Villoro S Bolaño

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Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle

Juan Villoro
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To cite this article: Juan Villoro (2010): Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle, Review: Literature and Arts of
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Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 80, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2010, 918
Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle

Juan Villoro
Translated by Lorna Scott Fox
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Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) has published books of short stories (La casa
pierde [1999, awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia prize; The House Loses], Los
culpables [2007; The Guilty]), novels (El testigo [2004; The Witness]), and
essays (Efectos personales [2000; Personal Effects]). He has taught at
Mexico City’s UNAM, Yale, and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
One night in 1998 the telephone rang, and I heard a voice from way back
in time: ‘‘This is Roberto, Roberto Bolaño.’’ We had met almost twenty
years before. The line wasn’t very clear; his words seemed to be rising from
a submarine. ‘‘It’s pretty windy around here,’’ Roberto explained. He was
in Blanes, a small town on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona.
‘‘Where the first rock of the Costa Brava pokes up,’’ he added. This rock
could just as well be the last, coming from France, but he liked it better as
the first. In our later talks, when I visited him at home, and after 2001
when I moved to Barcelona, I saw his predilection for singularizing things
in terms of extremes. This person was ‘‘unique,’’ that one a ‘‘borderliner.’’
He was uninterested in shades of gray; he preferred to rectify by
criticizing.
As remembered by Rodrigo Fresán, Roberto ‘‘didn’t go in for abstract
conversation’’; he would never be drawn in by subjects like God, the Left,
or the weather. His approach to conversation was that of a hunter who
can smell the prey and is about to set a trap. He pursued his theme with
the fastidious care of a taxidermist. Then he’d change tack: a story about
a virtuous South American morphed into one about a rogue South
American. Nothing is irreversible for the good storyteller. Like the
‘‘hopeful monsters’’ that so intrigued him (those creatures born with
some physical anomaly that manage to adapt to the environment in
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2010 Americas Society, Inc.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905761003688450
10 Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
unusual ways), every tale found new forms of survival in Roberto’s voice.
The cowboy with sunstroke reappeared as a mystic gunman or a pampas
gaucho.
Often we made the mistake of listening to him in notarial mode, as
though he were speaking of what had already taken place, an unalterable
quantity, hardened into law*forgetting that his was an investigative
temperament, that he was only interested in loose ends. If you reminded
him of something he’d said which you’d agreed with, you were inviting a
lopsided grin and a ‘‘Whatever do you mean?’’ In her celebrated interview
1. Maristain published an with him for Playboy, Mónica Maristain demanded: ‘‘Why do you always
interview with Bolaño in argue?’’ And in exemplary fashion, the contrarian answered: ‘‘But I never
the Mexican edition of
argue.’’1
Playboy (July 2003) the
same month Bolaño The extraordinary interviews with Roberto Bolaño, selected with an
died. The interview is intelligent magnifying-glass by Andrés Braithwaite and published by the
reprinted in Mónica Universidad Diego Portales, are the equivalent of an airliner’s black box.
Maristain, Roberto
Bolaño: The Last The words preceding the crash. Not so much a calculated testament as a
Interview (Brooklyn: voice from within the turbulence, unshakable to the last.2
Melville House, 2009). What would the writer think upon seeing them gathered together? We
