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

by Roberto Bolaño

  6.

  The Private Life

  of a Novelist

  Who Would Dare?

  The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place for shoplifting. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt. The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can’t remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis. I know that I was sixteen and that for a while Louÿs became my guide. Then I stole books by Max Beerbohm (The Happy Hypocrite), Champfleury, Samuel Pepys, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Rulfo and Areola, Mexican writers who at the time were still more or less practicing, and whom I might therefore meet some morning on Avenida Niño Perdido, a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I was lost at the age of sixteen. From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine — or shone — with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed. I remember the edition: it was a book with very large print, like a primary school reader, slim, hardback, with a horrendous drawing on the jacket, a hard book to steal and one that I didn’t know whether to hide under my arm or in my belt, because it showed under my truant student blazer, and in the end I carried it out in plain sight of all the clerks at the Glass Bookstore, this is one of the best ways to steal, which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story. After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a petty book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what one might expect, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasn’t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which is or was across from the Alameda, on Avenida Juárez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurai had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall, none of which I’d stolen there. Soon afterwards I left for Chile. If in Mexico I might have bumped into Rulfo and Arreola, in Chile the same was true of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, but I think the only writer I saw was Rodrigo Lira, walking fast on a night that smelled of tear gas. Then came the coup and after that I spent my time visiting the bookstores of Santiago as a cheap way of staving off boredom and madness. Unlike the Mexican bookstores, the bookstores of Santiago had no clerks, each of them was run by a single person, almost always the owner. There I bought Nicanor Parra’s Obra gruesa [Complete Works] and the Artefactos, and books by Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier that I would soon lose and that were essential reading for me; although essential isn’t the word: those books helped me breathe. But breathe isn’t the right word either. What I remember best about my visits to those bookstores are the eyes of the booksellers, which sometimes looked like the eyes of a hanged man and sometimes were veiled by a kind of film of sleep, which I now know was something else. I don’t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didn’t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man who’d been sentenced to death. The bookseller was standing in a corner, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and he had a prominent Adam’s apple that quivered as he spoke. I said it didn’t seem right. What condemned men are we talking about? I asked. The bookseller looked at me and said that he knew for certain of more than one novelist capable of recommending his own books to a man on the verge of death. Then he said that we were talking about desperate readers. I’m hardly qualified to judge, he said, but if I don’t, no one will. What book would you give to a condemned man? he asked me. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know either, said the bookseller, and I think it’s terrible. What books do desperate men read? What books do they like? How do you imagine the reading room of a condemned man? he asked. I have no idea, I said. You’re young, I’m not surprised, he said. And then: it’s like Antarctica. Not like the North Pole, but like Antarctica. I was reminded of the last days of Arthur Gordon Pym, but I decided not to say anything. Let’s see, said the bookseller, who would have the audacity to drop this novel on the lap of a man sentenced to death? He picked up a book that had done fairly well and then he tossed it on a pile. I paid him and left. When I turned to leave, the bookseller might have laughed or sobbed. As I stepped out I heard him say: What kind of arrogant bastard would dare to do such a thing? And then he said something else, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

  The Private Life of a Novelist

  My literary kitchen is often an empty room, without even a window. Of course, I’d like it if there were something in it, a lamp, some books, a faint scent of courage, but the truth is that there’s nothing.

  And yet sometimes, when I succumb to irrepressible bouts of optimism (which lead, incidentally, to terrible allergy attacks), my literary kitchen becomes a medieval castle (with a kitchen) or a New York apartment (with a kitchen and incredible views) or a hut in the foothills of the mountains (without a kitchen, but with a campfire). In these circumstances, I do what everybody does: I lose my sense of proportion and imagine I’m immortal. I don’t mean immortal in literary terms, because you’d have to be an idiot to believe that, but literally immortal, like dogs and children and good citizens who have yet to fall ill. Fortunately or unfortunately, every bout of optimism has a beginning and an end. If it didn’t, it would become a political calling. Or a religious declaration. And from there it’s just a short step to burying books (I won’t say “burning books” because that would be an exaggeration). In my case, at least, the truth is that these bouts of optimism come to an end, and with them goes the literary kitchen, which vanishes into thin air, and all that’s left is my convalescent self and a faint smell of dirty pots, unscraped plates, spoiled sauces.


