Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

Introduction

This volume collects most of the newspaper columns and articles that Roberto Bolaño published between 1998 and 2003. Also included are a few scattered prefaces, as well as the texts of some talks or speeches given by Bolaño during the same period. Taken together, they make up a surprisingly rounded whole, offering in their entirety a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented “autobiography.”

The starting date, 1998, isn’t arbitrary. Up until then (and despite the critical success of Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, in 1996, and the short-story collection Llamadas telefónicas [Phone Calls], in 1997), Roberto was a little-known writer who lived in relative isolation in Blanes, a coastal town in the Spanish province of Gerona, north of Barcelona. It was after the publication of The Savage Detectives, in 1998, and the powerful response the novel elicited, that Roberto was given the opportunity to write for various Spanish and Latin American publications, and he began to be called upon to give lectures, write prefaces, preside at book launches, and participate in conferences.

Today, it’s hard to grasp how quickly all of this happened. In fact, the oldest of the pieces collected here — “Who Would Dare?” — is an isolated article that appeared in Babelia, the literary supplement of the Spanish newspaper El País, in January 1998. Less than a year later, Bolaño agreed to write a more or less weekly column for the Diari de Girona. The first was published in January 1999, and from then on, Bolaño — who had begun to acquire a taste for this new kind of writing — continued to publish articles on a fairly regular basis, and also to field a growing number of requests for his presence at different events.

As a result, all of the texts collected here were written in the short span of about five years. It makes sense, then, that the tone should be consistent, that multiple internal resonances should be revealed, and that the pieces should fit together in a natural way, with surprising neatness. In assembling the volume, a strict chronological order might have been adopted. But in the end this was rejected in favor of a more deliberate scheme, according to which the different materials are grouped in six main sections, preceded by a brief “Self-Portrait” and concluding with one of the last interviews that Bolaño gave shortly before he died.

First come three talks or speeches (either term is better than lectures) delivered by Roberto on very different occasions. The adjective “insufferable” has been attached to all three, deliberately: to underscore the close relationship of these speeches with the two that Roberto himself included at the end of his posthumous collection, El gaucho insufrible (2003) [The Insufferable Gaucho]. “Literatura + enfermedad = enfermedad” [Literature + Illness = Illness] and “Los mitos de Cthulhu” [The Myths of Cthulhu] were surprising because of their aggressive stance, provocatively full of categorical statements. “The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom,” the first of the “three insufferable speeches” gathered here, continues in the same provocative vein; it begins with a discussion of Martín Fierro, the ultimate insufferable gaucho, and is dedicated to the patron saints of post-Borgesian Argentine literature. The other two speeches are somewhat different in character, much more personal. The “Caracas Address” is the text that Bolaño read in Venezuela when his novel The Savage Detectives won the 1999 Rómulo Gallegos Prize. It’s an unexpectedly confessional speech, in which Bolaño makes a public profession of his literary faith and comes to state, with moving seriousness, that “everything I’ve written is a love letter or farewell letter to my own generation.” “Literature and Exile,” meanwhile, reflects on a subject as crucial to Bolaño’s work as to his life; very shortly after giving this speech he faced the intense experience of returning, for the first time in twenty-five years, to Chile, the country of his birth.

“Fragments of a Return to the Native Land” is the title of a long piece that Bolaño wrote upon his return from the first of two trips he made to Chile, at the end of 1998. The same title heads the block of texts that serve as the backbone of this volume. The first was written — like the speech “Literature and Exile” — just before Bolaño’s return to Chile. His first impressions of this trip are very clearly described in the piece cited above, which is wary yet warm in tone, full of humor. Shortly afterward, however, Bolaño published a much darker, more bitter piece in the Barcelona magazine Ajoblanco. It’s the account of a dinner to which he was invited by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit and her husband, the socialist minister Jorge Arrate, spokesman of the Frei government. The story — recast later in By Night in Chile — was soon making the rounds in Chile and, not surprisingly, feelings were hurt. As a result, when Bolaño traveled to Chile for the second time, in December 1999, the atmosphere was stormy, and even hostile, and Bolaño was shut out by the country’s cultural establishment. This had to happen sooner or later, given Bolaño’s visceral response to Chilean politics and society, as well as culture, and, more specifically, poetry. The texts collected in this section give a good sense of this response. Among them, special mention should be made of the piece on Nicanor Parra, a crucial influence on Bolaño’s work, as is evident in many places. It’s impossible to explain Bolaño’s poetry (and Bolaño, of course, was first and foremost a poet) without keeping in mind Parra’s influence. But the deep effect of the great Chilean poet is also recognizable in Bolaño’s more or less insufferable speeches and his increasingly cantankerous, irreverent, and havoc-wreaking public persona.

