Reading Roberto Bolano in Chile

Mucho gracias to my witty and wonderful guest posters. I will just briefly interrupt their reign of wisdom to weigh in with another Dispatch From Abroad, this time with my promised post about Roberto Bolano.

I have been reading Bolano in Chile, simply because he´s Chilean and I wanted my reading to match my travels. Everyone has been raving about his latest novel to be translated, The Savage Detectives, which I have yet to read, but I´ve been reading Last Evenings on Earth, his collection of short stories that came out in English in 2006. What´s nice about reading an author in their country of origin is that certain Chilean details leap out at me that wouldn´t be as resonant while reading in California. For instance, in the very first story in the collection, Sensini, which is about a young writer developing a relationship with an older writer as they both try to win literary contests, Bolano writes: ¨When the winners were announced I was working as a vendor in a handcrafts market where absolutely no one was selling anything handcrafted.¨ Ever since I arrived in Chile I´ve been wandering through these markets that target tourists with fat wallets and poor sense of taste, and I immediately understand the cynical, wry tone of the narrator. Also, Bolano drops a number of cities into his stories, like Conception and Los Angeles (the Chilean Los Angeles), and since I just stopped at one and drove through the other, I have a much better sense of the distances characters are traveling and the type of cities they are passing through. There´s something else about reading a book in place where it´s set that´s more intangible: the collective psychology of the natives. There´s still a shadow from Pinochet that hangs over the older residents, a kind of suspicion toward the government and a knee-jerk conformism that hangs around like a habit. It reminds me of when I spent a few months in Spain, because the older residents had lived under the reign of Franco while the younger ones had only known the new government. (Caveat – of course a good portion of the stories are set in Spain and Mexico, not only Chile, but I just imagine those settings.)

As far as the stories themselves, Bolano usually has writers as protagonists: journalists, writing teachers, poets (lots of poets), critics, short story writers. This prevalent use of writers might be considered precious or autobiographical, but by dealing with their doubts and fears and by connecting the lot of writers to a particularly oppressive moment in Chilean history, Bolano manages to sidestep the bromide of a writer writing about writers. And in all of these stories, the political environment is looming in the foreground, sometimes subtly, in the case of Chilean expats in Spain (their mere presence in Spain grounds the story in the historical fact that they had to run for their lives), and sometimes more explicitly, as a character in Sensini searches for his son who has ¨disappeared¨.

The most striking feature of all of the stories is Bolano´s ability to shoehorn a novel into short story length. The novelistic length of some of these stories – which can span five years or twenty – means that the narrative flies by, sometimes dwelling only briefly on a scene, just enough of a description to orient the reader before plunging onward to a summarization of the next few months. Whole lifetime shifts are covered. The use of time is encouraging, if only to prove that the one of the cornerstone pieces of advice frequently given to novice writers – to write in scenes – could really restrict some storytellers. Of course, Bolano often uses scenes. But the ratio of his scenes to the rapid sweep of time is much higher  than many writers. Ultimately, the effect of these grand narratives in tiny spaces is to make the story bloom even larger in the reader´s mind.

To those of you who have already read The Savage Detectives, I´d be interested to know how Bolano treats time in his novels. If he continued at the same pace, he´d be writing a novel with the scope of A Hundred Years of Solitude.