Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations

by Roberto Bolaño

  González Rodríguez felt his stomach sink. Really, Roberto? he said. With my name?

  Yes, don’t worry about it, Bolaño said. His daughter, Alejandra, was playing with González Rodríguez’s friend. Bolaño looked happy. González Rodríguez didn’t know what to say.

  The next evening they met for sushi in Barcelona. This time they talked, not about Juárez but about literature. Bolaño asked if writers in Mexico still wore beards or if they’d all cut them off. At one point, he announced that he and Mario Santiago had officially dissolved the Infrarealist movement in Paris in 1992. He’s crazy, González Rodríguez thought. He thinks that the only Infrarealists who matter are him and Santiago.

  Shortly after this visit, Bolaño published the essay “Sergio González Rodríguez Under the Hurricane,” which declared his affection and admiration for the journalist and sang the praises of his book. González Rodríguez’s “technical help in the writing of my novel,” he wrote, “has been substantial.” And Huesos en el desierto is “not only an imperfect photograph—how could it be anything else—of evil and of corruption; it also transforms itself into a metaphor of Mexico and of Mexico’s past and of the uncertain future of all of Latin America.”

  Seven months later, on July 1, 2003, Bolaño was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona. Two weeks later, he died.

  When 2666 was released in Mexico in 2004, González Rodríguez could barely bring himself to read it. “It took me months to read the section about the dead women,” he says. “It terrified me. To live through it is one thing, but to see it told by a great literary master like Bolaño isn’t funny. Roberto is crazier than a goat, you understand? You can’t believe it because in some way you’re there.”

  As a reporter, González Rodríguez had cultivated a critical distance that helped him ignore how easily he could be attacked again. Finding in 2666 a character with his name pinioned to a world of killers and cover-ups shattered that illusion. At one point Bolaño even describes a kidnapping exactly like the 1999 attack on González Rodríguez, except that it ends in death. It’s not clear whether the reporter who dies is the character “Sergio González.”

  Such pointed mind games aside, any Mexican journalist writing about cartels or corruption would have felt vulnerable in 2004. That year, five investigative reporters were killed or disappeared in Mexico. One of them was shot to death in front of his two young children. According to a report put out by Reporters Without Borders in 2007, Mexico has become the second-most dangerous place in the world for journalists, the first being Iraq. Alejandro Junco de la Vega, the president of Grupo Reforma, told an audience at Columbia University in October 2008 that his three newspapers no longer run bylines, in order to protect their journalists. “We find ourselves under the siege of drug lords, criminals,” he explained, “and the more we expose their activities, the harder they push back.” Junco himself has moved his entire family to “a safe haven in the US.”

  So it may be a coincidence that the same year 2666 was published, González Rodríguez decided to stop traveling to Juárez. He’d heard there was a bounty on his head in the state of Chihuahua. Suits alleging slander had been filed, and he risked being jailed the moment he set foot in the state. Given these maneuvers, his lawyers recommended that he not enter Chihuahua under any circumstances. (It wasn’t until April 2007 that President Felipe Calderón signed a federal law that decriminalized defamation and “insults,” and obliged state governments to do the same.) The last time González Rodríguez visited, nobody wanted to talk about what was going on. It had become a city of closed doors.

  Neither Huesos nor 2666 is an easy book to read. I was plagued by nightmares as I read both of them. Their pages are like freshly dug graves, but they are shadowed by different philosophies of evil. In Huesos, Juárez is a casualty of rampant corruption. When cops and courts look the other way, González Rodríguez believes, brutal acts become ordinary events. The rape and murder of women, the assassination of journalists, the kidnapping of people for ransom: none of these crimes are page-one news in Mexico anymore. “A malevolent person, like a serial killer, can unleash a kind of sweeping effect,” González Rodríguez says, igniting a mechanism of extermination that rivals that of any totalitarian dictatorship. This “normalization of barbarism,” he argues, is the most serious problem facing Mexico and Latin America today.

