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Obituary Roberto
Bolaño Chilean
creator of 'infrarealism' Nick Caistor The
Guardian, Thursday 17 July 2003 16.54 BST Article historyRoberto
Bolaño, who
has died at Blanes in northern Spain of liver failure, aged 50, was one
of the
most talented and surprising of a new generation of Latin American
writers. Born in the
Chilean capital of Santiago, Bolaño was typical of a generation of
Latin
American writers who had to cope with exile and a difficult
relationship with
their home country, its values and its ways of seeking accommodation
with a
turbulent history. Bolaño turned to literature to express these
experiences,
mixing autobiography, a profound knowledge of literature, and a wicked
sense of
humour in several novels and books of short stories that won him
admirers
throughout Latin America and Spain. Bolaño spent
much of his adolescence with his parents in Mexico. He returned to
Chile in
1972, to take part in President Allende's attempts to bringing
revolutionary
change to the country. Arrested for a week after the September 1973
Pinochet
coup, Bolaño eventually made his way once more to Mexico, where he
embarked on
his literary career. At first he wrote poetry, strongly marked by
Chilean
surrealism and experimentalism, but after moving to Spain in 1977 he
turned to
prose, first in short-story form and then more ambitious novels. His
mischievous spirit upset many fellow writers, who often bore the brunt
of his
attacks. Fed up with the pious sentimentalism of the kind of socially
committed
literature he felt was expected of Chilean writers, he aimed to subvert
good
taste, revolutionary or conservative. This iconoclasm led to books such
as the
History Of Nazi Literature In Latin America, an invented genealogy of
writers. In 1998,
Bolaño published his best-known work, the sprawling novel Los
Detectives
Salvajes (The Wild Detectives), a challenging mixture of thriller,
philosophical and literary reflections, pastiche and autobiography,
which he
baptised "infrarealism". The novel won him the Herralde and Romulo
Gallegos prizes, and established Bolaño as one of the foremost writers
in the
Hispanic world. English
readers so far have only been able to read By Night In Chile, published
by
Harvill this year. This is the most straightforward of his books,
looking back
as it does to the Pinochet days in Chile and the coexistence of evil,
compromise and literature in extreme situations. When Bolaño
came to London early this year for the English publication of By Night
in
Chile, he was already very ill from a longstanding liver complaint.
Despite
this, he was still talking non-stop of the many projects he was
involved in,
including a mammoth novel provisionally entitled 2666, already more
than 1,000
pages long, that dealt with the murders of more than 300 young women in
the
Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, another novel, and a new
collection of
poetry. But what
most delighted him during his London visit was the fact that he was
already
becoming better known in Spain as a fictional character than as his
"real" self. This is because he is one of the main characters in the
Spanish bestseller by Javier Cercas, The Soldiers Of Salamis, where
"Roberto Bolaño" helps the author to successfully complete his novel. This
mingling of reality and fiction seemed to Bolaño a confirmation that
life and
literature are of equal importance. As he said at the time, "You never
finish reading, even if you finish all your books, just as you never
finish
living, even though death is certain." Bolaño had
faced this certainty for years, as his liver deteriorated. He died in
hospital
while awaiting a liver transplant, and is survived by his wife Carolina
and two
children, Alexandra and Lautaro. · Roberto
Bolaño, writer, born April 28 1953; died July 15 2003.
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