Bolaño and the Poetic Pose

Ron Silliman on Bolaño's poetry:

The pose of Bolaño-the-poet may well be more important – and certainly more powerful – than the fact of the poems themselves, but what might be most useful here is to note the whole notion of Bolaño posing. The unifying – indeed distinguishing – element of these poems, written in a post-Beat free verse that might be closest in English to Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ray Bremser, is the consistency of the pose: the intellectual as tough guy but one who is, at all moments, hard as nails & deeply sentimental. Think of upper limit Jean-Paul Belmondo in the films of Godard, lower limit Charles Bukowski (not as Mickey Rourke so much as Johnny Depp or, had he lived, Heath Ledger). Imagine Kerouac mixed with Camus.

The Ubiquitous Bolaño

I find it mildly embarrassing to be so enamored of Bolaño these days. I picked up By Night in Chile and Distant Star back when they were the only Bolaño books available in English -- back in the dusty old days of, what, 2005? -- and they both perplexed me and impressed me; then when Last Evenings on Earth came out, I picked it up and was blown away -- something really felt like it exploded in my head, and I went back and reread parts of By Night in Chile and Distant Star and they felt so much richer than they had before. I had, in some ways, been teaching myself how to read Bolaño.

There was great praise of Bolaño from the moment the first translations appeared, but the praise and admiration for Bolaño back then felt restrained and quiet compared to what would happen when The Savage Detectives came out -- suddenly it seemed like Bolaño had been made the saint of all literature. I was excited, yes, but also a bit fearful, and I resisted Savage Detectives for a while, partly, I think, because praise of Bolaño seemed ubiquitous, and I just couldn't believe -- didn't want to believe -- that here was a writer who could be so universally popular. Sure, I loved him, but how could everybody else? It was disturbing. I particularly didn't think it possible that a writer like Bolaño could be so truly adored, because he is a writer whose work seldom has much of a linear plotline (if it has a plotline at all), likeable characters, or lyrical prose, the things that so much of the world seems to want fiction to have.

I started to distrust even my own response to the books -- did I really like them, or did I just want to avoid upsetting the overflowing bandwagon? I suffered angst and self-distrust. I didn't leave the house for days. I abjured my very basic knowledge of Spanish and tried to remember some German. (Ach, German! I said to myself, remembering that earlier sensation in translation, W.G. Sebald, a writer I have much admired but not yet learned to love.)

And then came 2666 in two gorgeous editions from FSG (I bought the 3-volume slipcased paperback, since the hardcover seemed a bit unweildy) and the praise just continued, like kudzu or a deadly bender. Of course, at some point it will stop. Won't it? People will pick up the books and be bewildered by them and decide it's all just hype and they will turn, backlashing, against we who praise -- we who must, they think, be full of horse effluent: "How," they will say, "can you really and truly think that is any great shakes?"

The phenomenon of Bolaño's success in translation (a separate sort of success, I think, from success in one's own language -- and his translators, each excellent, deserve much praise as well, particularly in as translation-averse a country as the U.S.) is itself beginning to become a topic. The new issue of The Chronicle Review contains an interesting, though not particularly probing, essay by Ilan Stavans about the sudden rise of Bolaño's popularity and, in particular, about 2666, a book he has some reservations about (the article is only online to subscribers or people who have access via various institutions, alas):

Alas, Bolaño's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago, I had a student who wrote his senior thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolaño and illness, Bolaño and the whodunit, Bolaño and the beatniks, Bolaño and eschatology, etc. Since then, interviews, photographs, e-mail messages — everything by or about him — are perceived as discoveries (even though most of the material was never lost to a Spanish-language audience).

The rapture must have been the same when Borges, long a commodity among a small cadre of followers in Argentina, shared with Samuel Beckett the International Publishers' Prize in 1961. Suddenly he became an overnight sensation in translation around the world. Such instant celebrity occurs when writers are able to prove that the local is universal: They exist in their corners of the world but are able to recreate the world entire. For Borges, that happened because after World War II readers were eager to look at Latin America, and the so-called third world in general, as a cradle of a worldview that was both different and refreshing.

Stavans goes on to ask an important question: What does Bolaño offer that was so quickly attractive to such a broad swath of the U.S. literati? (I'll leave it to others to ruminate on his popularity elsewhere.) Stavans suggests that it is because the fiction offered to us by "mainstream publishers" has grown "complacent", that the genres offered are "suffocating", that we want somebody to shake it up, a prophet, and that Bolaño is the one who has been annointed.

There's something to this, but I don't buy it completely (I might have been more persuaded if Stavans had had more space to expand upon his ideas). There is, indeed, an energy in Bolaño that is not available in most mainstream U.S. writers, a blithe disregard for the strictures of fictional form as they have ossified over the years into the current cant about "what a novel is", a willingness on Bolaño's part to make his own forms as he sees fit, and to have fun with those forms, a playfulness seen in only a few U.S. writers whose work is published by mainstream publishers, though it's much less absent from the books published by many small presses. Most of the U.S. writers who have a sense of playfulness in their fiction get chastised for thinking fiction is a "game", but I haven't yet seen Bolaño get criticized for this.

