Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  A little more than two hundred years ago the sage of the venerable city of Göttingen wrote the following: “On the night of February 9, 1799, I dreamed that while on a journey I was eating at an inn, or rather a roadside shack, where they were playing dice. Sitting across from me was a fresh-faced young man who seemed a bit dissipated and who, without paying any attention to the people around him, whether seated or standing, was eating his soup; nonetheless, he tossed every second or third spoonful into the air, caught it again in his spoon, and swallowed it calmly. What I find so singular about this dream is that it inspired my habitual remark: that such things cannot be invented, only seen (by which I mean that no novelist would ever have come up with the idea); and yet I had just invented it myself. At the table where they were playing dice, a tall, thin woman sat knitting. I asked her what could be won at this game, and she answered: Nothing! When I asked her whether anything could be lost, she said: No! The game struck me as very important.”

  This passage — must it be said? — foreshadows Kafka and much of twentieth-century literature. It also sums up the Enlightenment, and upon it a culture could be founded. It anticipates the philosopher’s own death, on February 24 or fourteen days after the dream, as if death had paid Lichtenberg a visit two weeks before their final encounter. And how does our philosopher respond when visited by the withered old crone? He responds with humor and curiosity, the two most important components of intelligence.

  SERGIO PITOL

  For a few months now, Tríptico del Carnaval [Carnival Triptych] (Anagrama), a three-volume set by the enigmatic and often unclassifiable Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, has been in bookstores. Why enigmatic? Because Pitol — unlike Carlos Fuentes and others writers of his generation who enjoyed the fruits of the Boom — always held himself a little apart, whether in terms of his work, unsurpassed in Mexico and on a par with that of a select few in the Spanish language, or his reading habits: one mustn’t forget that we owe Pitol the translation of a memorable novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, The Gates of Paradise, and his always astute readings of Witold Gombrowicz.

  His remoteness, punctuated by multiple trips and global wanderings, or his presence, suddenly revealed to us as absence, has yielded a figure that, while admired by the few of us fortunate enough to boast of a close acquaintance with his work, is at the same time unfamiliar to most, a giant shadow acknowledged to possess certain merits but avoided like a hedgehog in the middle of the road. And yet, in my opinion Pito is superior to Salvador Elizondo or García Ponce, for example, two Mexican novelists who also scarcely register on most people’s lists.

  Tríptico del Carnaval comprises El desfile del amor [The Parade of Love] (awarded the Premio Herralde in 1984), a vast Mexican labyrinth that continually reconstructs itself as a crime novel and as historic impossibility; Domar a la divina garza [Taming the Sacred Heron], a glimpse of hell and a display of the Pitolian sense of humor; and La vida conyugal [Conjugal Life], a reflection on reality and writing that’s also not lacking in humor — like all of Pitol’s work, incidentally.

  It goes without saying but it must be said: Pitol, who is now sixty-six, continues to be a rebel and a brave man.

  THE INCREDIBLE CÉSAR AIRA

  If there’s currently a writer who defies all classification that writer is César Aira, from Coronel Pringles, Argentina, a city in the province of Buenos Aires that I have no choice but to accept as real, though it sounds invented by Aira, its most illustrious son, an exceptionally perceptive chronicler of mothers (a verbal mystery) and fathers (a geometric certainty), and a man whose position in contemporary literature in Spanish is as complicated as the position of Macedonio Fernández was at the turn of the century.

  To begin with, it must be said that Aira has written one of the five best stories I can remember. It’s called “Cecil Taylor” and it’s collected in an anthology of Argentine literature edited by Juan Forn. Aira is also the author of four memorable novels: How I Became A Nun, which tells the story of his childhood; Ema, la cautiva [Emma the Captive], which describes the luxury of the Indians of the pampa; The Literary Conference, which recounts an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes; and El llanto [The Weeping], which retails a kind of epiphany or insomnia.