  In the final section of 2666, “The Part About Archimboldi,” Bolaño presents a more sinister vision of evil. The section opens at the end of World War I, with a wounded Prussian’s return home. Everything is changing, a stranger tells him: “The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin. [The Prussian] answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change.” Indeed, the whole finale of 2666, which spans the First World War to the late 1990s, seems designed to prove Archimboldi’s belief that history is nothing more than a series of instants “that vie with one another in monstrousness.” As Archimboldi fights for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front and starts his career as a novelist in the ruins of Berlin, Bolaño regales us with tale after tale of rape and murder. In the hills of Germany, a man kills his wife and the authorities turn a blind eye. During the war, city folk who flee to the country are routinely robbed, raped and killed. The land around a Romanian castle is filled with buried human bones, and allusions to the Holocaust abound.

  In this landscape of brutality and impunity, Santa Teresa seems less aberrant. It’s just one of many places where an underlying, pervasive evil has welled up and broken the surface. As it is now in Santa Teresa, the novel seems to say, as it has always been, as it shall be in the cemeteries of 2666. Evil is as widespread and eternal as the sea.

  This vision of violence brings to mind America’s own apocalyptic writer, Cormac McCarthy, but Bolaño’s novel has more sex and comedy, and his hero is quite different from those in The Road or Blood Meridian. Archimboldi marches through the battlefields of Poland and Romania like a man trolling along the bottom of the sea, immersed in the deep’s dark horror yet untouched by it. As a teenager, he reads Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and is captivated by the idea of a “lay and independent” medieval knight. His own holy grail turns out to be a dead man’s diary he discovers in an abandoned shtetl.

  A lay and independent knight: these words could describe both the great detectives and the great writers who wander through the pages of 2666. All of them are loners who devote themselves to reading and swimming in the abyss. Being a writer in this world is as dangerous as being a detective, walking through a graveyard, looking at ghosts.

  “LITERATURE IS NOT MADE FROM WORDS ALONE”

  INTERVIEW BY HÉCTOR SOTO AND MATÍAS BRAVO

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN CAPITAL, SANTIAGO, DECEMBER 1999

  HÉCTOR SOTO AND MATÍAS BRAVO: What is your relationship with writers from the Latin American Boom?

  ROBERTO BOLAÑO: Good, very good—as a reader, of course. Anyway the Boom is an imprecise notion. It depends on what parameters everybody gives. Does Sábato come in or not? How about Onetti? Most people would say no. Rulfo, who for me is one of the cornerstones of the Boom, is also left out.

  Argentine writer, Ernesto Sábato (b. 1911) was a driving force in the Argentine surrealist scene. Much of his work is available in English.

  Uraguayan novelist and short story writer Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994) sought to blend the real and the fantastic in his fiction. His novella The Pit (1939) is one of the first works of modern Spanish-language literature.

  After publishing the short story collection The Burning Plain (1953) and the novel Pedro Párama (1955), Mexican author Juan Rulfo (1917–1986) stopped publishing narrative fiction, despite the enormous critical success of his books. Both Faulkner and García Márquez were influenced by Rulfo’s prose.

  Born in Honduras, raised in Guatemala, and eventually exiled to Mexico, Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) was a deeply respected short story writer. His story “The Dinosaur” is said to be literature’s shortest story. In full, it reads: “When he woke up
, the dinosaur was still there.” His Complete Works and Other Stories (1995) is available in English.

  HS/MB: Perhaps the emblematic figures of the movement were too adored, an injustice for quieter figures like Monterroso and Onetti, who are vindicated more and more. They’ve stayed relevant with the passage of time.

  RB: I don’t believe so. The literature of Vargas Llosa or García Márquez is gigantic.

  HS/MB: A cathedral.

