“World Literature and the Marketing of Roberto
Bolaño’s Posthumous Works.”
Critical Insights:
Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo. Salem Press, 2017. 26-41
For a copy of the published article click here
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of California, Merced
Keyword
World
Literature, Marketing, Translation, Posthumous Works, Roberto
Bolaño, 2666, Adiós, Shane,
Las alamedas luminosas, Amuleto, Comedia
del horror de Francia, Consejos
de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce,
Corrida, El
contorno del ojo, Cuentos. Llamadas telefónicas. Putas asesinas. El gaucho insufrible, Los detectives salvajes,
D.F., la paloma de Tobruck, Diario de
bar, Diorama, Dos
señores de Chile, El espectro de Rudolf Armand Philippi, El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción,
Ellos supieron perder, Estrella distante, El gaucho insufrible, Lento palacio de invierno, La literatura nazi en América, “Manifiesto
mexicano,” El
maquinista, El náufrago, Pista de hielo, Las
rodillas de un autor de ciencia-ficción, atrás, El secreto del mal, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía, Sepulcros
de vaqueros, El Tercer Reich, Todo lo que la gente cuenta de Ulises
Lima, Tres minutos antes de la aparición del gato, Última
entrevista en Boca-cero, Una
novelita lumpen, La universidad desconocida, La virgen de Barcelona, Vuelve
el man a Venezuela, Woes of
the True Policeman
Coinciding
with the publication of El espíritu de la
ciencia-ficción (The Spirit of Science-Fiction, 2016), which Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) wrote in 1984, Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo ironically
wondered in an article published in the Spanish journal El País:
Since he
died, Roberto Bolaño does not stop working. . . . One wonders why geniuses edit
those works after dying, considering that they did not do it while still alive.
Perhaps it is because it is not they who do it but an army of agents, editors,
producers, and heirs. Bolaño has a contract of 500,000 euros and has generated
big judicial and mediatic fights among the administrators of his memory. But he
cannot give his opinion. Shouldn’t we allow artists to control their life while
they’re still alive, instead of deforming it after they die?1
Roncagliolo jokes that, in comparison, while
still alive, Bolaño seemed to be quite lazy, and then compares him with
Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov and American Truman Capote, whose oeuvres
also continued to grow after their death. Indeed, since Bolaño’s untimely death
from liver failure, the astonishing number of nine posthumous works have been
published in thirteen years: the novels 2666
(2004), written in 1999-2003 and translated in 2008; El Tercer Reich (2010; The
Third Reich, 2011), written in 1989; Los
sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011; Woes of the True Policeman, 2012), begun in the 1980s and
written through 2003; and El espíritu de
la ciencia-ficción, which takes place in Mexico City, like much of Amuleto (Amulet, 1999), Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, 1998), 2666,
and Sepulcros de vaqueros (Cowboy
Sepulchers [three novellas], 2017); as well as the short-story collections El gaucho insufrible (2003; The Insufferable Gaucho 2010); Diario de bar (Bar Diary, 2006),
co-written with A.G. Porta 1983 and published together with a new edition of Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un
fanático de Joyce [1984; Tips from
a Disciple of Morrison to a Fan of Joyce]); and El secreto del mal (2007; The Secret of Evil, 2012); and the collection of essays,
articles, and speeches from 1998 through 2003 Entre paréntesis (2004;
Between Parentheses, 2011).