2. Andrés Braithwaite, must consider first of all his disdain for systems of consecration. And yet
Bolaño por sı́ mismo:
entrevistas escogidas we cannot get away from this paradox: the minor genres practiced by an
(Santiago: Ediciones author*his secondary voices*only come into their own once consecra-
Universidad Diego tion has occurred.
Portales, 2006).
I used a hunting image for the experience of Roberto’s conversation,
because hunting is one of many personal survival skills that approximate
his storytelling manner. The narrator lays his trap and conceals it with dry
leaves. He continues chatting with the deliberation of one who is
dropping bait along the path to the site of danger. Carried away by the
details, the smells, the exact time at which an incident took place, the
listener is led on unawares until realizing, too late, that the prey is himself.
‘‘How could you ever have fallen for that!’’ cries the gratified redskin.
The interviews he gave often involved ambushes of this kind. If he was
inflexible in matters of feeling*an emotional militant, with iron-clad
phobias and loyalties*Roberto channeled every literary exchange into the
domain of conjecture. He shared with Nabokov the idea of writing as a
simulacrum that obeys the conditions of the real only in so far as it can re-
invent them.
To what extent are we to take literally his provocations, his outbursts,
his pranks, his felicitous excesses? Did he really save a penalty kick by Vavá
in a soccer match? When he affirmed that Gabriela Mistral was an
extraterrestrial, did he mean to pay her a compliment, finding fault with
earthly oxygen, or was it the other way around? What’s certain is that he
would be smiling after seeing how well the enemy was put off the scent.
The interviews are like clues planted around the battlefield, landmines
that have not been deactivated but explode at the edges of the core
strategy. The strong nucleus of Bolaño’s oeuvre lies in his stories and
Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle 11
novels, and also in an uncanny interregnum: the zone in which his prose
feeds off his poetry.
The interviews are a part of the literary corpus: almost all were
conducted on paper, bringing into play his imagination and his writerly
force field. ‘‘Intelligence, a solitude on fire,’’ as José Gorostiza wrote in
Muerte sin fin (Death without End). The phrase may be applied fruitfully
3. José Gorostiza, Muerte to Bolaño’s writing stance in general.3 Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in
sin fin/Death without mind that the interviews are so many excursions without benefit of maps,
End, trans. Laura
Villaseñor (Austin: as perilous for the occasional tourist as for the pilgrim in a hurry. Beneath
Harry Ransom the surface of dry leaves, branches sharp as daggers await.
Humanities Research Borges claimed that fame is always a simplification. Like so many
Center, 1969).
greats, Roberto Bolaño runs the risk of being turned into a pop myth. In
telling fashion, the interviews he granted are at once a stimulant and an
antidote to this status. The savage detective continues to defy his readers.
His opinions falter when taken as absolute truths, and are empowered by
being read as elusive oddities (as provisional as Breton’s soluble fish). He
must be treated seriously, not as a guru, but as a writer who employed
words like torches and understood Cocteau’s paradox: all that can be
salvaged from a fire is fire itself.
Asked in what person or thing he would like to be reincarnated, he
offered a miniature story: ‘‘A hummingbird, the smallest of the birds,
which can sometimes weigh less than two grams. The desk of a Swiss
4. ‘‘El cuestionario de writer. A reptile in the Sonora desert.’’4 He rarely shrank from personal
Proust: Entrevista a questions, but did not seek confessionality as much as self-fabulation.
Roberto Bolaño,’’ La
Tercera (19 March 2000). Asked about his greatest regret, he said: ‘‘I have many, which go to bed
See also Braithwaite, 46. with me and get up with me and write with me, because my regrets know
5. Ibid. how to write.’’5
Bolaño deployed the strategy of the loner who imposes his law, rejects
