With so many newly translated books by Roberto Bolano tumbling out of bookstores, I had begun to lose that sense of discovery and excitement I first felt on reading his fiction. But now, reading his first and only collection of non-fiction, there is that charge again, that sense of literary invigoration when encountering a joyously cantankerous and combative voice in literature. Between Parenthesis (Essays, articles and speeches; New Directions, translated by Natasha Wimmer) is shot through with a strange mixture of fierceness and tenderness. Bolano is unsparing in one paragraph, and gentle in another. His take down of Isabelle Allende is well documented, and now you can also hear his opinionated, subtly ironic riffs on Arturo Perez-Reverte and Paul Coelho. Also present are adorations of his literary heroes: Cortazar, Borges, Nicanor Parra.
I can't resist quoting this from the last interview he gave (included here) when asked what he thought of Perez-Reverte being inducted into the Royal Academy: “The Royal Academy is a hotbed of genius. Juan Marsé isn't a member, Juan Goytisolo isn't a member, Mendoza and Javier Marías aren't members, Olvido García Valdez isn't a member, I can't remember if Álvaro Pombo is a member (if he is it's probably a mistake), but there's Perez-Reverte. Well, Paulo Coelho is a member of the Brazilian Academy.” In this same Playboy interview he's asked if he ever disliked any of the books he stole, and Bolano replies, “Never. The good thing about stealing books (as opposed to safes) is that one can carefully examine their contents before perpetrating the crime.”
Moving recollection
There's an entire essay here on pilfering books, moving for the way it is also about the desperation and heady loneliness of adolescence. “The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of 16 and 19, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was 20, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt. The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by [the 19th century erotic poet] Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can't remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis .”
In the collection, I was especially drawn to Bolano on popular culture, movies, pulp fiction, and music. Bolano likes Thomas Harris, noting that “Hannibal Lecter is a great character. With lapses, purple passages, even soft spots, but ultimately a great character…not to mention Agent Starling, who will always look like Jodie Foster to us, but who in Harris's dreams is probably prettier than Jodie Foster…” Bolano also reads Walter Mosley, Martin Amis, and James Ellroy, loves Philip K. Dick, The Pogues, and Bob Dylan. Comparing two memoirs, Amis' Experience and Ellory's My Dark Places , he feels Amis is brilliant and bland (and you realise only after Bolano has said it that one can be both) while Ellroy is more daring, keeping his eyes open (where Amis has them closed) when entering the abyss.
Enlightening
As bonus, a lovely little piece on the pleasures of 84 Charing Cross Road , where the reader is moved to tears because “the best tears are those that make us better and at the same time come closest to laughter.” But this book is only marginally about the things I've noted so far; the bulk of it is Bolano on contemporary Latin American/Spanish writing. A long list of writers one has never even heard of but is grateful to learn about. Bolana's prodigious reading and generosity is evident on every page when he calls our attention to the work of his contemporaries in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Spain and Cuba. This is Bolano as anti-hero and rebel reader, taking up for the underdog. His balanced, razor-sharp evaluations of older masters such as Neruda, Marquez, Borges and Cortazar can only come from the incendiary Bolano who is unafraid to name their exact place in the canon.
Regional though in the extreme, these pieces also carry with them Bolano's inspiring and original commentary on the writing life, the struggles and hard-won victories of artists, the pleasure of creating, and what is required of literary criticism, and what it must be at all times — constantly creative. He's tough on himself and others, but he's also quite a softie and whenever he thinks he's sounding too vulnerable, such as when talking of children or dogs, he apologies for being too sappy. He exhorts us to show courage in times of failure, to be uncompromising in art even in the face of loss. He wrote in Antwerp : “Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength”.