Moreover,
Bolaño’s literature has also attracted the attention of film directors: Alicia Scherson directed El futuro (The Future, 2013), based on Una novelita lumpen (A Little
Lumpen Novelita, 2002); Valeria Sarmiento is planning to film La pista de hielo (1993); and Gael
García Bernal’s company, Canana, is planning to have David
Pablos direct a film based on Los
detectives salvajes, a novel based on the experiences of the adventures of
two poets of the avant-garde infrarrealista movement that Bolaño
co-founded (called “visceral realists” in the novel), how they sabotage the
literary establishment of the Mexico of the 1970s and Octavio Paz in
particular, and how they search for a 1920s fictional poet named Cesárea
Tinajero. In 2016, there was also a five-hour stage
adaptation of 2666, directed by Seth
Bockley and Robert Falls, the artistic
director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
Additional
publications of new manuscripts by Bolaño have already been announced: La virgen de Barcelona (The Virgin of
Barcelona, 1980), D.F., la paloma de
Tobruck (D.F., the Tobruck Dove, 1983) and Diorama (1984), as well as some of Bolaño’s letters. And many more titles may be published in
the near future, if we keep in mind that, that the Arxiu Bolaño: 1977-2003
(Bolaño Archive), a 2013 exhibit in
Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània (Center for Contemporary Culture), listed, besides his poems, the
following titles: Lento palacio de invierno (Slow Winter Palace, written
in 1979), Tres minutos antes de la aparición del gato (Three Minutes
before the Appearance of the Cat, written in 1979), Las alamedas luminosas (The
Luminous Poplar Groves, written in 1979), Las rodillas de un autor de
ciencia-ficción, atrás (The Knees of a Sci-Fi Author, behind, written in 1979),
El náufrago (The Castaway, 1979-1982), Ellos supieron perder (They
Knew How to Lose, 1979-1982), La virgen de Barcelona, El contorno del
ojo (The Outline of the Eye, written in 1979-1982), El espectro de
Rudolf Armand Philippi (The Specter of Rudolf Armand Philippi, written in 1982), Adiós, Shane
(Goodbye Shane, written in 1983), D.F, La paloma, Tobruk (DF, The Pigeon, Tobruk, written in 1983), Diorama (written in 1983-1984),
El maquinista (The Train Engineer, written in 1986), Última
entrevista en Boca-cero (Last Interview in Boca-cero, written in 1995-1996),
Sepulcros de vaqueros (written in 1996), Todo lo que la gente cuenta
de Ulises Lima (Everything People Say about Ulises Lima, written in 1996-1997),
Vuelve el man a Venezuela (The Man Returns to Venezuela, written in 1999),
Corrida (Bullfight, written in 1999-2000), Comedia del horror de
Francia (Comedy of Horrors in France, written in 2001), and Dos señores
de Chile (Two Gentlemen from Chile, written in 2001).
One
cannot help but wonder whether the Chilean writer had actually planned to
publish all these books or whether some or all of them were simple drafts that
did not fully satisfy him. Will this rush to publish most of what he wrote eventually
affect his reputation as a writer or will it increase his aura as a master
writer, as happened with the publication of the posthumous 2666? After all, El Tercer
Reich and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía received mixed reviews, with The New York
Times actually describing
the latter, perhaps unfairly, as “a collection of outtakes.” As is well known, Bolaño had attained a
minor success with his second novel Pista de hielo (The Skating Rink, 1993) and three years
later, some critical acclaim (albeit a failure in sales) with Estrella distante (Distant Star) and La
literatura nazi en América (Nazi
Literature in the Americas). But his literary
caché in Spain and Latin America would grow dramatically after receiving the 1998
Herralde Award and the 1999 Rómulo
Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives,
published a year earlier. After his death, and especially after Time magazine chose 2666 as the best book of 2008, The New York Times declared it one of “The Ten Best
Books of 2008,” and then it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Fiction, the Chilean author’s acclaim attained a global reach, with a special
impetus in the English-speaking world. In recent years, after the translation
of several of his texts into English, Bolaño’s literary reputation has made him
one of the most acclaimed writers in any language and an indisputable member of
the World Republic of Letters, to use Pascale Casanova’s term.
But to what do we owe this Bolañomania and the
ensuing rush to publish his manuscripts? Apart from the obvious economic
benefits to certain publishers and Bolaño’s heirs, there is no question that his
warm reception by both critics and readers has turned him into a cult writer.
Neither the self-proclaimed successors of the Boom writers, the Crack and
McOndo writers, nor best-selling Latin American writers from the 1980s and 90s,
such as Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, ever reached Bolaño’s universal
acclaim. As a result, the vacuum left by the Boom writers (Gabriel García
Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes) had to be
filled by someone: Roberto Bolaño. As Nicholas Birns puts it,
Bolaño was a post-Boomer who had more to
offer than just coming after the
Boom. He seemed a weightier and more highbrow figure than Fuguet or even Volpi.
