Roberto Bolaño - Between Parentheses

Also by Roberto Bolao

Available from New Directions

Amulet

Antwerp

By Night in Chile

Distant Star

The Insufferable Gaucho

Last Evenings on Earth

Monsieur Pain

Nazi Literature in the Americas

The Return

The Romantic Dogs

The Skating Rink

Tres

Roberto Bolao

Between Parentheses

Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 19982003

Edited by IGNACIO ECHEVARRA

Translated by NATASHA WIMMER

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Copyright 2004 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolao

Copyright 2004 by Editorial Anagrama

Translation copyright 2011 by Natasha Wimmer

Originally published as Entre parentesis by EditorialAnagrama, Barcelona, Spain. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of RobertoBolao and Carmen Balcells Agencia Literaria, Barcelona.

All rights reserved. Except for a brief passage quoted in anewspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this bookmay be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage andretrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the magazines where some ofthese essays originally appeared: The Nation, Newsweek,TheHudson Review, Granta, and The New York Review ofBooks.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada,Ltd.

First published as a New Directions Book in 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bolao, Roberto, 19532003.

[Entre parentesis. English]

Between parentheses : essays, articles, and speeches,1998-2003 / Roberto Bolao, ; edited by Ignacio Echevarria ; translated byNatasha Wimmer.

p. cm.

Originally published in Spain as: Entre parentesis.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

3ISBN 978-0-8112-2050-7

I. Echevarra, Ignacio. II. Wimmer, Natasha. III. Title.

PQ8098.12.O38E5613 2011

864'.64dc22 2011002586

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Contents

Introduction

This volume collects most of the newspaper columns and articles thatRoberto Bolao published between 1998 and 2003. Also included are a fewscattered prefaces, as well as the texts of some talks or speeches given byBolao during the same period. Taken together, they make up a surprisinglyrounded whole, offering in their entirety a personal cartography of the writer:the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmentedautobiography.

The starting date, 1998, isnt arbitrary. Up until then (and despitethe critical success of Nazi Literature in the Americas and DistantStar, in 1996, and the short-story collection Llamadas telefnicas[Phone Calls], in 1997), Roberto was a little-known writer who lived inrelative isolation in Blanes, a coastal town in the Spanish province of Gerona,north of Barcelona. It was after the publication of The SavageDetectives, in 1998, and the powerful response the novel elicited, thatRoberto was given the opportunity to write for various Spanish and LatinAmerican publications, and he began to be called upon to give lectures, writeprefaces, preside at book launches, and participate in conferences.

Today, its hard to grasp how quickly all of this happened. In fact,the oldest of the pieces collected here Who Would Dare? is an isolatedarticle that appeared in Babelia, the literary supplement of theSpanish newspaper El Pas, in January 1998. Less than a year later,Bolao agreed to write a more or less weekly column for the Diari deGirona. The first was published in January 1999, and from then on,Bolao who had begun to acquire a taste for this new kind of writing continued to publish articles on a fairly regular basis, and also to field agrowing number of requests for his presence at different events.

As a result, all of the texts collected here were written in the shortspan of about five years. It makes sense, then, that the tone should beconsistent, that multiple internal resonances should be revealed, and that thepieces should fit together in a natural way, with surprising neatness. Inassembling the volume, a strict chronological order might have been adopted. Butin the end this was rejected in favor of a more deliberate scheme, according towhich the different materials are grouped in six main sections, preceded by abrief Self-Portrait and concluding with one of the last interviews that Bolaogave shortly before he died.

First come three talks or speeches (either term is better thanlectures) delivered by Roberto on very different occasions. Theadjective insufferable has been attached to all three, deliberately: tounderscore the close relationship of these speeches with the two that Robertohimself included at the end of his posthumous collection, El gauchoinsufrible (2003) [The Insufferable Gaucho]. Literatura + enfermedad =enfermedad [Literature + Illness = Illness] and Los mitos de Cthulhu [TheMyths of Cthulhu] were surprising because of their aggressive stance,provocatively full of categorical statements. The Vagaries of the Literature ofDoom, the first of the three insufferable speeches gathered here, continuesin the same provocative vein; it begins with a discussion of MartnFierro, the ultimate insufferable gaucho, and is dedicated to thepatron saints of post-Borgesian Argentine literature. The other two speeches aresomewhat different in character, much more personal. The Caracas Address isthe text that Bolao read in Venezuela when his novel The SavageDetectives won the 1999 Rmulo Gallegos Prize. Its an unexpectedlyconfessional speech, in which Bolao makes a public profession of his literaryfaith and comes to state, with moving seriousness, that everything Ive writtenis a love letter or farewell letter to my own generation. Literature andExile, meanwhile, reflects on a subject as crucial to Bolaos work as to hislife; very shortly after giving this speech he faced the intense experience ofreturning, for the first time in twenty-five years, to Chile, the country of hisbirth.

Fragments of a Return to the Native Land is the title of a longpiece that Bolao wrote upon his return from the first of two trips he made toChile, at the end of 1998. The same title heads the block of texts that serve asthe backbone of this volume. The first was written like the speech Literatureand Exile just before Bolaos return to Chile. His first impressions of thistrip are very clearly described in the piece cited above, which is wary yet warmin tone, full of humor. Shortly afterward, however, Bolao published a muchdarker, more bitter piece in the Barcelona magazine Ajoblanco. Its theaccount of a dinner to which he was invited by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit and her husband, the socialist minister Jorge Arrate, spokesman of the Frei government. The story recast later in By Night in Chile was soon making the rounds inChile and, not surprisingly, feelings were hurt. As a result, when Bolaotraveled to Chile for the second time, in December 1999, the atmosphere wasstormy, and even hostile, and Bolao was shut out by the countrys culturalestablishment. This had to happen sooner or later, given Bolaos visceralresponse to Chilean politics and society, as well as culture, and, morespecifically, poetry. The texts collected in this section give a good sense ofthis response. Among them, special mention should be made of the piece onNicanor Parra, a crucial influence on Bolaos work, as is evident in manyplaces. Its impossible to explain Bolaos poetry (and Bolao, of course, wasfirst and foremost a poet) without keeping in mind Parras influence. But thedeep effect of the great Chilean poet is also recognizable in Bolaos more orless insufferable speeches and his increasingly cantankerous, irreverent, andhavoc-wreaking public persona.