I Just Read About That…

When I started reading 2666, I didn’t know anything about Bolaño.  I didn’t even know any of his other books (except I had heard The Savage Detectives was excellent).  But I didn’t know anything about him, personally.

You shouldn’t need to know an author’s biography to appreciate a novel.  And that’s the case with Bolaño, certainly.  However, knowing his biography adds a new dimension to his work that explains why he writes what he writes.

So, the brief outline:

1953: Born in Chile.
1968: Moved to Mexico City
1973: returned to Chile to support the socialist revolution of Salvador Allende
1973: Augusto Pinochet staged a coup against Allende; Bolaño jailed for 8 days (a major event in his writing).  He was rescued by former school friends who worked at the prison.  While in jail her heard torture (although he himself was not tortured).
He lived briefly in El Salvador and then moved to Spain in 1977.

He was originally a poet (a kind of bohemian beatnik), but he gave that up because there was more money in writing fiction.

I mention this for two reasons: One, his novels are very poetic.  His language is terse and carefully picked over.  Although there are a lot of digressions in his books (a deliberate choice), there’s very little unnecessary verbiage. Two, his novels all discuss poetry in some context or another.  Characters are poets or poetry is lauded in some way.  It’s clear that poetry is his first and most important love, even while he’s writing fiction.

I enjoyed the writing style of 2666, which led me to discover what his earlier, shorter novels were like.  What struck me immediately was how different all the books were in style.

The Skating Rink is a mystery told from different narrators.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is a fictional encyclopedia.
Distant Star expands (and modifies) a chapter from Nazi.
Monsieur Pain is a dreamscape, a fictionalized version of real people.
By Night in Chile is a rambling monologue.
Antwerp is a bizarre prose poem type mystery.

And, Last Evenings on Earth collects some short stories, which also vary quite a bit.

So, the style of each book is quite different, and yet there are threads that run through them: searching, murder, poetry, whores, pornography, sex and an obsession with details.

Searching: nearly every one of these stories involves a quest.  2666 is a quest for Archimboldi (and more!); Skating seeks a number of things (love, a murderer, missing funds); Nazi is a quest for the truth; Monsieur begins as a quest to help someone and ends as a quest for sanity; And By Night is a search for a lost past and for truth.

Murder: there’s a murder in most of these stories.  It’s the plot of Skating (and of Antwerp), it’s pervasive in 2666. It’s also common in Nazi (Distant Star’s main subject is an artist and murderer).

Whores: This is the one subject that I’m puzzled by. In just about every story, some guy sleeps with a whore (often many).  The prevalence of whores is such a foreign idea to me, but it’s not an issue for Bolaño.  Men just up and find whores.  Tangentially this is related to a criticism about the role of women in his stories.  I agree that he doesn’t have too many well-developed women in his cast, but I’m not sure if that’s specifically a bad thing.  Some people just can’t write certain characters.  He may also suffer from a Madonna/Whore complex.  I admit this wasn’t an issue for me while I was reading his books.  But in retrospect I can see it being an issue for some.

As would be the prevalence of pornography and sex.  He is often very graphic.  In both shorter and longer works, porn is a major factor.  And, there’s a lot of sex, consensual or otherwise, in his books.  I’m not exactly sure what it says about him as a person,

Poetry: I mentioned already that poets play a large role in his books.  But so does writing in general.  Almost all of his stories are about writing or a writer or discussing the process or failure of writing.  But it’s not a solipsistic “writers writing about writers” kind of nonsense.  He seems to be genuinely philosophical about the issue.

As for details, I mentioned on another blog recently that Bolaño reminds me of the cubists: he tries to show everything from every angle.  You proceed along in a story and every character you meet, regardless of how relevant they are, you get their full story.  It’s the basis of Nazi, but even in 2666, there are huge digressions about characters who are around for just a few pages.

But speaking of Nazi, I think the overriding thing that I love about Bolaño is that he loves inventing people.  And all of his people are fully formed (even if the women are not especially compelling, they’ve got good background stories anyhow). Nazi creates a bunch of people.  He invents their lives, their writings, their deaths, everything.  (And here the women are just as complex as the men).  By Night is an expounding on one of those characters, and within this novella, there is an extensive look at other people who impacted this one man.

Part of the reason I read all of these works so quickly was because they are all quite short.  And, yes, it’s fun to read novellas and feel a sense of accomplishment.  It’s fascinating to me that after all of those novelas, he then wrote The Savage Detectives (672 pages) and 2666 (912 pages).  2666 seems like an explosion of those novellas: a way of cramming all of his motifs into one big book.

I’m rather looking forward to Savage Detectives.  And then, there’s several soon-to-be-released-in-English books coming down the pike.

It has been a real treat to have exposure to this enchanting writer.  And I’m delighted to have found out about him with very little in the way of preconceived notions.  I’m hooked on his writing.  [And his poetry is great too].