“Bolaño was no political pamphleteer. And yet his characters’ angst and desires play out against the canvas of history. With his raw, barely controlled emotions, and a talent for mining the pathos, beauty, and even humor amid the horror of ordinary life, his fiction soared.”
— The Daily Beast on Roberto Bolaño's The Secret of Evil
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 Secret of Evil
Tres
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles And Speeches, 1998-2003
The Insufferable Gaucho
The Return
Antwerp
Monsieur Pain
Nazi Literature in the Americas
Romantic Dogs
Amulet
Last Evenings On Earth
An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter
Distant Star
By Night In Chile
The Skating Rink
photo credit: Mathieu Bourgois
“That dream, its stubborn survival despite all evidence of its defeat, would become the subject of much of Bolaño’s writing.”
— Ben Ehrenreich, the arabophile on Roberto Bolaño
“If you haven't heard of Roberto Bolaño yet, you will soon.”
— Benjamin Lytal, New York Sun on Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings On Earth
“A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called 'unimproved'––lacking the polish of shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only the 'fist-fucking' but 'feet-fucking' in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up... The poems shine their beery light on life's romantic dogs; dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double-time as saints and martyrs.”
— Forrest Gander, Nation on Roberto Bolaño's Romantic Dogs
“Vila-Matas...has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Enrique Vila-Matas's
“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
“If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira.”
— Roberto Bolaño on César Aira
Enrique Lihn
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Felisberto Hernández
Vicente Huidobro
Clarice Lispector
Pablo Neruda
Nicanor Parra