convention, and is skeptical of celebrity and its powers. It is hard to go
along with all his pronouncements, largely because he distrusted them
himself: ‘‘We come to literature by chance . . . Did I say that we come to
literature by chance? No, no, no, nobody ever got to literature by chance.
6. Braithwaite, 91. Never, never.’’6
As a conversationalist he was less emphatic, but his character ran on
exaggeration, and exaggerators tend to dominate. He asked plenty of
questions, displaying genuine curiosity about the most trifling concerns of
others, what the kids were up to, anything the women wanted to tell him
about, before resuming the thread of some interminable story that often
was sordid to the point of absurdity, no matter how enlivened by bracing
epithets. He talked with an obsessive verisimilitude, as though precise and
plentiful detail were a point of honor. I heard him expound with exactly
the same possessiveness on the subject of serial killers, porn stars,
Merovingian troubadours, and forgotten poets of the Mexican nineteenth
century.
When his phone call came through in 1998, I tried to make out that
peculiar accent of his which I hadn’t heard for twenty years, that tone
blurred by successive emigrations and no doubt hoarsened by the climate
(‘‘It’s pretty windy around here’’).
Roberto uttered his words with spontaneous wariness, as if proffering
something at once precious and tacky, like a peddler opening his raincoat
to reveal a row of imitation gold watches made in China. A careful
unkemptness of speech that could only be defined as a hodgepodge. He
mixed the lingo of Chile, Mexico, and Spain with a few Catalan
expressions, but his voice was the sound of an individual country. Its
wavering accent let you know where he’d been, but not where he was
going. This was apt for a man who once said, ‘‘Every country must exist
at some time, in some form.’’ The memories of exiles and travelers become
imaginary little by little; countries fade away and come back like
cherished, far-flung vestiges, like things that suddenly turn up in your
pockets.
Such a flow of disparate expressions turned Roberto’s delivery into an
act of style. Moreover, he smoked as much as any character in Onetti, and
this marked a rhythm: a torrential spate, a pause to inhale deeply, a
resumption of the story with a precipitous momentum muffled by smoke.
Talkers who smoke have a tendency to wander. On the occasion of that
first call, he covered so much ground that I became anxious about the
cost. ‘‘Not to worry,’’ he said, ‘‘the house is on solid ground.’’ I asked him
what he lived on, and for the first time heard him define himself as a
scalp-hunter. He lay in wait for municipal writing competitions and
leaped on top of them like a Cherokee. Actually, he had already dropped
this habit by 1998 and indeed written a masterly short story about it,
‘‘Sensini’’; but he chose to situate himself in that period for me, maybe
counting on the fact that I hadn’t read it.
In succeeding years, I would discover his fascination with a certain type
of rugged loner: gunslingers, explorers, prospectors, gauchos, men who
lived outside the common law but according to the strenuous morality
they had adopted for themselves, a code dictated by the tough conditions
of their trade. In one interview he declares: ‘‘Literature is very similar to
samurai wrestling. A samurai doesn’t fight against a samurai: he fights a
monster. He usually knows, too, that he’s going to lose. To have the valor,
7. Ibid., 13. in full anticipation of defeat, to go out and fight: that’s literature.’’7
He loved to throw out allusions to the ‘‘soldier warrior’’ that don
Quixote evokes in the speech about arms and letters; to immerse himself
in video games where he could win the battles of Austerlitz or Borodino;
and to read up on the intricate machinery of war. And yet nothing was
further from his nature than the celebration of violence. The phantasma-
goria of war provided him with an extreme mirror of reality, spewing out
the black smoke that must be seen before it can be avoided. A familiarity
with the circuits of horror, a grip on the workings of evil, are starting
