Waggish: Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile
…seems Roberto’s writing is finally getting translated & marketed in English.
I recommend his work with th weight of a peculiar sense of loss- Roberto was th good firend who never was, th too-brief, inspirational acquaintance…
I have some video footage of his close friend & collaborator, Toni, (my screenplay is based on th book they wrote together) & him having what seemed to be an oft-repeated, ritual conversation- Roberto proposing a scheme to try to better market difficult literary work, Toni, as sales mgr. for a small publishing house dedicated to teacher’s manuals & texts, patiently running down th impossible numbers…
III
For Bolaño, Latin America is not only a geographical expanse; it is a state of mind. It is the pieces, the ghosts, exiles took with them as they scattered around the world. In the short story “El ojo Silva” (“Silva the Eye”), Bolaño writes in the opening sentence:
It’s strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can’t be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died.
Bolaño always dealt with the impacts of violence in the private realm. He didn’t work epically; he avoided historical denouements. The struggles and massacre of Colombia’s plantation workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuentes’s evocations of the Mexican Revolution, Vargas Llosa’s dissection of a ferocious backwoods millenarian movement in The War at the End of the World – grand tapestries of this kind are absent in his work.