Review by New York Times Review
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. In Bolaño's version, the protagonist, Pereda, heads south after the collapse of the Argentine peso. What he finds on the Pampas is a sense of desertion and impotence. The gauchos have sold their horses and get around on bicycles or on foot. There are no cattle, only a proliferating scourge of rabbits. Having surrendered their ferocity, the gauchos are reduced to hunting the pests for food. Pereda gives them pep talks: "We have fallen, we're down . . . but we can still pick ourselves up and go to our deaths like men." During an argument he challenges the gauchos to a knife fight, believing his fate, like that of Borges's character in "The South," will be sealed. But the gauchos recoil: "Pereda felt that the shame of the nation or the continent had turned them into tame cats." In the end, he does use his knife, against a 50-year-old writer with an "adolescent air" who insults him in a literary cafe in Buenos Aires. In "Police Rat" Bolaño, with his taste for the subterranean life, vividly imagines a community of rats. Hard-working, co-operative and exquisitely polite, they are the fortunate members of a society where violent crime is unheard of. Every once in a while an artist is born among them. "As a general rule, we don't make fun of those individuals. On the contrary, we pity them, because we know that they're condemned to solitude. Why? Well, because creating works of art and contemplating them are activities in which our people . . . are unable to take part." Even in this modest version of utopia, the artist is doomed. The stories in "The Return" are less even. Some are mere character sketches; others read like barroom tales that would have been better off left unpublished. "William Burns," about an American who kills a man who may or may not be stalking two women, seems especially pointless. But there is gold to be found in this collection as well. The narrator of "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" is the son of a porn star. He was raised in a neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia, called the Impaled. His father, an itinerant preacher, abandoned his wife before the son was born. At the age of 19, Lalo watches the movies his mother starred in while she was pregnant with him, "crying my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my head." He is sure that he remembers seeing and feeling these penetrations in the womb. Disturbing as they are, Lalo can't help admiring the artistry of the movies; they seem to offer a glimpse into the mysteries of existence. "The sadness of the phallus," he says, was something the filmmaker "understood better than anyone. I mean the sadness of those monumental members against the backdrop of this vast and desolate continent." Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano, pops up in several stories. In "Detectives," two veteran cops remember holding Belano as a prisoner after the Chilean coup that overthrew President Allende in 1973. They were classmates with Belano in high school and are inclined to protect him, though they just as easily could have shot him through the head and "come up with any old explanation." When Belano passes a mirror on the way to the bathroom he tells one of his former classmates that what he sees is the face of a complete stranger. The cop looks in the glass and fails to recognize himself as well. The atrocities have carried them so far from themselves that they have become something other, mixed up with the faces of the other prisoners and their guards who have also been alchemized into strangers. In "Photos," Arturo Belano is "lost in Africa," like one of his creator's heroes, Arthur Rimbaud. Sitting in the dust of a village "forsaken by god and abandoned by the human race," he leafs through an anthology of French poetry someone has left behind. He peers at the author photographs, ruminating on desire, projection, on the poets who are burned, "even the bad ones, on those burning bridges that are so enticing, so fascinating when you're 18, or 21, but then so dull, so monotonous." With Bolaño you rarely feel beset by monotony. Certainly not in "Antwerp," a tiny, unclassifiable book that will be of interest mainly to his most devoted fans. Bolaño completed it in 1980, but didn't publish it until a year before he died. "I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can't be sure of," he tells us in the preface. The short sections are like prose poems - a bridge of sorts between Bolaño's fiction and poetry - with such cryptic titles as "A Monkey," "There Was Nothing," "Big Silver Waves." Though not easily comprehensible, each section presents the reader with at least one startling line. A boy and a girl in "Cleaning Utensils," for example, weep "like characters from different movies projected on the same screen." In an essay titled "Literature + Illness = Illness," in "The Insufferable Gaucho," Bolaño confronts his own impending death, at the age of 50, from liver disease. He compares a patient's voyage on a gurney - "from his room to the operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the sect of the Hashishin" - to a hazardous 19th-century voyage where the traveler gives up everything. The best of these stories confirm Bolaño's ideal of literature as a voyage to the zero degree of human existence, to the abyss, as Baudelaire, another of his heroes, would call it, where we lose the self in order to find it again. Bolaños subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and desperate glimmers of transcendence. Michael Greenberg is the author of "Hurry Down Sunshine" and "Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life." He writes the Accidentalist column for Bookforum.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 19, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The dead and wildly fashionable Bolano (2666) seems doomed to have all of his scribblings published. Hence this slapdash collation of 56 cinematic gestures set in 1980 Barcelona and featuring a nervous South American narrator named Roberto Bolano, who is fascinated by facade versus reality, observes himself as if from the outside, and records random scenes (i.e., a hunchback eating sardines from a can in the woods). Alternately, elements of a detective plot are set up but hardly developed and involve a police sergeant searching for someone (perhaps the hunchback) and a nameless young woman (red-haired, a drug addict, a witness) sodomized by a cop-or is it the narrator? Bolano derides conventional story lines ("rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels") in favor of recording senseless, disjointed snippets of speech, errant impressions, and sensations. Collectively, these might be viewed as the paranoid, manic musings of a writer desperately searching for material. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
