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

  The fifth section deals entirely with writers and books. Again, these are occasional pieces, written on assignment, mostly prefaces and the odd review, as well as a few stray obituaries (like Camilo José Cela’s) and pieces written to celebrate the publication of a book (like “Notes on Jaime Bayly”). At the end comes what is certainly one of Bolaño’s last pieces, “Sevilla Kills Me,” a fragment of an unfinished speech that he planned to read at the first Encuentro de Escritores Latinoamericanos [Conference of Latin American Writers], organized by the publishing house Seix Barral and held in Sevilla in June 2003. Bolaño traveled to Sevilla without having finished the speech, reading instead “Los mitos de Cthulhu,” which was already written. It’s clear that if finished, “Sevilla Kills Me” would join the company of the “insufferable speeches.” Its content, in any case, makes plain the context in which one must view the back-slaps and knuckle-raps, the winks and cuffs that Bolaño deals his contemporaries, particularly the young Latin American writers who, justifiably or not, constantly cite him as an influence.

  “The Private Life of a Novelist,” the last of the sections into which this volume is divided, consists of four short pieces in which Bolaño recalls his education as a reader and reflects on his “literary kitchen,” permitting himself to offer some “advice on the art of writing stories” and providing some clues to The Savage Detectives.

  The book ends with one of the last interviews that Bolaño gave, if not the last. The interview was conducted by Mónica Maristain, for the Mexican edition of Playboy, and it came out on the day he died. Bolaño sent written answers, and claimed he’d had fun with it. The result is a kind of sketch, for which Bolaño posed with characteristic openness and irony.

  In putting together this book, it was necessary to overcome some scruples about doing so without the express consent of the writer. But, as we’ve seen, Bolaño himself more than once announced his intention of preparing a collection of his journalistic pieces, which provides an initial alibi for proceeding in his stead. There’s room nevertheless, for reasonable doubt as to which pieces Bolaño might or might not have decided to include, what his selection criteria might have been, and how he might have ordered the pieces. In these matters there’s no guidance to be had, so an attempt has been made to proceed as neutrally as possible, without relinquishing minimal standards of organization. There has been no “censorship,” nor were any pieces automatically ruled out (with the exception, previously noted, of those published in Catalan that couldn’t be located in the original version). Another matter are the undiscovered pieces that will doubtless surface here and there once this volume has been published. There are unlikely to be many of them. In any case, this volume isn’t defined by its zeal for exhaustiveness, particularly since it was decided at the outset not to reprint a number of very old pieces, published during the years when Bolaño lived in Mexico. To include them in this volume would have meant disrupting the notable harmony of the elements of which it is presently composed. Also, there was some hurry to get these pieces into readers’ hands. This haste was motivated by a wish that they be read while the memory of the writer was still fresh, and as I write these lines, a year has not yet passed since his death.

  At the end of the volume, the source for each piece is provided, along with a few explanatory notes. It can be seen here that only in exceptional cases, when a piece is of particular interest, has it been included without definite proof of publication. Our aim has been simply to gather Bolaño’s scattered writings, not to provide a place for unpublished pieces, or to pretend to make inroads into his posthumous body of work, which is immense.

  At this point, it seems unnecessary to justify our choice of title — he chose it. All of the collected pieces were written by Roberto Bolaño during pauses in his incessant creative labors, or “between parentheses,” and that urgency inevitably shines through in this volume, most of its pieces written in the course of the writer’s increasingly desperate struggle with death to finish the monumental 2666, which will surely confirm him as an utterly exceptional novelist, an essential figure.

  We began by saying that this volume amounts to something like a personal cartography of Roberto Bolaño and comes closest, of everything he wrote, to being a kind of fragmented “autobiography.” That the pieces it contains are — as the author stressed — of a “basically literary” nature, doesn’t contradict this assertion. Borges boasted more about the books he’d read than the ones he’d written. In the “self-portrait” at the start of this volume, Bolaño, assiduous reader of Borges, claims to be “much happier reading than writing.”

  “Criticism is the modern form of autobiography,” says Ricardo Piglia in Formas breves [Short Forms]. And he adds: “Writing fiction changes how we read, and a writer’s criticism is the secret mirror of his work.” Sergio Pitol says something similar in El arte de la fuga [The Art of Escape], a book that, like Piglia’s, bears a certain family resemblance to Between Parentheses. One might suggest other precedents for this kind of confessional writing through reading, understood as an autobiographical approach to the fiction writer, but what has been said will suffice to justify the guiding role that this book is called to play in the proper reception of Roberto Bolaño as an author whose influence in the realms of Spanish and Latin American literature has only just begun to be felt.

  Ignacio Echevarría

  Barcelona, May 2004

  Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I’m at the end of my strength.

  Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

  Preface: Self-Portrait

  I was born in 1953, the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died. In 1973 I was detained for eight days by the military, which had staged a coup in my country, and in the gym where the political prisoners were held I found an English magazine with pictures of Dylan Thomas’s house in Wales. I had thought that Dylan Thomas died poor, but the house looked wonderful, almost like a fairytale cottage in the woods. There was no story about Stalin. But that night I dreamed of Stalin and Dylan Thomas: the two of them were at a bar in Mexico City, sitting at a little round table, a table for arm wrestling, but instead of wrestling they were competing to see who could hold his liquor better. The Welsh poet was drinking whiskey and the Soviet dictator was drinking vodka. As the dream went on, however, I was the only one who seemed to feel queasier and queasier, ever closer to the verge of nausea. Well there you have the story of my birth. As for my books, I should say that I’ve published five collections of poetry, one book of short stories, and seven novels. Almost no one has read my poems, which is probably a good thing. My books of prose have some loyal readers, probably undeservedly. In Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic] (1984), written in collaboration with Antoni García Porta, I talk about violence. In The Skating Rink (1993), I talk about beauty, which is fleeting and usually meets a disastrous end. In Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), I talk about the pathos and grandeur of the writing career. In Distant Star (1996), I attempt a very modest approximation of absolute evil. In The Savage Detectives (1998), I talk about adventure, which is always unexpected. In Amulet (1999), I try to give the reader the impassioned voice of a Uruguayan woman who should have been born in ancient Greece. I omit my third novel, Monsieur Pain, whose plot is indecipherable. Though I’ve lived in Europe for more than twenty years, my only nationality is Chilean, w
hich in no way prevents me from feeling deeply Spanish and Latin American. In my life I’ve lived in three countries: Chile, Mexico, and Spain. I’ve worked at every job in the world, except the three or four that anybody with a little pride would turn down. My wife is Carolina López* and my son is Lautaro Bolaño. They’re both Catalan. In Catalonia, I learned the difficult art of tolerance. I’m much happier reading than writing.

  *In March 2001, after this piece was written, Alexandra, the second child of Carolina and Roberto, was born.

  I.

  Three Insufferable Speeches

  The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom

  It’s odd that it was bourgeois writers who transported José Hernández’s Martín Fierro to the center of the Argentine canon. The point is debatable, of course, but the truth is that Fierro, the gaucho, paradigm of the dispossessed, of the brave man (but also of the thug), presides over a canon, the Argentine canon, that only keeps getting stranger. As a poem, Martín Fierro is nothing out of this world. As a novel, however, it’s alive, full of meanings to explore, which means that the wind still gusts (or blasts) through it, it still smells of the out-of-doors, it still cheerfully accepts the blows of fate. Nevertheless, it’s a novel of freedom and squalor, not of good breeding and manners. It’s a novel about bravery rather than intelligence, let alone morality.

  If Martín Fierro dominates Argentine literature and its place is in the center of the canon, the work of Borges, probably the greatest writer born in Latin America, is only a footnote.

  It’s odd that Borges wrote so much and so well about Martín Fierro. Not just the young Borges, who can be nationalistic at times, if only on the page, but also the adult Borges, who is occasionally thrown into ecstasies (strange ecstasies, as if he were contemplating the gestures of the Sphinx) by the four most memorable scenes in Hernández’s work, and who sometimes even writes perfect, listless stories with plots imitative of Hernández’s. When Borges recalls Hernández, it’s not with the affection and admiration with which he refers to Güiraldes, or with the surprise and resignation evoked by Evaristo Carriego, that familiar bogeyman. With Hernández, or with Martín Fierro, Borges seems to be acting, acting to perfection, in fact, but in a play that strikes him from the beginning as not so much odious as wrongheaded. And yet, odious or wrongheaded, it also seems to him inevitable. In this sense, his silent death in Geneva is highly eloquent. More than eloquent. In fact, his death in Geneva talks a blue streak.

  With Borges alive, Argentine literature becomes what most readers think of as Argentine literature. That is: there’s Macedonio Fernández, who at times resembles the Valéry of Buenos Aires; there’s Güiraldes, who’s rich and ailing; there’s Ezequiel Martínez Estrada; there’s Marechal, who later turns Peronist; there’s Mujica Láinez; there’s Bioy Casares, who writes Latin America’s first and best fantastic novel, though all the writers of Latin America rush to deny it; there’s Bianco; there’s Mallea, the pedant; there’s Silvina Ocampo; there’s Sábato; there’s Cortázar, best of them all; there’s Roberto Arlt, most hard done by. When Borges dies, everything suddenly comes to an end. It’s as if Merlin had died, though Buenos Aires’ literary circles aren’t exactly Camelot. Gone, most of all, is the reign of balance. Apollonian intelligence gives way to Dionysian desperation. Sleep, an often hypocritical, false, accommodating, cowardly sleep, becomes nightmare, a nightmare that’s often honest, loyal, brave, a nightmare that operates without a safety net, but a nightmare in the end, and, what’s worse, a literary nightmare, literary suicide, a literary dead end.

