The itinerant, Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, has become one of the most internationally recognized and influential of Latin American novelists despite the fact that much of his work wasn’t even published while he was alive.
In contrast to other celebrated South American literary exports such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bolano wasn’t much interested in magical realism. (He accused the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, one of magical realism’s most commercially successful practitioners, of writing anemic “kitsch.”) That is not to say that Bolano’s writing was conventional or realist in any typical sense. His style is deliberately fragmented, often to frustratingly elusive effect. His body of work returns often to the same characters, themes, and incidents, which are described from different and sometimes contradictory angles and from the perspectives of a legion of interlocutors. As with Jorge Luis Borges, one of his influences, Bolano positions himself less as a storyteller of fiction than as an investigator, or curator, exposing documents from an alternate but completely real world. Like Borges, and a bit like the late, great science fiction writer Gene Wolfe (who, like Bolano, trafficked heavily in unreliable narrators), Bolano’s literary documents are “real” but imbued with a powerful mood of enigma and mystery.
The first of his two best-known novels, The Savage Detectives (1998, published in English in 2007), concerns two itinerant poets who found a literary school they dub “visceral realism.” One of the poets is Arturo Belano, an alter ego whose bohemian 20th-century life has certain parallels with Bolano’s. The Savage Detectives is a kind of investigation into the poets’ lives and rippling influence, told through accounts from their imagined contemporaries.
Published in 2004 from a manuscript Bolano finished shortly before he died, 2666 is even more audacious: a 1,000-page novel with a dizzying number of characters, fragmented into numerous sections and arcs. The novel’s ostensible subject is femicide in Santa Teresa, a fictional Mexican city based on Juarez, which is notorious for the unsolved murders of women. When the novel was released in English in 2008, American critics described it as a masterpiece.
The posthumous arrival of previously unpublished Bolano manuscripts has since become something of a trope. “It mightn’t be long,” the writer Rob Doyle recently joked in the Guardian, “before we’re presented with Bolano: The Complete Shopping Lists or Gauchos at the Forgotten Library: Selected Email Drafts.” Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas (Penguin Press, Feb. 16) is the latest entry and an example in equal measure of Bolano’s brilliance and his ability to madden and tax the reader.
The second of the three stories, “French Comedy of Horrors,” is the most conventional in storytelling structure, if not subject, and the most accessible and engaging as a standalone novella. The narrator is Diodorus Pilon, a 17-year-old aspiring poet in French Guiana. While walking alone at night after an evening socializing with his artistic circle, he passes a public telephone that starts ringing. He answers. A mysterious caller says he is an emissary of the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of surrealists based in the Parisian sewers. The group, a fringe faction of radical surrealists opposed to what they view as the mediocrity and compromise of mainstream surrealism, is considering inducting him into its membership, but only if he can swear to a code of secrecy and complete artistic purity. “French Comedy of Horrors” is, we come to realize, both a meditation on surrealism and a clever and delightful homage.
The other two novellas, “Cowboy Graves” and “Fatherland,” are longer, more difficult, and perhaps better reserved for Bolano completists. The partly autobiographical “Cowboy Graves” is told from the perspective of Bolano’s alter ego, Belano. The story explores his relationship with his father, his conflicted identity after his family moves from Chile to Mexico, and his decision to return to Chile to resist the Pinochet regime. The narrator is self-consciously unreliable and frequently draws his own recollections into doubt. He is also, in characteristic Bolano fashion, digressive: In one eight-page passage, he describes to a Jesuit priest a science fiction story he is writing about an invasion of Earth by ant-sized extraterrestrials. There are moments of great charm and beauty in “Cowboy Graves,” but also some agonizing tedium.
The third novella, “Fatherland,” overlaps thematically and topically with the first and with Bolano’s other works. It concerns the narrator’s attempt to track down an acquaintance from his youth, a female poet who has disappeared, presumably at the hands of the right-wing regime. One day, as a group of Chilean political prisoners watches through the window of their jail, a Third Reich warplane mysteriously appears in the sky and begins writing fragments of her poetry in trails of smoke. This is the closest this collection gets to magical realism and also perhaps its least subtle allegory, if that’s even the right word.
“Fatherland” is told in fragments, brief chapters structured as direct addresses to the reader by monologuing interlocutors or as excerpted documents: a funeral oration, a literary lecture. The unconventional approach to form is impressive and mostly effective but also sometimes frustratingly meandering and coy. The chapter I liked best, “Family Plot,” was the most plain and perhaps, for that reason, affecting:
Effects of the coup on the family unit. My mother lost her job as a math teacher at Liceo number 3 in Concepcion. My father and my mother were on speaking terms again. My brother David was arrested and beaten […]. My sister Elisenda was angry all of the time. […] My sister Elisenda stopped watching so much TV. My brother David started to train every morning in the yard […] My brother David became a Trotskyite. My sister Elisenda burned her childhood books and then cried bitterly. My father tried to make love to my mother five or six times, and the results, to judge by their faces, were not satisfactory. […] My brother David called me a faggot and a eunuch.
All in all, Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas is a mixed bag and probably not the best place for readers new to Bolano to start.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