  Of course, these aren’t his only novels. I’m told that Aira writes no fewer than two books a year, books that are sometimes published by the small Argentine publishing house Beatriz Viterbo, named after the Borges character in “The Aleph.” The few books that I’ve been able to find were published by Mondadori and Tusquets Argentina. It’s too bad, because once you’ve read Aira, you don’t want to stop. His novels are like stagings of Gombrowicz’s theories, with one fundamental difference: the Pole was the abbot of some plush imaginary monastery, whereas Aira is a nun or novice of the Discalced Sisters of the Word. Sometimes he’s reminiscent of Roussel (a Roussel on his knees in the red tub), but the only contemporary writer to whom he can be compared is the Barcelonan Enrique Vila-Matas.

  Aira is an eccentric, but he’s also one of the three or four best Spanish-language writers alive today.

  MEMORIES OF JUAN VILLORO

  A new story collection by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro, La casa pierde [The House Loses] (Alfaguara), has just hit the shelves of bookstores in Spain, ten excellent stories invested with Villoro’s rare power not to look into the abyss but to teeter for a long time on its brink, to teeter and thereby make us, his readers, teeter, in a kind of half-sleep or perhaps a state of heightened clarity.

  The first time I met Villoro was at the Universidad Autonoma of Mexico, at an awards ceremony. He had received second prize for a short story and I had received third prize for poetry. Villoro was sixteen or seventeen and I was three years older. My memories of that day are mostly hazy. I remember a tall, eager adolescent. I don’t know whether back then he had a beard yet or not, maybe not, although in my mind I see him with a beard, talking to me for a few minutes, neither of us paying much attention to the other, neither of us contemplating the future, a future that was beginning to open up before us, though not like a curtain parting or like a sudden vision but like a metal garage door that rises with a clatter, neither cleanly nor harmoniously. This is it. This is what you’ve been allotted. But we didn’t know that and we talked about the kinds of things young writers talk about. Then more than twenty years went by and not long ago I saw him again. He’s a little taller than he was then, I think, and maybe a little thinner. His stories are much better than they were then; in fact his stories are some of the best written in Spanish today, comparable only to those of the Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

  But that isn’t the important thing, I realize, as I watch Villoro gaze at the Mediterranean. Is the important thing that we’re still alive? No, though that counts for something. The important thing is that we have our memories. The important thing is that we can still laugh and not splatter anyone with blood. The important thing is that we’re still standing and we haven’t become cowards or cannibals.

  HANNIBAL, BY THOMAS HARRIS

  Strange, this novel. It’s a bestseller, intended for a mass audience, but I wish most contemporary novelists wrote this well. Thomas Harris has read the classics of English literature. Dickens, Stevenson, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters. And he knows how to pace a story. He isn’t a great novelist. He’s a craftsman, but every once in a while it’s nice to read someone who can tackle something long without boring us to death before we get to page fifty. And Hannibal Lecter is a great character. With lapses, purple passages, even soft spots, but ultimately a great character. His views on crime are chaotic. There’s no rhyme or reason to them. But his views on pain and the brevity of life can be magnificent, and they make him a virtuous hero. The secondary characters are at once believable and implausible: in other words, they’re literature. Like ambitious Inspector Pazzi of the Florence Questura, whose fate is anticipated in a Renaissance fresco; or like Carlo, the Sardinian kidnapper who’s always chewing on a deer tooth and who smells like a pigsty; or like De
puty Mogli, gray-haired and corrupt and also brave in his own way; or like Barney, the black nurse and autodidact, a brilliant character who gives us a fuller sense if not of the literature that Harris has stored in his head then of the books from which he has profited and his capacity for observation: the relationship between Barney and Mason Verger’s lesbian sister is sketched with the delicacy and clarity of Vermeer — whose paintings, scattered in museums around the world, Barney wants to see in person at least once in his life. 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; or like Mason Verger, millionaire, pederast, martyr, and arch-villain, the only one of Lecter’s victims who survives. At once Lecter’s nemesis and the flip side of the same coin.