points for refuting them. It is partly for this reason that he was planning
to write a ‘‘Military Anthology of Latin American Literature.’’ Like
unsuspected buried shells, his military metaphors were liable to blow up
in the face of anyone who approached them too carelessly. He did not seek
to explain reality, but to illustrate it. Although there’s nothing he would
have hated more than to be a soldier, he regarded himself, following
Seneca’s precept, as a soldier of the most diverse circumstances.
He would praise a colleague’s mettle in the same terms: ‘‘Sergio
González Rodrı́guez, a man to go to the wars with.’’ Without the slightest
inclination to enlist, he nonetheless prized qualities such as loyalty in
extreme situations, and active opposition to barbaric horror. One evening,
he said he still hadn’t found a place for me in his anthology. ‘‘Which
regiment would you like?’’ he asked mischievously. I replied that I could
only imagine going to war like Bob Hope or Marilyn Monroe, to entertain
the troops. ‘‘That’ll do fine,’’ he nodded. For himself, he preferred
active combat roles. ‘‘I’m a Marine,’’ he informed me in his favorite
Japanese restaurant in Barcelona. ‘‘Wherever you send me, I stand firm.’’
The fabulation of his destiny as a pioneer through the wide open spaces
was like the psychological correlation to the huge scope he encompassed
as a narrator, from the Spanish Civil War to the Mexican student
movement of 1968, via the Russian front during World War II, the
murdered women of Ciudad Juárez, and the military coup in Chile.
Even though he was always criticizing, he never complained about his
own plight. Ghoulish jokes about the state of his liver led us to assume he
must be in the pink of ill health. Anyone who can write all night without
switching on the heating can only be described as fit. However, he didn’t
like to boast about it. He fell prisoner after Pinochet’s coup in Chile, but
objected to people making too much of this episode. As he said in an
interview with Eliseo Álvarez, ‘‘I was detained for eight days, but in Italy
recently they asked me: What happened to you? Can you tell us about
your six months in jail? And that’s because of an error in a German book,
where they put six months. It used to be less, mind you. Typical Latin
American tango. The first book of mine published in Germany said I’d
been locked up for a month. It didn’t sell all that well, so the next book
upped me to three months, and the third gave me four months. At this
8. Ibid., 38. rate, I’ll soon be still in prison.’’8
The reason for his call that day in 1998 was a piece I’d written about
the death of the poet Mario Santiago (Ulises Lima in The Savage
Detectives). Roberto began to quiz me about events back in 1972, mixed in
with what had happened last week. I couldn’t answer all his questions.
From afar, he had constructed a country in memory, a place of spectral
accuracy, and he now plunged with a keen forensic eye into the minutiae
of a period whose major virtue, in my view, was that it was done and
dusted. I started worrying about the cost of the call again. I didn’t know
you could get discount phone cards in Europe, and perhaps he didn’t use
them anyway. It may be that the only extravagance to mitigate his spartan
lifestyle were those long hours on the phone to distant friends, and he
might have shunned the advantages of speculative discount cards as an
honorable gesture.
The passionate conversationalist is best enjoyed at a distance, if he is to
illuminate us, rather than scorch us to a crisp. Roberto was incapable of
small talk; the intensity of his interest in things made every encounter
exceptional. It could not be recreated the next day. For mutual benefit,
our dialogues had to be spaced out over time, and frequently conducted
by phone. It was advisable to leave the initiative up to him. Ever since
working at the campground, he kept night watchman’s hours and his
fragile health did not always put him in a mood for idle chitchat. I
preferred that he should be the one to call. But you had to pick up fast.
On one occasion I delayed for longer than I should, seeing to my