Perhaps we expect people from south of us to be a little ... odd like that. They speak a funny language, they write weird books, so it's all just fine. It's kind of cute, actually.

No, there's something more to it -- I think Bolaño escapes being criticized for gaming the system because he also writes about Big Stuff: dictatorships and mass murder and evil and stuff. He does it in a weird way, yes, because he doesn't have magical things happen to his dictators the way the other people who write in his funny language do, but that's part of his appeal -- we've got shelves of the other sorts of books about dictators and mass murder and stuff. The roundabout way he does it, it's kind of fun. Even though books should not be fun if they're Serious, well ... we like this kind of funlike Serious. Don't we? Yes?

Oh, I don't know. I don't understand the mass mind, so why am I trying to explain?

At least I've found one person who isn't buying into the hype: Nick Antosca. Having just finished reading 2666, he says that though he often found it enthralling, he also found it just as often tedious (and, by the way, he thinks Jonathan Lethem's NY Times review is insane):

The fourth book, "The Part About the Crimes," is the one everyone talks about. It is a list of murder scenes. It is a desert of boredom containing sites of interest. Once in a while, things happen--certain characters reappear (a suspect, a few detectives). Young women are being killed in a Mexican city. We don't see the crimes, we just get a detached third person voice describing the bodies. Always, "the hyoid bone was fractured." Occasionally there are scenes of horrific prison torture and murder. (These scenes are much more disturbing than the murders, which we never "see.") I found this section the most problematic--it is generally tedious, for one thing, but worse, I think it's exploitative. I haven't heard anyone else say this about 2666, but I really felt like Bolaño was using the murders for literary capital--using the dead women as props, as flavor, and illuminating nothing. (Remember, these are based on real murders--hundreds of women dumped in the desert outside Juárez.) Describing horrific crime scenes in a politely repetitive tone for 300 pages isn't interesting, productive, compelling... it's wasteful and it's boring, and after a while I became angry at Bolaño for building his novel around this litany in what seems a very arbitrary way. Certainly a powerful novel involving the Juárez murders (which do feel apocalyptic and unreal) could have been written. This isn't it.

I found Nick's post (and the comments from Bolaño haters after it) liberating -- I'm not as embarrassed to love Bolaño as much as I do anymore, because finally I know of at least a few people out there who don't share my feeling. This is comforting.

Meanwhile, Wyatt Mason (who doesn't love Savage Detectives as much as I do, bless him!) is more enamored of 2666 than Nick, and uses a paragraph from it to explain why he admires this particular bit of writing and not the first sentence to A Canticle for Leibowitz:

To those who have written me to say that can’t imagine why I dislike so violently the first sentence of A Canticle for Leibowitz, I offer these sentences as exemple of what I do like, very much. They leave something to the imagination, while, at the same time, present quite an imagination at work.

And now, for Bolaño lovers and hater alike, a new translation of a short story, "Meeting with Enrique Lihn", translated by Chris Andrews. Here are the first sentences:

In 1999, after returning from Venezuela, I dreamed that I was being taken to Enrique Lihn’s apartment, in a country that could well have been Chile, in a city that could well have been Santiago, bearing in mind that Chile and Santiago once resembled Hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain. Of course, I knew that Lihn was dead, but when the people I was with offered to take me to meet him I accepted without hesitation. Maybe I thought that they were playing a joke, or that a miracle might be possible. But probably I just wasn’t thinking, or had misunderstood the invitation. In any case, we came to a seven-story building with a façade painted a faded yellow and a bar on the ground floor, a bar of considerable dimensions, with a long counter and several booths, and my friends (although it seems odd to describe them that way; let’s just say the enthusiasts who had offered to take me to meet the poet) led me to a booth, and there was Lihn.

"And then there's no other choice but to write"

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant -- no, pleasant isn’t the word -- it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write.

--Roberto Bolaño

Mr. Waggish on Mr. Bolaño

Just after writing my little love letter to Roberto Bolaño, I noticed that Mr. Waggish has read and thought about The Savage Detectives (and confesses he is less love-struck than I, which is, it seems to me, a healthy thing). I'd meant to link to Waggish's previous consideration of By Night in Chile, but in my haste forgot to, and so now I correct that here. (It was a particularly negligent oversight, because I think it was that post that first got me interested in seeking out Bolaño's work.)