  The literary kitchen, I tell myself sometimes, is ruled by taste, by which I mean that it’s a domain in which memory and ethics (or moral values, if I can call them that) play a game whose rules I don’t know. Talent and excellence watch the game, mesmerized, but they don’t take part. Daring and bravery do take part, but only at certain moments, which is to say not often. Suffering takes part, pain takes part, death takes part, but on the condition that they don’t take the game seriously. They’re just playing to be polite.

  Much more important than the literary kitchen is the literary library (if you’ll excuse the redundancy). A library is much more comfortable than a kitchen. A library is like a church, whereas a kitchen gradually begins to resemble a morgue. Reading, said Gil de Biedma, is more natural than writing. I would add (redundancy aside) that it’s also much healthier, no matter what the ophthalmologists say. In fact, literature is a long struggle from redundancy to redundancy, until the final redundancy.

  If I had to choose a literary kitchen to move into for a week, I would choose one that belonged to a woman writer, so long as that writer wasn’t Chilean. I would live very happily in Silvina Ocampo’s kitchen, or Alexandra Pizarnik’s, or in the kitchen of the novelist and Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa, or of Simone de Beauvoir. Among other things, because they’re cleaner.

  Some nights I dream about my literary kitchen. It’s huge, like three soccer stadiums, with vaulted ceilings and endlessly long tables at which all the living beings on earth crowd together, the extinct and those soon to be extinct; it’s unevenly lit, in some places with anti-aircraft searchlights and in others with torches, and naturally there are plenty of dark sections where all that can be glimpsed are yearning or menacing shadows, and big screens on which, out of the corner of your eye, you can see silent films or slideshows, and in the dream or nightmare I stroll around my literary kitchen and occasionally I fire up a stove and make myself a fried egg, sometimes even a piece of toast. And then I wake up feeling utterly exhausted.

  I don’t know what you should do in a literary kitchen, but I do know what you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t plagiarize. Plagiarists deserve to be hanged in the public square. Swift said so, and Swift, as everybody knows, was always right.

  Just so we’re clear on this point: no one should plagiarize, unless he wants to be hanged in the public square. Although today plagiarists aren’t hanged. In fact, they’re given scholarships, prizes, public office, and if very lucky, they become bestsellers and opinion makers. What a strange and ugly term: opinion makers. I suppose it means the same thing as shepherd, or spiritual guide of slaves, or poet laureate, or father of the nation, or mother of the nation, or uncle-by-marriage of the nation.

  In my ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior, whom some voices (disembodied voices, voices that cast no shadow) call a writer. This warrior is always fighting. He knows that in the end, no matter what he does, he’ll be defeated. But he still roams the literary kitchen, which is built of cement, and faces his opponent without begging for mercy or granting it.

  Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories

  Now that I’m forty-four, I have some advice to offer on the art of writing short stories. 1) Never tackle stories one by one. Really, if you tackle them one by one you could be writing the same story until the day you die. 2) It’s best to write stories three at a time, or five at a time. If you’ve got the energy, write them nine at a time, or fifteen at a time. 3) Careful: the temptation to write them in twos is as dangerous as deciding to write them one by one — it conceals the rather sticky game of mirrors in love, which yields melancholic reflections. 4) You must read Quiroga, you must read Felisberto Hernández, you must read Borges. You must read Rulfo and Monterroso. A short-story writer with any respect at all for his work will never read Cela or Umbral. He’ll read Cortázar and Bioy Casares, but by no means Cela and Umbral. 5) Let me repeat, in case it’s not clear: Cela and Umbral must be avoided like the plague. 6) A short-story writer must be brave. Sad to say, but it’s true. 7) Short-story writers often boast of having read Petrus Borel. In fact, short-story writers are notorious imitators of Petrus Borel. Big mistake: they should imitate the way Petrus Borel dresses! But the truth is they hardly know anything about Petrus Borel! Or about Gautier, or Nerval! 8) Let’s make a deal. Read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel, but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob, especially Marcel Schwob, and after that Alfonso Reyes, and then Borges. 9) The honest truth is that if we read Edgar Allan Poe that would be more than enough. 10) Consider that ninth point. Consider and reflect. It’s not too late. You must consider point number nine. If possible: on your knees. 11) Highly recommended books and authors: On the Sublime, by Longinus; the sonnets of brave, ill-fated Philip Sidney, whose biographer was Lord Brooke; the Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters; Suicidios ejemplares [Exemplary Suicides], by Enrique Vila-Matas; and While the Women Are Sleeping, by Javier Marías. 12) Read these books and also read Chekhov and Raymond Carver. One of the two of them is the best short-story writer this century has produced.