Yet he was not simply these writers trussed up and made less obvious: Bolaño
had a history with leftist politics and literary insurgency the younger writers
did not, and his generational status made him more than a young man in a hurry
or part of a new cohort, oedipally overthrowing their predecessors. (“The Part,” 53)
Regarding
Bolaño’s success in the United States, Sara Pollack has speculated that along
with the successful marketing campaign, the persistence of cultural stereotypes
about Latin America among U.S. publishers has also had a powerful effect:
Unwittingly—or
perhaps with provocative deliberation—The
Savage Detectives plays on a series of opposing characteristics that the
United States has historically employed in defining itself vis-à-vis its
neighbors to the south: hardworking vs. lazy, mature vs. adolescent,
responsible vs. reckless, upstanding vs. delinquent. In a nutshell, Sarmiento’s
dichotomy, as old as Latin America itself: civilization vs. barbarism. Regarded
from this standpoint, The Savage
Detectives is a comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the
pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized. (362)
Along
these lines, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas has suggested that, beyond the
unquestionable literary value of his works, his canonization as a writer has something
to do with his premature death:
The fact that Bolaño died young and at the summit
of his creating power and his prestige prevented, I guess, any other possibility;
the incurable mythomaniac tendency of our literary medium, added to our hypocritical and equally
incurable tendency to speak well about the dead—because the no longer bother us
and be easily manipulated, or perhaps because we want to compensate for how
badly we spoke about the when they were alive—has done the rest.2
Indeed,
it is possible that his tragic and untimely death, coupled with the public’s
awareness that after finding out about his liver disease in 1992, Bolaño wrote
feverishly to ensure his family’s economic security until he published eleven
novels in thirteen years, turned him, as Cercas puts it, into a sort of
literary James Dean. Readers suddenly associated him with an aura of
rebelliousness, which, incidentally, Bolaño himself helped propagate through
his literary alter-egos, as well as through his autobiographical accounts
delivered in several interviews and essays. This information, however, is in
many cases is full of inaccuracies, since in reality, as has been repeatedly
pointed out in recent years, during his most productive years Bolaño was a
prudent family man, devoted to his children, who did not drink alcohol, was
never a heroin addict, and had become a moderate leftist in politics.
In any case, since
Bolaño became the most influential writer of his generation and the only Latin
American author in the last twenty-five years to have become canonical in the
United States and to have achieved world literary status, the number of
posthumous publications and the marketing campaign does not seem to reach an
end, which has brought about the perhaps inevitable concern about whether
economic motivation is being prioritized over aesthetic and literary value.3
This publication of posthumous novels seems particularly problematic when some
of the works, such as Los sinsabores del
verdadero policía, were still
unfinished at the time of Bolaño’s death. Comments such as the following one
made by Andrew Wylie, the notorious literary agent of Penguin Random House (the
group to which Alfaguara belongs), regarding the publication of Bolaño’s
posthumous books, do not help appease the skepticism of critics and readers
alike: “As a good American, I am a capitalist. The market has its rules and
what it says about Bolaño is that his latest works have been the most valuable
ones. I would also say that some of these books should not be considered at the
same literary level as The Savage
Detectives or 2666.”4
Wylie’s candid acknowledgment that these new publications do not match the
literary value of Bolaño’s masterpieces adds little information, however, about
whether or not it is worth publishing them beyond the economic benefits they
may bring to the publishing house he works for.
More
reassuringly, Carolina López, Bolaño’s widow, has underscored the—according to
her—rigorous criteria used to decide whether the manuscripts should be
published. Thus, in an interview with Josep Massot, she avers:
When a
writer is world renowned, as is Bolaño’s case, readers appreciate it when his
diaries or correspondence are published, as well as certain documents and texts
(as long as they have literary value) that could have remained unpublished.
Everything is publishable, provided one applies certain criteria. The main one:
to respect scrupulously the text left by the author, as well as to
contextualize it so that the reader may have the necessary information, and to
incorporate it to the corpus of his oeuvre without damaging it. . . . Besides
these criteria, we have worked with texts that at some point Bolaño considered
finished; we have carried out a rigorous study in the author’s archive of all
the documentation related to the text, guaranteeing the maximum information and
veracity.5
In spite of the Spanish
literary critic (and Bolaño’s close friend) Ignacio Echevarría’s criticism
about how she is managing her late husband’s posthumous works, López has
repeatedly stated that she would never allow the publication of a work that
would damage her late husband’s prestige as an author.