Bolaño, Mi Amor

I started reading Roberto Bolaño's work last year, beginning with his short story collection Last Evenings on Earth, and it was love at first sight. Actually, no. I think I had to read a couple of stories before I was entranced -- I remember reading the first story and wondering what all the fuss over Bolaño was about, but by the end of the second I was developing a crush, and by the end of the third I was head-over-heels. From there, it was on to Distant Star and By Night in Chile -- the last a bittersweet experience, because some bastard had written in the Dartmouth Library copy, defacing it with underlining and marginal notes, inserting their own dull presence between me and the words of mi novio. (I have since gotten a fresh copy of my own, but still, the pain lingers.) (I've not yet read Amulet, but soon, soon... ) (I've been reading the translations, though I've glanced at the Spanish-language originals. My Spanish is, unfortunately, at best functional -- enough to let me get the gist of most newspaper articles, but not much more than that. I keep practicing, though.)

A copy of the latest book of Bolaño's to appear in the U.S., The Savage Detectives, is, I hear, on its way to me, and I am preparing to put all the other books in my life aside so that I can spend some quality time with it and it alone. After the short assignations that are Bolaño's other books in English, The Savage Detectives will (I hope, I expect, I dream) allow a longer-term relationship.

What is the nature of this passion of mine? Any love is difficult to explain fully, to analyze or dissect, but I have some idea of what it is about Bolaño's writing that makes it so attractive to me. His diction (in Chris Andrews's translations, at least) is disarmingly colloquial, creating a poetic effect that heightens ordinary speech and expression without churning it into lyrical goo. This is, to be honest, my favorite sort of style, but one I am wary of, because most of the time it is used by writers who don't know what else to do. Bolaño's stories drift around, often as monologues -- and since I was once an aspiring playwright, I have a weakness for monologues. I am happiest when hearing characters talk. His characters talk, and they talk about each other talking, and their talk is the substance of their stories.

But this is not all that attracts me -- such writing might be enough to spark a crush, but it is not, on its own, enough to fuel a passion. I am also enraptured by Bolaño's mix of the odd and the ordinary, the easy movement he makes between the logic of modernity and the logic of dreams, the willingness he has to indulge in goofiness and absurdity, and the general refusal in all of his work (that I have read) to turn terror and evil into simple melodrama. And I adore his allusions -- no literary geek like me could fail to fall in love with all the names dropped through the pages like confetti from The Reader's Encyclopedia. No-one with a sweet tooth for metafiction could fail to be charmed by the twists and turns of Bolaño's fictive realities, their palimpsests and funhouse mirrors, their chuckles and winks.

I do not suffer passionate love for the critic James Wood, whose spleen sometimes bursts with ridiculous generalities about What Fiction Should Do And Be, but when he writes in praise of a writer (as Carrie just said, too) he's at his best, and able to isolate many of the elements that make a particular piece of writing work. Thus, I was pleased to see he likes Bolaño, whom he calls a "wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative" and so has named my love in exactly the words I would have used, had I been less love-struck and more concise. He quotes a sentence from By Night in Chile and then follows it with a marvelous array of insights -- the sentence is about a pigeon-killing falcon named Ta Gueule:

"Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter."

Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence -- impossibly, like someone punting a leaf -- image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia.

Here Wood starts from one of the other things that inevitably makes my heart go pitter-pat, the wonder of long sentences, and continues on to show just what is so marvelous about this particular one. I'm also glad he writes about this because it brings out just how skilled Bolaño was, a fact that is sometimes easy to forget when we don't read with all the care we should, when we miss the complexity of his structures and think they're lackadaisical. That's where the art lies: in the indirection.

When it comes to literary loves, I like to share, and so here, for those of you who may not have fallen under Bolaño's particular spell yet (or who have and seek more, more, more), are a few links...

• Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio"
• Bolaño's story "Dance Card"
• Bolaño's advice on writing short stories (PDF)
  
• A profile of Bolaño from the San Francisco Bay Guardian
• A memoir of Bolaño and friends from The Nation
• "Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño"
  
• Overview of Bolaño's work by Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review
• "Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic" by Aura Estrada
• Review of The Savage Detectives in BookForum
  
• Biography and review of The Savage Detectives at The New Yorker
• Official Bolaño Spanish-language site
  
• Wikipedia entry

Easter Sunday PKD-in-the-Wild Sighting

Roberto Bolaño, from Distant Star:

Bibiano's investigations in the United States were not, however, limited to the world of board games. I heard from a friend (though I don't know if the story is true) that Bibiano contacted a member of the Philip K. Dick Society in Glen Ellen, California, who was, for want of a better expression, a collector of literary curiosities. Apparently Bibiano entered into correspondence with this individual, who specialized in "secret messages in literature, painting, theatre, and cinema," and told him the story of Carlos Wieder. ... He had a wide range of friends: detectives, activists fighting for the rights of minority groups, feminists marooned in west coast motels, directors and producers who would never get a film off the ground and led lives as reckless and solitary as his own. The members of the Philip K. Dick Society, enthusiastic but discreet people as a rule, regarded him as a madman, but harmless and basically a good guy, as well as being a genuine expert on the works of Dick.