  RB: More than a cathedral. I do not think time will harm them. The work of Vargas Llosa, for example, is immense. It has thousands of entry points and thousands of exit points. So does the literature of García Márquez. They’re both public figures. They’re not just literary figures. Vargas Llosa was a candidate for president. García Márquez is a political heavyweight and very influential in Latin America. This distorts things a bit, but it shouldn’t make us lose sight of the position they have in the hierarchy. They are superiors, superior to the people who came after and, to be sure, to the writers of my generation. Books such as No One Writes to the Colonel are simply perfect.

  No One Writes to the Colonel is a García Márquez novella.

  HS/MB: Since you read the Boom during its own time, your reading must have been from the perspective of a poet. During that period, you were only writing poetry.

  RB: Yes, but I read plenty of narrative work, although it’s clear that my readings were from the perspective of a poet, which is a shame in a sense. If my reading had been from a narrator’s perspective, I would have probably learned more. Perhaps I have gaps in the way I look at the internal structures of a novel. I would have learned this sooner had I read with a different perspective.

  HS/MB: I have the impression that you compose small plots, which you then fit into the overall novel, although it isn’t so clear whether you do it with a preconceived idea of what the work will eventually be.

  RB: I always have an idea. Each time I begin to write a novel, I have a very elaborate structure in mind.

  HS/MB: Very elaborate, yes. But it does not prevent each of your phrases, given the rhythm and inflection you infuse them with, from being justified, though not always in the service of the novel’s unfolding plot.

  RB: Well, I think that’s something else. It relates to the elemental debt all prose writers have, which consists of cleaning a bit, trying to get close to language with open eyes and ears. I appreciate your words very much, but I don’t assign great relevance to hygienic definitions of my work. I’m very demanding in that sense. Without going any further than Savage Detectives, there are phrases and whole paragraphs in it that seem to me to be very bad. They seem terrible to me.

  HS/MB: Your books are distinct approximations of a particular world, a world of writers and rather marginal people who are in between being obsessives and losers. Your stories and novels also center around the same situations or the same characters.

  RB: Also around the same arguments.

  HS/MB: Exactly. Your characters are crusaders for revolutionizing art and changing the world, which is the project of your generation.

  RB: Revolutionizing art and changing life were the objectives of Rimbaud’s project. And reinventing love. At heart, to make life a work of art.

  HS/MB: But you are a part of the world that you describe, and you look affectionately toward it.

  RB: Perhaps I’ve been attempting to forgive myself.

  HS/MB: You’re not an apologist for the project or rhapsodic about it, but you’re not a gravedigger, or a critic.

  RB: I’m a survivor. I feel enormous affection toward this project, notwithstanding its excesses, immoderations and deviations. The project is hopelessly romantic, essentially revolutionary, and it has seen the failure of many groups and generations of artists. Though, even now, our conception of art in the West is indebted to this vision.

  HS/MB: If there is a concept that has been devalued in this era, it is that of revolution.

  RB: The truth for me—and I want to be very sincere—is that the idea of revolution had already been devalued by the time I was twenty years old. At that age, I was a Trotskyite and what I saw in the Soviet Union was a counterrevolution. I never felt I had the support of the movement of history. To the contrary, I felt quite crushed. I think that’s noticeable in the characters in The Savage Detectives.

  HS/MB: At some point in your life, we imagined that you were animated by great revolutionary ardor.

  RB: You imagined it correctly. I was against everything. Against New York and Moscow, against London and Havana, against Paris and Beijing. I even felt scared by the solitude entailed in radicalism.

  HS/MB: Does your sense of having survived come from that?

  RB: No, I feel like a survivor in a more literal sense. I am not dead. I say it like that because many of my friends have died, from armed revolutionary struggle, drug overdose, or AIDS. Although some who survived are now illustrious and famous celebrities of Spanish letters.

  HS/MB: Writers are always asked for their inspiration and today will not be an exception. Some are inspired more from life, while others more from literature.