daughter, and he hung up, offended. It was three or four days before I was
able to call him back. ‘‘I call you about something urgent, and you take
centuries to answer!’’ he grumbled. He hated to lose control of the agenda.
What was so terribly urgent, I asked. ‘‘Did you hear that Irán Eory died?’’
he exclaimed, instantly cheered by recalling the soap opera actress, the
blonde beauty we’d worshipped back in Mexico. And this triggered a
chain of anecdotes, ending with the same reproof with which he’d begun,
only now strangely recast as a virtue on my part: ‘‘Don’t ever let anyone
stop you looking after your daughter!’’
Other exchanges were not as harmonious. To smooth the path of
dialogue, you had to respect his rigid code of vetoes. He wouldn’t stand for
even the mildest criticism of Mexico (the last word he wrote, the word that
concludes the novel 2666, was precisely ‘‘México’’), any more than he
would tolerate a good word about Chile. His idiosyncratic theodicy of
countries dealt out national virtues and defects with little regard for the
facts. Impervious to geopolitics, he would elaborate his ideas from a
mythographic perspective: ‘‘Latin America is like the madhouse of Europe.
Maybe originally it was thought of as the hospital of Europe, or the granary
of Europe. But now it’s the madhouse. A savage, impoverished madhouse,
a slough of chaos and corruption, but open your eyes wide and you might
9. Ibid., 111. catch the shadow of the Louvre.’’9
Midway through 1998 Roberto sent me two of his books, with
emblematic titles: Distant Star and Telephone Calls*‘‘Llamadas telefóni-
cas,’’ the original title of the volume translated as Last Evenings on Earth.
The words of the one who is far away. From that moment on, the ghostly
voice from the past became a regular fixture.
We first met in 1976 at an awards ceremony held by the magazine
Punto de Partida. He was twenty-three, I was twenty. There were drinks on
the grounds of UNAM’s Ciudad Universitaria campus, and I was
discussing something with Poli Délano, one of the short story judges.
Roberto, who had read Poli’s work, came up to us. He was wearing
Groucho Marx glasses, and his hair was mussed by an imaginary wind
that was still blowing two decades later. On hearing that I’d placed second
in the short story contest, he said: ‘‘Well, I only placed third in the poetry,
but what I really deserved was a reprimand.’’ The verses he’d submitted to
Punto de Partida included the line: ‘‘Let Nicanor Parra be the anti-poet,
not me.’’ The trajectory of the author of By Night in Chile was to be a
constant readjustment of his own ideas. He reveled in being right, but
only at the time. Soon, he’d take a different tack.
One of his favorite stories about himself concerned political militancy:
he used to be an anarchist, until he met another anarchist. He had to feel
that he was one of a kind. ‘‘I’ve got the same blood group as everyone who
has written The Savage Detectives,’’ he told Andrés Gómez. He never
wanted either masters or disciples; he needed others as sounding boards,
to test the power of his hunches, to argue them through. You might say he
made of contrariness a proof of affection.
It was hard to forget the things he said. At that long ago ceremony in
1976, he mentioned that being an exile forced him to wonder about the
poet’s homeland. As time went by, he found or founded that land in the
journeys of his heroes. While he never ceased to regard himself as a man
dedicated to poetry, his best writing decants one genre into another: it
recreates, within the parameters of prose fiction, the conditions that
unleash the act of poetry.
Ignacio Echevarrı́a has rightly suggested that the predominant
narrative figure in Bolaño is that of the poet*the maverick investigator
of the real, the savage detective. If Ricardo Piglia sees the sleuth as a
popular embodiment of the intellectual (a person who hunts for
connections, who pursues a theory to make sense of the environment),
Bolaño writes about poets who delve into the reverse side of things, and
transform experience into a work of art. It is not necessarily consummated
in writing. Bolaño’s poets embrace action as an avant-garde aesthetic.
Some write things we don’t get to read, others parse the grammar of living
it up; all of them resist. ‘‘Enrique Martı́n,’’ a short story included in Last
Evenings on Earth, begins significantly: ‘‘A poet can endure anything.
Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But
that’s not true: there are obvious limits to what a human being can
endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything.
We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that
10. Roberto Bolaño, way lie ruin, madness and death.’’10
‘‘Enrique Martı́n,’’ Last From those poems of 1976 up to*rhyming numbers*2666, Bolaño
Evenings on Earth, trans.
Chris Andrews (New tracked with insomniac gaze the heroism of those who make poetry away
York: New Directions, from the page, using the broken glass and rusty junk that litter the back
2006), 26. alleys of reality.
In The Republic, Plato takes a cautious line on poets. ‘‘If an able man
were to arrive in our city intending to exhibit himself and his poems, we
should fall to our knees before him as before a divine being, admirable
and enchanting. Nevertheless, we should send him on his way to another

