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Roberto Bolaño Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973, just a month before Pinochet seized power, and was arrested. After his release he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then Barcelona. He wrote ten novels and two collections of short stories as well as poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003. Translator Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the language department of the University of Melbourne. In 2005, his translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star won the Vallé-Inclan Prize.
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by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy “A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called ‘unimproved’–lacking the polish of a 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, The Nation |
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Poetry, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño’s poetic voice is like no other’s. Publishers Weekly praised The Romantic Dogs in its review: “The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bolaño (1953–2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bolaño began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion—the depths of despair (‘From these nightmares I'll retain only/ these poor houses’) or the heights of sexual adventures. Bolaño moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches ‘a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions’ wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bolaño's dreamt motorcycle journey in ‘The Donkey,’ mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bolaño and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bolaño the poet's ‘deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet’ can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse." Download "The Detectives" from The Romantic Dogs. |
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Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A tour
de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. |
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Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7). |
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by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Now in paperback, the first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The stories are similar,
in theme and voice (though not in locale), and they are perfectly
calibrated: Bolaño limns the capacity of a voice to carry
despair without shading into bitterness." |
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"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolaño's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolaño writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died." Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street. |
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by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. "The most influential and admired
novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world." "Bolaño wrote
with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow
and an extreme subversive vision of his own." "By far the most exciting
writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time." |
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Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet." |
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by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. "Bolaño's reputation and
legend are in meteoric ascent." "Few artists will invite
you in, offer a seat, and then so gracefully pull the chair out from
under you." |
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The star of Roberto Bolaño's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multi-media enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.") Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño."
"Bolaño's prose marries
humor and irony, violence and love, poetry and death." "Bolaño's spare prose
lends his narrator's account a chilly precision." "Subtle and terrifying...a
twisted, compressed masterpiece." |
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by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. "A contemporary novel destined
to have a permanent place in world literature." |
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As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.
"A true masterpiece."
"Mordant, haunting and sometimes
elegaic...takes the reader hurtling into the darkest psychological folds
of one man and one country." "Haunting and mordant ...
written with unsettling art ... the most damning sentence ... has
the pallor and stillness of a shroud." "Postwar Chilean politics
and literature infuse this densely learned, richly evocative novel....reminiscent
of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald." "One of the great Latin American
novels, in an exemplary translation. Not to be missed." |
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©2009
by New Directions Publishing Corp. |
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