  MIGUEL CASADO: POET

  Miguel Casado, born in 1954, a high school teacher in Toledo, Spain, is one of my favorite poets. A while ago he sent me a poem and a letter. With some trepidation, I’ve finally decided to send you this, he wrote. Then he told me that it was his first poem in a long time. As if he’d forgotten how to write poetry, which isn’t true, though it is a difficult art, and some poets do forget or repeat themselves, or, even worse, repeat other poets. Not Casado. His untitled poem is about a trip from Toledo to Madrid to Málaga, first by bus, then by train, the parched landscape, the Madrid metro where the poet is passed by a black father and son speaking Spanish, the long line of old men who enter a public toilet one by one. All of this takes place as the traveler recalls a conversation he’d had the night before with a friend who’d flown across the Atlantic, and the plane, according to the poet’s friend, went down and the passengers started to scream in the dark, and reality thickened and thus became more real or maybe more true. At some point, the poem mentions a child crying. Elsewhere, the poet gazes out the window of the train on the outskirts of Córdoba, where it’s not sunny either. He says: The trip languishes as if all around it a void had been created. Toward the end, Norman O. Brown is quoted: “Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medallions. It does not bear the head of a man on its coins. Its true essence is iconoclasm.” The dream, Casado tells us, is collective, even when it’s impossible to say who’s dreaming. Then the train halts to switch tracks, and just there, before it reaches its geographic terminus but having long since reached its creative destination, the poem stops.

  THE RAPIER-SHARP PEN OF RODRIGO REY ROSA

  I’m an assiduous reader of Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan writer born in 1958 and a tireless traveler through the deserts of Africa and the villages of India when he’s not visiting liquid apartments, at once strange and familiar. A while ago I reread his last collection, Ningún lugar sagrado [No Sacred Place] (Seix Barral, 1998), set mostly in New York City, where Rey Rosa has lived at different times in his life. It’s a book of short stories, of which Rey Rosa is the consummate master, the best of my generation, which happens to include many excellent short-story writers.

  Rey Rosa’s prose is methodical and judicious. He doesn’t scorn an occasional flick of the whip — or rather, the distant crack of a whip we never see — or the use of camouflage. Rather than a master of endurance, he’s a shadow, a ray of lightning shooting across the space of normality. His elegance never detracts from his precision. To read him is to learn how to write and also an invitation to the pure delight of letting oneself be carried away by uncanny or fantastic stories. Until recently he lived in Guatemala and he didn’t have his own house: one day he would stay with his mother, another day with his sister, the rest of the time at friends’ houses. One night we talked on the phone for almost two hours: he’d just gotten back from Mali. Now he’s in India, writing a book that he doesn’t know whether he’ll finish or not. That’s how I like to imagine him: with no fixed address, fearless, checking in to cheap hotels, sitting at bus stations in the tropics or in chaotic airports with his laptop or a blue notebook into which his curiosity — his entomologist’s boldness — calmly unspools.

  To some, this prose — especially that of the stories of Ningún lugar sagrado — seems cold, and it probably is: a giant freezer room where words pop, alive, reborn. And then one can’t help but think about the terror unleashed in Guatemala, the depravity and the bloodshed. And one thinks about Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso, and now Rodrigo Rey Rosa, three giant writers from a small, unhappy country. And the vision that lingers in the mirror is terrible, and it’s alive.

  OSVALDO LAMBORGHINI: MARTYR

  There are books that inspire fear. Real fear. More than books they seem like time bombs or like taxidermied animals that’ll go for your throat when you’re not looking. This is a fear I’ve known only twice. The first time was long ago, in 1977 or 1978; I was reading a novella in which, on a certain page, the reader is warned that he could die at any moment. That is, he could die literally, fall to the floor and not get up. The novella was La asesina ilustrada [The Enlightened Assassin] by Enrique Vila-Matas, and as far as I know none of its readers died on the spot although many of us emerged transformed from our reading of it, conscious that something had changed forever in our relationship with literature. Along with Los dominios del lobo [The Wolf’s Haunts], Javier Marías’s first novel, La asesina ilustrada, marks the departure point for our generation.

