Early in 2007, the Colombian magazine Semana asked a panel of experts to select the 100 best novels in Spanish published during the last 25 years. Few were surprised to see Gabriel García Marquez take the top honors with his Love in the Time of Cholera. But who was Roberto Bolaño, who, captured both third and fourth spots with his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666?
At the time of the Semana survey, neither of these novels had been made available in English translation. Yet The Savage Detectives was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux a few days later to much acclaim. (See my review here.) And now Bolaño's 2666 appears, a nine hundred page magnum opus that will no doubt solidify this author’s posthumous reputation as one of the leading—and most unsettling—modern novelists.
How does one begin to describe this writer’s unconventional work to the uninitiated? I am tempted to call him a Latin American Kerouac, given his wandering bohemian protagonists with their idiosyncratic literary ideals and often arbitrary itineraries. Yet at many junctures 2666 will remind readers of the very different sensibility of Cormac McCarthy, with his violent tales of the US-Mexico borderlands. One critic has taken a different tack, going so far as to proclaim this book as the novel that Jorge Luis Borges might have written. Yet none of these pigeonholes do justice the avant garde sensibility that constantly lingers below the surface of Bolaño’s fiction, and often threatens to take charge of the narrative. The diversity of these descriptions is perhaps the best indicator that Bolaño is his own man, straddling many traditions without settling comfortably into any one of them.
Bolaño, who died from liver failure at age 50 in 2003, was a wanderer himself for much of his life. In his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999, Bolaño defended his unwillingness to give complete allegiance to any one country, noting that “a writer’s country is his language.” A vagabond, perhaps by nature, and a traveler by either choice or necessity—he was born in Chile, raised partly in Mexico, and spent decades in Spain— Bolaño sometimes saw the Spanish language as his true homeland. Playing on this comparison, he described the quality of his writing as his passport, and defined quality in revealing terms: “to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.”
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