A
posthumous novel by Bolaño that seemed to be finished by 1984 is El espíritu de la ciencia ficción. The
manuscript was taken from his seemingly endless archives, this time from neatly
hand-written notebooks, and was published by the prestigious Spanish publishing
house Alfaguara (which, incidentally, rejected Bolaño’s book manuscripts on
several occasions before he achieved worldwide fame), instead of Jorge
Herralde’s Anagrama, where the Chilean author’s oeuvre achieved world literature
status. Pilar Reyes, the Alfaguara editor, frankly admits: “We cannot speculate
about whether for Bolaño it was a finished manuscript or not, publishable or
not. The manuscript has a date and it is signed, and it is contained in three
notebooks, in three writing stages: notes, first draft, and final
transcription.”6 Therefore, the fact that the Chilean author
bothered to date, polish, and copy the manuscript in a final transcription
seems to satisfy her requirements for publication, an argument that could
easily be debated.
Furthermore,
there is speculation that the fact that part of it, titled “Manifiesto mexicano”
(Mexican Manifesto), had already been published with some minor variations in
the journal Turia in 2005 (two years
after his death), then two years later in the collection of poetry and prose La universidad desconocida (The Unknown University, 2007),
and finally in 2013 in The New Yorker,
may be indicative of the fact that Bolaño did not intend to publish the rest of
the book manuscript. As Elena Hevia points out, “That he only typed this
fragment in his computer seems to suggest that Bolaño wanted to rescue this
story alone, which can be read as an independent account, and left behind in
the manuscript—which he had cleaned up, that is true—the rest of a novel that
probably did not satisfy him.”7 Hevia adds that Bolaño, in his 1980s
correspondence with his friends A.G. Porta and Bruno Montané, repeatedly
expressed his dissatisfaction with this work, which he sometimes described as a
“shitty novel”8 or as “abominable,” also pointing out that some of the scenes
did not match the rest of the plot. By contrast, Valerie Miles argues that if
“he truly had not wanted the novel to be published, he would have left explicit
instructions to his widow.”9 One may quickly respond, however, that neither did
Bolaño leave instructions for his widow to publish the novel. At any rate, one
must admit that in the case of 2666, it was a good idea not to follow
Bolaño’s instructions of publishing it in five separate books for economic
reasons.
Be that
as it may, it is still interesting to note how in early works such as El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción and Sepulcros de vaqueros one can already
take a glimpse at some of the Chilean author’s main narrative techniques
(metaliterature); tone (irony, humor); alter-egos, characters (embryonic
versions of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and Auxilio Lacouture); themes (the
literary initiation of young poets in Mexico City); and obsessions (the
archeology of evil and violence). Furthermore, El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción and Los sinsabores del
verdadero policía have the added value—at
least for literary critics and Bolaño fans—of potentially representing the
drafts or embryos of Los detectives salvajes and 2666,
respectively.
International Reception and Bolaño’s World Literary
Status
Beyond any
type of marketing strategy (let us not forget that not long ago some critics
also unfairly ascribed the success of the Boom to marketing campaigns), there
is no doubt that Bolaño’s writing touched a generation of readers and writers
who admired him as a leader and as a model to emulate. Besides the admiration
of his peers, Bolaño entered in record time the conventional literary world-system, all the while becoming an
international bestseller. In fact, the also Chilean Isabel Allende (whose work
Bolaño openly denigrated, as he did with the oeuvres of several of his Chilean
peers) is the only Latin American author who sells more novels in the United
States than him.
In this
context, David Damrosch has famously
defined world literature in the following way:
I take world literature to encompass all literary
works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or
in the original language . . . a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is
actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture .
. . world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather
a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is applicable to individual
works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and
new discoveries alike. (What 4-5)
Damrosch later adds that “literature stays within its national or regional
tradition when it usually loses in translation, whereas works become world
literature when they gain on balance in translation, stylistic losses offset by
an expansion in depth as they increase their range” (What 289). In the
case of Bolaño’s opus, it has been successfully translated to dozens of
languages and, as stated, no other
Latin American author since the Boom authors has had a more triumphal entrance
into the World Republic of
Letters (to use Pascale Casanova’s concept). Tellingly, in October 2016, Babelia, the cultural magazine of the
prestigious Spanish newspaper El País,
included two of Bolaño’s novels among the three best ones published in the last
quarter of a century. Some of the terms coined for this literary phenomenon, “The
Bolaño tsunami,” “Bolañomania,” “The Bolaño effect,” and even “Bolaño fatigue,”
attest to the level of his international success among readers and critics
alike.
