I Just Read About That…

[READ: February 18, 2010] “Vagabonds”

After reading Infinite Jest, I got totally het up about reading all of David Foster Wallace’s works. Of course, I discovered that he had an awful lot of uncollected works (which were all conveniently gathered in one location by a much bigger DFW fan than I). Since I’m reading 2666 as part of an online group, I wondered if I would be similarly obsessed with Bolaño’s output.

Well first, I’m not loving 2666 as much as I did Infinite Jest (but I’m only 1/3 of the way through, so that may change).  But, on a more literal note, there seems to be very few short stories literred around the place. A very cursory search revealed a couple things in Harper’s and a couple things in the New Yorker, but very little else.  Now, I assume that’s primarily because his stories need to be translated first, so there’s possibly a bunch of uncollected Spanish stories, but as for English ones?  Well, let’s just say that scouring the globe for a complete list of short stories in English that are not part of a previously released collections is something of a dificult task.

In fact, further investigation into the stories from The New Yorker and Harper’s shows that these stories are either already released or soon to be published in translated collections.

One of the things I found in my search was this article which is more or less a review of Bolano’s, The Savage Detectives.  However, in true New Yorker fashion, it is also a detailed overview of Bolaño’s life as well.

I’m inlcluding it here mostly for the biographical stuff, since I haven’t read Detetcives.  Although it has been on my “to read” list for over a year, and reading this article makes me want to read it even more now.  Huh, maybe I will be reading all of Bolaño’s work.

It appears, from this brief sketch, that his biography informs what his characters go through.  Bolaño moved around a lot in his life.  He was born in Chile.  When he was 15 his family moved to Mexico City, which proved to be an incredibly exhilerating place.

Bolaño becanme a Trotskyite and traveled to El Salvador where he hung out with leftist poets and revolutionaries.

When he was 20 he moved back to Chile, hoping to join the leftist revolution. When Pincochet was elected, Bolaño became a spy for the resistance.  He was arrested as a foreign terrorist and spent 8 days in jail.  He likely would have been killed if one of the prison guards didn’t recognize him from when they were kids.

After a few more months in Chile, he returned to Mexico City.  There he and several friends form a band of litrery guerills a caled The Infrarealists.  They practiced dadist and surrealist works of art, including shouting their own poems during other poets’s readings.  They particularly depsied Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“A man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops”) and all of the magical realists, and Isabelle Allende (“her attempts at literature range from kitsch to the pathetic”  For her part, Allende described his a extrememly unpleasnat adding that “death does not make you a nicer person”.  Bolaño loved Borges and Julio Cortázar.

Bolaño began his writing career as a poet.  And poetry was the love of his life.  He published two collections in Mexico City, but by the time he was 24 he left (suffering a broken heart), eventually settling in Barcelona.  Over the years he became addicted to heroin.

In the 1980s, in his 30s, he quite heroin, and got married.  He had two kids in the 1990s.  Around that time, he switched from poetry to fiction in an attempt to make a proper income. I loved the anecdote that he often submited a short story to a competition, which he would win; he would change the title and submit the same story to another competition which also won. 

When he was 38, he learned that he had terminal liver damage.  Given this news, he began writing in earnest, with an astnishing output. He wrote several novels in just a couple of years.  He finished The Savage Detectives in 1998.  And finished 2666 just before he died.

It’s amazng to me that almost all of his fiction came out during his last ten year of his life. 

The article also talks about Bolaño’s dark humor.  There’s many examples cited from The Savage Detercives, an it is quite evident throughout his short stories, even if the humor is very dark, very subtle and may possiby be about stuff the average American reader doesn’t get (I know there’s a lot I don’t get!)

So the next few days are going to be devoted to all of the loose Bolaño works that I recently uncovered.