town, explaining that among us there were no poets, nor were poets
permitted to exist.’’ Platonism rejects poetry not because it disbelieves in
its effects, but because it believes in them too much, and therefore fears
them. Bolaño shares that conviction, but he does grant his poets
citizenship: that is, he sends them on their way, for they can only survive
on the road; the city has followed Plato’s paranoid advice.
Writing about nomads, Bolaño acquiesced to Raymond Roussel’s idea
that travel is a ‘‘pretext for mobility.’’ What matters is not what happens
during the journey, but what the man on the move is feeling.
The decisive foreignness of the poet is that of someone who speaks a
different language, revelatory but untranslatable. His word (or his act that
aspires to the condition of word) represents dissonance. Certain
characters in Bolaño’s fiction bend this capacity for transgression to

questionable ends. In one interview, he recalls that Hitler was a keen
reader. Culture by itself saves no one from damnation. Bolaño has few
rivals when it comes to exploring the destructive possibilities of
sophistication. Like Rameau’s nephew*the character in Diderot whose
artistic finesse was combined with personal coarseness*the avant-garde
dandies who people Nazi Literature in the Americas behave like exquisite
swine, scholars of intricate wickedness. Along with Distant Star and By
Night in Chile, the encyclopedia of new-world Nazis constitutes a trilogy
about sensibility in the absence of ethics, or acknowledging no ethic but
that of Form. On the eve of the French Revolution, Diderot’s preoccupa-
tion was with the pact between refinement and squalor; in the Latin
America of the dictatorships, Bolaño unfolds before us a gallery of brutes
who revel in elegant conjugations of the grammar of torture. Never
simplistic, he offers multifaceted, ambivalent creatures: Wieder, the poet
in Distant Star who sky-writes verses from his plane, is also a repressor. In
him, artistry coexists with depredation.
Poets, poets everywhere. Shamans he knew intimately like Mario
Santiago, visionaries in orbit like Philip K. Dick. Octavio Paz turns up in
The Savage Detectives, lost in Mexico City’s Parque Hundido. One
sentence pierces his circular wanderings like an arrow: ‘‘The poet does
not die, he sinks but does not die.’’
Already in an earlier novel, La senda de los elefantes (republished as
Monsieur Pain), Bolaño had pictured César Vallejo laid low by the
hiccups. The poet who interceded with the ‘‘black heralds’’ is in bed,
undergoing treatment with hypnosis. All he can produce is a groan. But
something ineffable, suggests the novelist, emerges from this torn throat,
the broken instrument of a poet. This integrity in weakness reappears in
Amulet, a story dealing with the true-life case of a woman who locked
herself into a toilet when the Mexican army invaded the Ciudad
Universitaria in 1968. The siege leads to an elegy addressed to the mother
of all poets.
An aspect Bolaño deeply responded to in Malcolm Lowry and Henry

