all his life. Most authors, Bolaño's editor Jorge Herralde observed in his book For Roberto Bolaño (2006), bury themselves in their own work, losing sight of the larger field. But Bolaño loved reading the works of his contemporaries--and he loved talking about what he was reading with his friends. According to Herralde, he was that rare and beautiful animal: "an insatiable reader." This lifelong compulsion, and its fleeting gratifications, formed the foundation of Bolaño's critical rulings, many of which can be found in his posthumous collection Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003) (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches).

The collection, edited by Spanish literary critic Ignacio Echevarría--one of Bolaño's best friends--was published by Anagrama in 2004, and it has yet to be brought into English. This is a shame, and not only because Bolaño's judgments are often a delight to read. In the United States, Bolaño is best known for his fiction: the eerie stories of Last Evenings on Earth, the short novels Distant Star and By Night in Chile, the tragicomic colossus The Savage Detectives. But in the Spanish-speaking world, Bolaño is also renowned for his erudition. The onomastic index at the end of Between Parentheses contains 600 names, most of which represent a book, or a series of books, that Bolaño had read. The C's, which number sixty-two, are especially rich. There one finds not only such Golden Age masters as Miguel de Cervantes and Calderón de la Barca but also philosophical novelists Camus and Elias Canetti, as well as North American novelists Michael Chabon, Douglas Coupland and Raymond Chandler.

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Roberto Bolaño: Antwerp

José Teodoro reviews Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp.

Antwerp was written in 1980, when Roberto Bolaño was 27, but left unpublished until 2002, the year before the author’s death at the age of 50. Now available from New Directions in a typically intelligent translation by Natasha Wimmer, this slim volume, bound in an austere cover of gold over dark brown, resembling a motel Bible, contains 56 prose poems that collectively constitute a very loose novel. (Perhaps, as the blurb suggests, an experimental crime novel.)

It offers readers a glimpse of the artist as a young man, living in Spain, far from his Chilean home, alone, without documents. At this time he was still uncertain with regards to form, coherence and sustainability, yet conjured captivating images, sensations and atmospheres. In his later novels, such as The Skating Rink and 2666, many of those early images begin to bloom into shadow-strewn, fully developed tales.

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Related Posts:
Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich
Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile
Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations
Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain
Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolaño: 2666
Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives

Interview with Natasha Wimmer

Ollie Brock interviews Natasha Wimmer for Granta 110: Sex on translating Roberto Bolaño.

I’ve always assumed you would need a lot of empathy as a translator. Or perhaps it’s more purely technical than that – just a matter of understanding the words and putting them through the grinder? I know that you spent some time in Mexico City when working on The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s debut novel – in what way did this affect your interpretation of the book?

I think you do need empathy, but I resist the familiar notion that the translator somehow becomes the author, or has some sort of special telepathic relationship with the author. Frankly, I think that’s a bit presumptuous and grandiose, and it obscures the delicate process by which the translator adjusts his or her own voice to the author’s voice. It requires a kind of harmonizing, by which I mean that the translator must find a tone in her own register that somehow suits the author’s. It is easier, at least for me, to translate an author or a character for whom I have a natural affinity.

As for Mexico City, the time I spent there completely transformed my understanding of the book. The Savage Detectives is a love song to Mexico City, and to walk the same streets that Bolaño and his characters walked gave me a very intimate, visceral sense of the city and the novel. There’s something about Mexico City at night, in particular, that’s distinctive. For one thing, it’s darker than most other cities I know, which means that things seem to loom out at you as you walk, and you have the sense that you’re on the verge of the kind of bizarre encounter that Bolaño’s characters have all the time. I also spent time at Café La Habana (the original of Café Quito in the novel), which hasn’t changed much since Bolaño hung out there, and I stumbled over all kinds of cultural details that saved me from translation pitfalls (‘El Santo’??? for example, was one of the notes scribbled on my first draft of the translation; he is, of course, Mexico’s most famous masked wrestler, as I soon discovered).

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The printed issue of Granta 110: Sex also includes Roberto Bolaño's text The Redhead.

Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich

Lorena Valera Villalba Roberto Bolaño's El Tercer Reich.

La alegría y la luz que todo lo inundan en la primera parte de la novela, dan paso a la sombra, al misterio y a la violencia a medida que avanza el relato. El contacto con otra pareja de turistas alemanes y, a través de ellos, con enigmáticos personajes como “Cordero”, “Lobo” o “Quemado”, supone el inicio de una serie de descubrimientos, desapariciones y enigmas que guardan relación con el Tercer Reich. El juego se convierte en el eje de la novela, las estrategias sobre el tablero marcan la evolución de los personajes y descubren las facetas más ocultas de algunos de ellos. Las anotaciones de Udo Berger, el “Fausto de los Juegos de Guerra”, integran una enigmática obra en la que Bolaño vuelca sus obsesiones y aficiones primigenias, entre ellas la II Guerra Mundial y los wargames.