  RB: In what concerns me, both.

  HS/MB: Notwithstanding that, you are an extremely literary writer—to put it one way.

  A: Well, if I had to choose one of the two things, and God pray that I never have to choose, I would choose literature. If I were offered a great library or an Inter-Rail ticket to Vladivostok, I would keep the library, without the slightest doubt. Besides, with the library, my trip would be much longer.

  HS/MB: Like Borges, you have lived through your reading.

  RB: In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.

  HS/MB: Nevertheless, literature is not purely a sanctuary for good sentiment. It is also a refuge for hatefulness and resentment.

  RB: I accept that. But it’s indisputable that there are good sentiments in it. I think Borges said that a good writer is normally a good person. It must have been Borges because he said practically everything. Good writers who are bad people are the exception. I can think only of one.

  HS/MB: Who?

  RB: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer and son of a bitch. Just an abject human being. It’s incredible that the coldest moments of his abjection are covered under an aura of nobility, which is only attributable to the power of words.

  HS/MB: Between Latin American and Spanish writers, where is your literary brotherhood?

  RB: Basically among the Latin Americans—but also among the Spaniards. I don’t believe in the separation of Latin American and Spanish writers. We all inhabit the same language. At least I think I cross those frontiers. And in my generation there is a mixed nucleus of writers, Spaniards and Latin Americans, the same way they were mixed in another era of Modernism, possibly the most revolutionary movement in Spanish literature of this century. Because of his strength, I think someone like Javier Marías is forced to influence Latin American literature, and he does. He is a great writer. By the same token, young Spanish writers should be influenced by someone like Rodrigo Rey Rosa or Juan Villoro, two enormous writers. I am extraordinarily blessed by a photograph of all of us together, from this and that side of the Atlantic: Rey Rosa, Villoro, Marías, Vila-Matas, Belén Gopegui, Victoria de Stefano.

  Spanish novelist, critic, and columnist Javier Marías (b. 1951) is one of the most respected contemporary Spanish writers in the world. Eleven of his books have been translated into English, including the acclaimed “Your Face Tomorrow” series.

  Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958) is a Guatemalan short story writer and novelist. Paul Bowles translated many of Rey Rosa’s works into English.

  A Mexican writer and journalist, Juan Villoro (b. 1956) was highly praised by Bolaño. In a television interview Bolaño claimed Villoro’s work was “opening up the path of the new Spanish novel of the m
illennium.” Currently no full English translations are available, but excerpts from El Testigo (2004) have appeared in various journals including The Quarterly Conversation and Common Knowledge. His short story “Among Friends” was published in the journal n+1 (Issue 8).

  A Spanish novelist and friend of Bolaño’s, Enrique Vila-Matas (b. 1948) is a force in contemporary Spanish literature. He is the author of over twenty-five works. His novels have just begun to be translated to English, including Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady.

  Spanish novelist and screenwriter, Belén Gopegui (b. 1940) has won many Spanish language literary awards for her fiction. An English translation of The Scale of Maps will be available in 2010.

  Born in Italy, Victoria de Stefano (b. 1940) moved to Venezuela in 1946. She has authored a number of novels and essay collections. Her work is not currently available in English.

  Writer of the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) was a prominent poet and politician. Much of his work is concerned with wordplay and metaphor.

  HS/MB: Is it disturbing to think we have read many of our gods (James, Stendhal, Proust) in translation, in second-hand versions? Is that literature? If we spin the matter around, it’s possible we might end up concluding that words don’t have an equivalent.

  RB: I think they do. Furthermore, literature is not made from words alone. Borges says that there are untranslatable writers. I think he uses Quevedo as an example. We could add García Lorca and others. Notwithstanding that, a work like Don Quijote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it—bad translation, incomplete and ruined—any version of Quijote would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature. We may lose a lot along the way. Without a doubt. But perhaps that was its destiny. Come what may.