Miller was their way of placing artists in the most unpropitious situations,
and forcing them to exercise their poetics there. The savage detective has a
system to deal with this predicament: he structures his adventure around
a quest (for Cesárea Tinajero in The Savage Detectives, for Benno von
Archimboldi in 2666) and solves uncodified crimes along the way.
Alain Robbe-Grillet has remarked that he considers himself a crime
writer, not in Raymond Chandler’s sense but in that of Sophocles: he
portrays people who are unaware of their guilt. Seldom does Bolaño craft
a plot without postponing its denouement in the manner of a thriller; but,
like Piglia in Artificial Respiration or Robbe-Grillet in La Reprise, he hangs
the story upon a series of investigators, the sleuths of an otherness that
resists them. His continual paeans to courage must be read as part of this
esthetic. To find is an act of daring. This imagination does not, however,

accent the outlandish, so much as the novelty of the quotidian. Like
Georges Perec, he elicits the flash of the infra-ordinary. Bolaño’s prose
moves upon faint fractures in the perception of reality. It is remarkable
how little interest he takes in his characters’ subjective worlds. When
relaying someone’s dream he will do so with the dry externality of a
delirium out of Kafka. His writing eschews introspection in favor of
factual computation. While his characters are endlessly opinionated, they
do not share ideas about ideas, they record and recapitulate. Forensics of
a kink in the quotidian, they make an inventory of the clues and discuss
their findings.
In his last work Bolaño perfected this device, shifting it from the
characters to the narrator proper. In The Savage Detectives, a polyphonic
chorus narrates itself by means of monologues. The author stands behind
a two-way mirror, recording the statements. As soon as it was published
the novel turned into a cult object, an I-Ching that served to divine
backwards, to decipher what had already taken place, a Book of Changes
for a whole generation, an era revisited in the first person, in which each
could be the detective of his own fate. The procedure was different for
2666. Here the characters are treated as cases, subjects alien to the
vacillations of the inner life, who stride toward their destinies without
blinking, like Greek heroes. The chapters represent the files of an
investigator. This time the detective stands outside the book, to narrate
it. While the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez are set out in the terms
of a coroner’s report, the protagonists appear as a compilation of data:
they are made of actions, not conjectures. Remembrance or longing are of
no use to the investigator; he cannot be distracted by the potentialities of
past or future; he must focus on the present, where fingerprints trace a
blurred and yet legible film. He doesn’t ask himself why these people do
what they do, he merely reconstructs the facts. Everyday life opens up like
a mystery akin to the mass graves of Ciudad Juárez. This is what fuels the
special impetus of the book, its forward drive.
The interviews represent a lateral but significant vector of this

exploratory method. They are akin to the numbered objects whereby
the investigator attempts to reconstruct what happened. A stray bullet, a
glass smudged with lipstick, a lock of hair*scraps of evidence that may or
may not have a bearing on events, but have been indisputably associated
with them.
The detective is a rescuer, a shield. He doesn’t like to admit it because it
undermines the hard-boiled nature of the job, but when asleep he dreams
protective dreams. The book of poems Tres (Three) concludes with the
salvaging of someone else’s childhood: ‘‘I dreamed that Georges Perec was
three years old and was crying inconsolably. I tried to soothe him.
I cuddled him in my arms, I bought him candy and coloring books. Then
we went to the waterfront in New York and while he was playing on the
slide I said to myself, I’m no good for anything, but I’ll be good at looking
after you. Nobody’s going to hurt you, nobody’s going to try and kill you.
After that it started raining and we quietly went back home. But where
11. Roberto Bolaño, Tres was our home?’’11
(Mexico City: El Bolaño’s writing is the home to which the sleeper wants to return. His
Acantilado, 2000), 77.
dream has a precise kind of reality. There are no strange subjectivities.
A house, a child, a coloring-book. Perhaps what this brief parable conveys
is the analogy between genius and innocence. It matters that Perec is three
years old and his future lies before him.
When the author of 2666 was admitted to the hospital, the air was
scorching hot, like a message of dread. Not for centuries had Mars, the
planet of war, moved so close to Earth. Shortly before Roberto’s death, the
Estrella de Mar campground, where he had been a night watchman,
caught on fire. No one can recall a summer like it in Catalonia.
We went to the Les Corts funeral parlor as if to a gathering in the desert
he often wrote about. A few days later, the weather suddenly changed.
Rain fell ‘‘with powerful slowness,’’ as it did in that vain land of the
immortals imagined by Borges. Water poured down like a pointless
miracle or an interminable christening. Roberto Bolaño had set off into
reluctant posterity, a distinction that held less appeal for him than the idea
of being able to sign up for classes with Pascal.
When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied: ‘‘That’s
a future battle.’’ To remember a person is to allow them to go on noticing
things. Especially when that person is a detective, and even more when he
has to take care of young Perec so he can grow and grow and write Life,
A User’s Manual.
The battle continues.

Villoro S Bolaño

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On: 04 April 2013, At: 08:29

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle

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Roberto Bolaño: The Future Battle

On one occasion I delayed for longer than I should, seeing to my

and enchanting. Nevertheless, we should send him on his way to another

characters in Bolaño’s fiction bend this capacity for transgression to

An aspect Bolaño deeply responded to in Malcolm Lowry and Henry

esthetic. To find is an act of daring. This imagination does not, however,

The interviews represent a lateral but significant vector of this

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