The worldliness in
Bolaño’s works, however, responds not only to their global circulation,
multiple translations, success in the English language (it is often said that
less that 3 percent of literature published in the United States is fiction in
translation), and the fact that they may very well gain in translation, but also
to the cosmopolitan consciousness and non-Eurocentric worldview of his works,
whose settings often cross national and continental borders. These
transnational settings facilitate the “transcultural
comparisons” that Damrosch considers another indispensable category for a text
to attain world-literature status.
As Nicholas Birns and Juan E.
De Castro point out, “Not just Bolaño’s recognition but also his material is
global. As a writer he covers the entire world” (8). Indeed, the post-national, transnational, and global cognitive mapping of Bolaño’s
literary journey—incidentally, the author himself was globally oriented beyond
his writing, as he seemed reluctant to consider himself only Chilean—may have
helped his works to be recognized beyond the national borders of the country
where they were written (Mexico and, since 1977, Spain). Bolaño’s ouevre, therefore, could be considered world literature, beyond
market events, because of its non-Eurocentric,
planetary consciousness beyond national projects. In this context, Oswaldo
Zavala has emphasized Bolaño’s proposal of an alternative Latin American modernity that
exceeds the frameworks of what is normally understood by “world literature,”
all the while pointing out the limitations of the world literature paradigm due
to the scarcity of translations. He argues that the Chilean author disrupts
world literature paradigms with “a constant interruption of the logic of
symbolic capital as the result of a productive reactivation of key European and
Latin American avant-garde poetics in a politically conscious intellectual
project that in combination lead to other formations of the modern” (82). Along
these lines, Benjamin Loy argues that “lying at the core of Bolaño’s oeuvre is
a reworking of Modernity and the issues surrounding the global literary field.
Based on operations of intertextuality and humor, whose role is fundamental in
Bolaño, his writing questions the cartographies formulated by the self-designated
‘western center’” (156).
Chilean
Ricardo House’s documentary film Roberto
Bolaño: La batalla futura III (Roberto Bolaño: The
Future Battle III, 2017) unveils Bolaño’s international outlook in both his
literature and his personal worldview. Born in Chile, where he lived until the
age of fifteen (and then returned briefly in 1973), he spent extended periods
of time in Mexico with his family, where he co-founded the Infrarrealista
literary group, and then in Spain, where he spent the last twenty-six years of
his life. Carlos Labbé, for this reason, argues that “Bolaño was not Chilean,
he was a Mexican-Catalan born in Chile. That is evident in his lexical
decisions and in his literary politics.”10 These international
experiences marked his life and career, finding a homeland mostly in the
Spanish language in which he wrote his works. In fact, in a radio
interview with Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, Bolaño declared that his only
tradition is his language and then chastised the critic Raquel Olea’s defense
of national literatures, which he defined as “a fantasy, a rip off,”11
and a Romantic discussion that was already obsolete by the end of the
nineteenth century: “The opus of a great writer is never circumscribed to a
country. Do you think that Neruda is not understood in Spain because he is not
Spanish? That we Chileans don’t understand Vallejo because he is Peruvian?”12
This statements reveal the reasons Bolaño would not accept a description of his
work as Chilean literature per se.
Most notably, as Nathan Scott McNamara points out, the Chilean author’s success in the United States, after appearing in
the prestigious magazine The New Yorker,
being translated into English by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer, and published
first by New Directions and then by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has transformed
the way Latin American literature was conceived (thankfully away from stereotypical
magical realist connotations), read, translated and published: “he opened
publishing channels by drawing readers’ attention to other writers in places
like Chile, Mexico, and Argentina. He also helped turn English readers’
attention away from the Latin American books of the 80s and 90s, and back in
the direction of the modernists and realists of the 60s boom” (n.p.).
Considering the dearth of literary translations in the United States, this is a
welcome development for Latin American literature in general.
Overall,
it is safe to say that a combination of all the factors mentioned above has
turned Bolaño into the face of Latin American literature today, thankfully away
from stereotypes about the omnipresence of Magical Realism or self-promotional
literary manifestos. Whether the incessant publication of posthumous works may
end up overexposing the writer or even damaging his literary reputation is
still to be seen, as the content of most of the new texts is unknown to most of
us. Be that as it may, at least his sudden inclusion into the so-called world
literature or the World Republic of Letters has brought much needed attention
to contemporary Latin American literature (as well as a revived interest in the
Boom writers), thus increasing the potential translations in the United States
and the rest of the world, as well as renewed critical attention to the works
of younger authors, such as the ones included in this volume, as well as many
other deserving ones. The impressive worldwide success of Bolaño’s work has
undoubtedly attracted renewed interest in the region’s literature, which had
been losing critical respect since the unprecedented success of the Boom
writers. One cannot help but hope that the some of the younger authors listed
in this volume will follow in his footsteps, hopefully without becoming
epigones of the Chilean master.