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Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile

Michael Tyson Murphy reviews Roberto Bolaño's "By Night in Chile"

For me in our reading so far, “A Night in Chile” is most resonant with Azuela’s “The Underdogs” in its overt and complex statements about a particular historical situation and its participants, real and fictional (though certainly, Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” and Carpentier’s “The Chase” must be included).

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Yasei no tanteitachi

This fantastic cover belongs to Yasei no tanteitachi, the first Japanese edition of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.
 The book presented this week in the Instituto Cervantes Tokio was published by Hakusuisha Publishers and translated into Japanese by Kenji Matsumoto and Takaatsu Yanagihara.

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations

 

William Skidelsky reviews Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.

This compilation of interviews seems destined to inflame the legend more than it will further the truth. Bolaño didn't often give interviews, and it is apparent from the ones featured here – including his last, to Mexican Playboy, months before he died – that he didn't take them too seriously. His answers tend to be playful, deflecting. Asked why he "always take(s) the opposite view of things", he responds: "I never take the opposite view of things." Asked what feelings "posthumous" works awaken in him, he replies: "Posthumous, it sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator." But Bolaño's often withering assessments of other writers and of the literary establishment ("The Royal Spanish Academy is a cave full of privileged cranums") are well worth reading, and there's an illuminating introduction by Marcela Valdes, which explains in detail how Bolaño came to find out about the killings in Ciudad Juarez that formed the basis of his masterpiece, 2666.

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Exile and Literature

Roberto Bolaño's Viena speech.

He sido invitado para hablar del exilio. La invitación me llegó escrita en inglés y yo no sé hablar inglés. Hubo una época en que sí sabía o creía que sabía, en cualquier caso hubo una época, cuando yo era adolescente, en que creía que podía leer el inglés casi tan bien, o tan mal, como el español. Esa época desdichadamente ya pasó. No sé leer inglés. Por lo que pude entender de la carta creo que tenía que hablar sobre el exilio. La literatura y el exilio. Pero es muy posible que esté absolutamente equivocado, lo cual, bien mirado, sería a la postre una ventaja, pues yo no creo en el exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta palabra va junto a la palabra literatura.

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The construction of memory process in Roberto Bolaño's Amulet in an essay by María José Schamun.

La construcción de la memoria se efectúa sobre la base de la búsqueda de los jóvenes perdidos de Latinoamérica. Se los busca en los tiempos y lugares que se tiene su núcleo en Tlatelolco -1968, pues es el gran crimen, es ese símbolo de lo innombrable hacia lo cual esos jóvenes que se intenta encontrar, marchan inexorablemente. De esta forma son los jóvenes mexicanos representantes de todos los jóvenes latinoamericanos, por lo que se transforma Tlatelolco y el año 1968 (el atroz crimen), en el horror hacia el cual los jóvenes de todo un continente se precipitaron.

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Only art can prevent gaps from turning into blanks

 
Stephen Henighan reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

Monsieur Pain, precise and dramatic yet suffused with a dreamy suggestiveness, is a real discovery and a substantial addition to the growing Bolaño library in English. Many of Bolaño’s central themes appear: the hovering shadow of fascism, and its complicated relationships with art; conspiracies, cults, and secret societies; loneliness, illness, and exile; and the errant lives of men who think they are going to be artists but drift into mediocrity, eccentricity, or complicity with dictatorship.

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Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Monica Szurmuk
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Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Will Blythe
Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain reviewed by Adam Mansbach and Craig Morgan Teicher

2666 in German

 

2666, Roberto Bolaño, Carl Hanser Verlag (2009)


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2666 in Portuguese
2666 in French

2666 in Portuguese

 

2666, Roberto Bolaño, Livros Quetzal (2009)

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2666 in French

The Last Latin American Writer

For Jorge Volpi, Roberto Bolaño was the last true latin american writer.

Bolaño fue el último que respondió conscientemente a una tradición que se pretendía continental. Conocía de cerca la literatura de cada país, y se enfrentó a ella con ahínco. Pero su mirada escapa ya de lo nacional

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Jorge Volpi: El insomnio de Bolívar
Interview with Jorge Volpi

Blogging Roberto Bolaño

Page247 comments Roberto Bolaño's The Last Interview & Other Conversations.

A small book, containing four interviews and explanatory notes on Hispanic and Latino authors and book titles that may be unfamiliar to English readers.

Scott Timberg on Roberto Bolaño.

But what Bolano does well, he does better than almost anybody I know. My book group -- who I led in the novella Distant Star a few years back -- is now reading what's considered his masterpiece, 2666, and I look forward to digging in deeper.