  And yet with the passage of the years it’s fair to ask whether the nightmare, or the skin of the nightmare, is really as radical as its exponents proclaimed. Many of them live much better than I do. In this sense, I can say that I’m an Apollonian rat and they’re starting to look more and more like angora or Siamese cats neatly deflead by a collar labeled Acme or Dionysius, which at this point in history amounts to the same thing.

  Regrettably, Argentine literature today has three reference points. Two are public. The third is secret. All three are in some sense reactions against Borges. All three ultimately represent a step backward and are conservative, not revolutionary, although all three, or at least two of them, have set themselves up as leftist alternatives.

  The first is the fiefdom of Osvaldo Soriano, who was a good minor novelist. When it comes to Soriano, you have to have a brain full of fecal matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can be built. I don’t mean he’s bad. As I’ve said: he’s good, he’s fun, he’s essentially an author of crime novels or something vaguely like crime novels, whose main virtue — praised at length by the always perceptive Spanish critical establishment — is his sparing use of adjectives, a restraint lost, in any case, after his fourth or fifth book. Hardly the basis for a school. Apart from Soriano’s kindness and generosity, which are said to be great, I suspect that his sway is due to sales, to his accessibility, his mass readership, although to speak of a mass readership when we’re really talking about twenty thousand people is clearly an exaggeration. What Argentine writers have learned from Soriano is that they, too, can make money. No need to write original books, like Cortázar or Bioy, or total novels, like Cortázar or Marechal, or perfect stories, like Cortázar or Bioy, and no need, especially, to squander your time and health in a lousy library when you’re never going to win a Nobel Prize anyway. All you have to do is write like Soriano. A little bit of humor, lots of Buenos Aires solidarity and camaraderie, a dash of tango, a worn-out boxer or two, an old but solid Marlowe. But, sobbing, I ask myself on my knees, solid where? Solid in heaven, solid in the toilet of your literary agent? What kind of nobody are you, anyway? You have an agent? And an Argentine agent, no less?

  If the Argentine writer answers this last question in the affirmative, we can be sure that he won’t write like Soriano but like Thomas Mann, like the Thomas Mann of Faust. Or, dizzied by the vastness of the pampa, like Goethe himself.

  The second line of descent is more complex. It begins with Roberto Arlt, though it’s likely that Arlt is totally innocent of this mess. Let’s say, to put it modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. Argentina is Israel, of course, and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem. Arlt is born and lives a rather short life, dying at forty-two, if I’m not mistaken. He’s a contemporary of Borges. Borges is born in 1899 and Arlt in 1900. But unlike Borges, Arlt grows up poor, and as an adolescent he goes to work instead of to Geneva. Arlt’s most frequently held job was as a reporter, and it’s in the light of the newspaper trade that one views many of his virtues, as well as his defects. Arlt is quick, bold, malleable, a born survivor, but he’s also an autodidact, though not an autodidact in the sense that Borges was: Arlt’s apprenticeship proceeds in disorder and chaos, through the reading of terrible translations, in the gutter rather than the library. Arlt is a Russian, a character out of Dostoyevsky, whereas Borges is an Englishman, a character out of Chesterton or Shaw or Stevenson. Sometimes, despite himself, Borges even seems like a character out of Kipling. In the war between the literary factions of Boedo and Florida, Arlt is with Boedo, although my impression is that his thirst for battle was never excessive. His oeuvre consists of two story collections and three novels, though in fact he wrote four novels, and his uncollected stories, stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines and that Arlt could write while he talked about women with his fellow reporters, would fill at least two more books. He’s also the author of a volume of newspaper columns called Aguaf
uertes porteños [Etchings from Buenos Aires], in the best French impressionist tradition, and Aguafuertes españoles [Etchings from Spain], sketches of daily life in Spain in the 1930s, which are full of gypsies, the poor, and the benevolent. He tried to get rich through deals that had nothing to do with the Argentine literature of the day, though they did have something to do with science fiction, and they were always categorical failures. Then he died and, as he would have said, that was the end of everything.

  But it wasn’t the end of everything, because like Jesus Christ, Arlt had his St. Paul. Arlt’s St. Paul, the founder of his church, is Ricardo Piglia. I often ask myself: What would have happened if Piglia, instead of falling in love with Arlt, had fallen in love with Gombrowicz? Why didn’t Piglia devote himself to spreading the Gombrowiczian good news, or specialize in Juan Emar, the Chilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the unknown soldier? A mystery. In any case, it’s Piglia who raises up Arlt in his own coffin soaring over Buenos Aires, in a very Piglian or Arltian scene, though one that takes place only in Piglia’s imagination, not in reality. It wasn’t a crane that lowered Arlt’s coffin. The stairs were wide enough for the job. The body in the box wasn’t a heavyweight champion’s.