Notes
1.
“Desde que está muerto, Roberto Bolaño no para
de trabajar. . . . Uno se pregunta por qué los genios editan esos trabajos
después de morir, si no lo hicieron cuando vivían. Quizá porque no lo hacen
ellos, sino un ejército de agentes, editores, productores y herederos. Bolaño tiene un contrato de 500.000 euros y ha generado
gordas peleas judiciales y mediáticas entre los administradores de su memoria.
Pero no puede dar su opinión. ¿No deberíamos dejar que los artistas controlen
su obra en vida, en vez de deformársela después de muertos?” (n.p.).
2. “El hecho de
que Bolaño muriera joven y en la cima de su potencia creadora y su prestigio
vedaba, supongo, cualquier otra posibilidad; la incurable propensión mitómana
de nuestro medio literario, sumada a nuestra hipócrita e igualmente incurable
propensión a hablar bien de los muertos—porque ya no molestan y pueden ser
manipulados a placer, o quizá porque queremos compensarlos por lo mal que
hablamos de ellos cuando estuvieron vivos—, ha hecho el resto” (n.p.).
3. Other authors, such as César Aira and Jorge Volpi, have
also received impressive international recognition, but nonetheless not at the
level of Bolaño’s international critical acclaim.
4. “Como buen americano, soy un
capitalista. El mercado tiene reglas y lo que dice sobre Bolaño es que las
últimas obras han sido las más valiosas. Diría también que algunos de estos
libros no deberían considerarse al mismo nivel literario que Los detectives
salvajes o 2666” (n.p.).
5. “Cuando un escritor es muy
reconocido universalmente, como en el caso de Bolaño, los lectores agradecen
que se publiquen hasta sus diarios o su correspondencia, así como ciertos
documentos o textos (siempre que tengan valor literario) que hubieran podido
quedar inéditos. Todo es publicable, pero siempre aplicando criterios. El
principal: respetar escrupulosamente el texto dejado por el autor, así como
contextualizarlo para que el lector tenga la información necesaria, e
incorporarlo al conjunto de su obra sin que la desmerezca… Además de los
criterios señalados, se ha trabajado con textos que en algún momento Roberto
consideró finalizados; se ha realizado un riguroso estudio en el archivo del
autor de toda la documentación vinculada al texto, garantizando un máximo de
información y veracidad” (n.p).
6. “Nosotros
no podemos especular sobre si para Bolaño era un manuscrito terminado o no,
publicable o no. El manuscrito está fechado y firmado, y son tres las libretas
que lo contienen, en tres etapas de la escritura: notas, primer borrador y
transcripción en limpio” (Sainz
Borgo, n.p.).
7. “Que solo
pasara al ordenador ese fragmento parecería indicar que Bolaño solo quiso
rescatar esa historia, que puede leerse como un relato independiente, y dejó en
manuscrito, pulcramente pasado a limpio, eso sí, el resto de una novela que
posiblemente no le satisfacía” (n.p.).
8. “Novela de mierda” (n.p.).
9. “Si a él realmente le hubiera importado
no publicar su obra inédita, hubiera dejado instrucciones explícitas a su
viuda” (n.p.).
10. “Bolaño
no era chileno, era un mexicano-catalán nacido en Chile. Eso se comprueba en
sus decisiones léxicas y en su política literaria” (Morla n.p.).
11. “Una entelequia, una estafa.”
12. “La obra de un gran escritor jamás está ceñida a un país.
¿Tú crees que a Neruda no lo entienden en España porque no es español? ¿Que a
Vallejo no lo entendemos los chilenos porque es peruano?”
Works
Cited
Birns, Nicholas. “The
Part About the Critics: the World Reception of Roberto Bolaño.”
Critical Insights:
Roberto Bolaño. Salem Press, 2015. 50-64. Print.
Birns, Nicholas and Juan E.
de Castro. Roberto Bolaño as World
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