  The second novel that’s truly frightened me (and this time the fear is much stronger, because it involves pain and humiliation instead of death) is Tadeys, the posthumous novel by Osvaldo Lamborghini. There is no crueller book. I started to read it with enthusiasm — an enthusiasm heightened by Lamborghini’s original prose (with its sentences like something out of Flemish painting and a kind of improbable Argentine or Central European pop art) and guided as well by my admiration for César Aira, Lamborghini’s disciple and literary executor as well as the author of the prologue to this unclassifiable novel — and my enthusiasm or innocence as a reader was throttled by the picture of terror that awaited me. There’s no question that it’s the most brutal book (that’s the best adjective I can come up with) that I’ve read in Spanish in this waning century. It’s incredible, a writer’s dream, but it’s impossible to read more than twenty pages at a time, unless one wants to contract an incurable illness. Naturally, I haven’t finished Tadeys, and I’ll probably die without finishing it. But I’m not giving up. Every once in a while I feel brave and I read a page. On exceptional nights I can read two.

  SARA AND STEVA

  I’ve just read a book, Art i conjuntura [Art and Conjuncture] (Di7 edició), whose subtitle, “La jove plàstica a Mallorca 1970-1978,” [Young Mallorcan Artists 1970-1978] immediately establishes the ground that its author, Jaume Reus Morro, will cover. What ground is this? At first glance, it’s the terrain of nostalgia or the history of art, a discipline that often bears a strong resemblance to entomology, but as the reader turns the pages he finds there’s more to it than that: youth’s long march, its discontents, the fluctuations of taste, the wagers on radicalism that are almost always lost, among other reasons because the odds are winner-take-all and because the young makers of such wagers don’t rig them.

  In 1977, when I was new to Barcelona, I met one of those young Mallorcans at a café on the Gran Vía. His name was Steva Terrades and he was a brilliant and radical painter. Also, it goes without saying, he was generous and curious in a way that people could only be generous and curious in those days, in a Barcelona that was the incarnation of utopian spirit. Through him I met Sara Gibert, the only Barcelonan painter of the Mallorcan group Neón de Suro. Sara, tall and thin, unpredictable and capable, with her exacting sense of humor, was the perfect archetype of the woman-mirror or the woman-razor, ungraspable and somewhat lofty.

  The two of them, Sara and Steva, introduced me to a world of painters: works by Miquel Barceló, Andreu Terrades (Steva’s twin brother), Cabot, and Mariscal shone, among those by others whose names I’ve forgotten but who are scrupulously memorialized in this book. For me, the happiness of Barcelona, the energy and unhappiness of youth, are link
ed to them: to their works, their words, cold mornings in District 5, the figure of Lola Paniagua vanishing into the night, the clouds of Baudelaire.

  MOSLEY

  A little while ago I read the latest novel by Walter Mosley (Gone Fishin’, Anagrama), Bill Clinton’s favorite thriller writer and the creator of the detective Easy Rawlins, a black man who isn’t really a detective but simply a black American, or an African-American, as the politically correct would have it, who always has the losing hand and whose story Mosley has told over the course of six novels — two of them great or very close to great — which have so far covered a long stretch of twentieth-century American history, from 1939 to the 1960s, with Easy growing older from novel to novel, and if in the first he’s a World War II veteran, a young black man from Texas who learns to kill whites in Europe, in the latest he’s a man who works hard and has only one real concern, his children. Because Easy Rawlins isn’t really a detective, he’s a smart guy who occasionally solves problems, searches for people who’ve disappeared, tries to clean up small-time messes that inevitably, a few pages in, become matters of life or death, problems that grow until they become unbearable, when the machinery of reality starts up and everything leads the reader to believe that this time Easy won’t make it out alive, among other things because he’s black and poor and there’s no political or religious power behind him, because he’s a man who can only rely on a certain amount of physical strength, decent intelligence, and nothing more. But Easy always finds his way out of the dead ends into which Mosley steers him. Bruised, battered, older and more cynical each time, he still escapes, like the protagonists of Chandler, Hammett, Jim Thompson, or Chester Himes. And his character’s ability to survive is one of the main gifts that Mosley has given us. He’s created the modern stoic. Or in other words, the classic stoic. With Easy Rawlins’s desperate and unflinching vision, he’s revitalized two genres, the hard-boiled novel and the American behaviorist novel.