20th century Chilean poet and novelist
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.
The Unknown University
The Secret of Evil
Tres
Between Parentheses
The Insufferable Gaucho
The Return
Antwerp
Monsieur Pain
Nazi Literature in the Americas
Romantic Dogs
Amulet
Last Evenings on Earth
By Night in Chile
Distant Star
The Skating Rink
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
photo credit: Mathieu Bourgois
“Although the thirteen stories that make up Roberto Bolaño's newly translated collection percolate with brooding darkness, they also bubble with a surprising luminosity ... each richer and more resonant than the last.”
“The sense of embattlement that animates the writing, and the scab-picking intensity that he brings to his obsessions, makes The Return a compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work.”
“Genius: This new collection of thirteen stories proves to be a defining sampler of Bolaño's style, thematic concerns and favored character types.”
— Booklist on Roberto Bolaño's The Return
“I dreamt I was sixteen and Martín Adán was giving me piano lessons. The old man's fingers, long as the Amazing Rubber Man's, plunged through the floor and played a chain of underground volcanoes.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Martín Adán's The Cardboard House
“Vila-Matas...has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesque
“Nicanor Parra over everyone else, including Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro and Gabriela Mistral. ”
— Roberto Bolaño on Nicanor Parra
“Lihn was without a doubt the best poet of his generation, the so-called Generación del '50, and one of the three or four best poets born between 1925 and 1935. Or maybe one of the two best. Or maybe he was the best. ”
— Roberto Bolaño on Enrique Lihn
“Cardenal [is] a man who lives in limbo, which isn't a bad way to live, next door to heaven.”
— Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses on Ernesto Cardenal
“A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Enrique Vila-Matas
“The cowardly don't publish the brave.”
— Roberto Bolaño
“The only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Horacio Castellanos Moya
“I could live under a table reading Borges.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Jorge Luis Borges
“Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop.”
— Roberto Bolaño on César Aira
Enrique Lihn
Nicanor Parra
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Felisberto Hernández
Vicente Huidobro
Clarice Lispector
Pablo Neruda