  About The Savage Detectives

  There are some nice things — not many — about finishing a novel, and one of them is beginning to forget it, remembering a dream or a nightmare that gradually fades so that we can face new books, new days, without the constant reminder of what in all likelihood we could have done better and didn’t. Kafka, this century’s best writer, showed the way when he asked a friend to burn all his work. He assigned the task to Brod, on the one hand, and also to Dora, his lover. Brod was a writer and he didn’t keep his promise. Dora was less educated and she may have loved Kafka more, and one presumes that she carried out her lover’s request to the letter. All writers, especially on the flat day, which is the day after, or what we vainly believe is the day after, have two devils or angels inside called Brod and Dora. One is always bigger than the other. Usually Brod is bigger or more powerful than Dora. Not in my case. Dora is considerably bigger than Brod, and Dora helps me forget what I’ve written so that I can write something new, with no pangs of shame or regret. So The Savage Detectives is more or less forgotten. I can only venture a few thoughts about it. On the one hand I think I see it as a response, one of many, to Huckleberry Finn; the Mississippi of The Savage Detectives is the flow of voices in the second part of the novel. It’s also the more or less faithful transcription of a segment of the life of the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, whose friend I was lucky enough to be. In this sense the novel tries to reflect a kind of generational defeat and also the happiness of a generation, a happiness that at times delineated courage and the limits of courage. To say that I’m permanently indebted to the work of Borges and Cortázar is obvious. I believe there are as many ways to read my novel as there are voices in it. It can be read as a deathbed lament. It can also be read as a game.

  The End: “Distant Star”

  (Interview with Mónica Maristain)

  On the lackluster literature scene in the Spanish-speaking world, a space where young writers turn up every day who care more about collecting grants than about contributing anything to artistic creation, the figure of a lean man stands out, blue backpack at the ready, huge glasses, eternal cigarette in hand, and subtle irony delivered rapid-fire.

  Roberto Bolaño, born in Chile in 1953, is the best thing that’s happened to the craft of writing in a long time. Since his monumental novel The Savage Detectives, perhaps the great contemporary Mexican novel, brought him fame and garnered him the Herralde Prize (1998) and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1999)
, he has continued to grow in influence and stature. Everything he says (with pointed humor and exquisite intelligence), and everything he writes (at great poetic risk and with deep creative commitment, his pen unerring) merits the attention of those who admire him, and, of course, of those who detest him.

  The author, who appears as a character in the novel Soldiers of Salamis, by Javier Cercas, and who is paid homage in Jorge Volpi’s latest novel, El fin de la locura [The End of Madness], is, like all brilliant men, a divisive figure, someone who inspires antipathy despite his gentle nature and despite his voice, somewhere between high-pitched and hoarse, in which he tells Playboy that he can’t write a story for the magazine because he’s still working on his next novel, which is already 900 pages long and will be about the killings of women in Ciudad Juárez.

  Roberto Bolaño lives in Blanes, Spain, and he’s very sick. He hopes that a liver transplant will give him the strength to live with the intensity lauded by those fortunate enough to know him personally. These people, his friends, say that when he’s writing he sometimes forgets to go to doctors’ appointments.

  At fifty, this man — who backpacked across Latin America, who escaped the clutches of Pinochet’s regime because one of his jailors was once a classmate, who lived in Mexico, who met the militants of the Farabundo Martí (future assassins of Roque Dalton) in El Salvador, who was a watchman at a campground in Catalonia, a seller of costume jewelry in Europe, and always a pilferer of good books, because reading demands action, not just attitude — has changed the course of Latin American literature. And he’s done it suddenly and without begging anyone’s leave.