The bulk of this volume consists of the columns that, under the heading “Between Parentheses,” Bolaño wrote for the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias. Their forerunner was the column that Bolaño wrote regularly for more than a year for the Diari de Girona, of the Catalan city of the same name. The staff there, particularly Salvador Cargol, the editor of the arts section, deserve credit for having been the first to think of him as a columnist, when such a thing had never crossed Bolaño’s mind. Starting in January 1999, Bolaño wrote for the Diari de Girona as noted, and continued to write for it for almost a year and a half, until the spring of 2000. Bolaño’s column usually ran alongside the paper’s editorial. There was something humorous, it must be said, about Bolaño sharing space with the Catholic writer Josep María Gironella, once-renowned author of The Cypresses Believe in God and One Million Dead, among many other books. In the end, Bolaño published nearly fifty articles in the Diari de Girona, as well as a number of reviews. The pieces were translated at the newspaper’s offices. Some of the Spanish originals were never found, and as a result those articles are not included here.

Soon after he stopped writing regularly for the Diari de Girona, it was Bolaño himself who, in reponse to an invitation to write a piece for his friend Andrés Braithwaite at Las Últimas Noticias (a venerable Chilean newspaper with a large circulation), proposed a weekly column. Roberto’s correspondence with Braithwaite, full of nudges and in-jokes, makes it possible to follow their planning step by step. It’s worth noting Bolaño’s original proposal, as he described it to Braithwaite in July 2000: “On a different subject: I’ve been thinking that we might publish (emphasis on might) my one-page articles that have only appeared in Catalan, along with some other completely new things. These are pieces on writers, occasionally on European and American movies and artists. They’re yours if you want them. Let me know if you’re interested [. .] I could make it a weekly column (there are more than forty already written).”

The next day, Roberto specifies: “I’d like to have a column where I can talk about everything from the most obscure Provençal poet to the most celebrated Polish novelist, which will all sound like the same gibberish in Santiago. The truth is, these pieces will be collected into a book at some point, and that’s why I want to get in the ones that were already published in Catalan. To be perfectly clear: this would be an essentially literary column.”

Andrés Braithwaite accepted Bolaño’s proposal, and the two immediately began trying to come up with a good title for the column. “I think it should have a title,” says Bolaño, and he suggests, tongue in cheek: “HELLO, GOD SPEAKING? THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA? THE ORACLE OF DELPHI? THE DIVINE SCOURGE?… I’m joking. I repeat: joking. The truth is I can’t come up with anything. page gues is a bad title, but that’s the idea. Or: NOTES. Something along those lines.” The matter was resolved after some back and forth around a list of suggestions sent by Braithwaite that caused Bolaño “considerable amusement.” Among them was “Between Parentheses,” which they both liked.

As this demonstrates, the idea of collecting Bolaño’s newspaper columns in a book was very much a part of his own plans. The long section into which they’re gathered is divided into three parts. I) In the first are the pieces that Bolaño didn’t reclaim for his column in Las Últimas Noticias. Not all are included, since, as noted, the Spanish originals of some couldn’t be found. II) The columns in the second part were all published in Las Últimas Noticias but many were previously published in the Diari de Girona. III) As for the pieces in the third part, almost all were originally published in Las Últimas Noticias.

In the case of the columns that were first published in the Diari de Girona and then in Las Últimas Noticias (about twenty), it was decided to follow the sequence that Bolaño established for the Chilean newspaper. This makes sense considering the greater care that Bolaño seems to have taken in his second stint as a columnist, when he was beginning to be a well-known writer and to contemplate the possibility of collecting his journalistic writings in a book. In any case, it’s important to stress the periodic nature of the columns gathered in this section, written at weekly or bi-weekly intervals, all more or less similar in length and linked to one another in the manner of diary entries, in which the author expresses his likes, loves, infatuations, and obsessions.

The next section, titled “Scenes,” collects some travel articles and other occasional pieces whose common denominator is the evocation of places that were familiar to Bolaño, or that he visited occasionally. The Catalan town of Blanes, a strong presence in a number of Bolaño’s columns, naturally takes center stage. Bolaño always felt very comfortable in this seaside town, which he encountered for the first time — as he explains in “Town Crier of Blanes” — in Últimas tardes con Teresa [Last Evenings with Teresa], the novel by Juan Marsé, which he read avidly while he was still living in Mexico. The Blanes beach, meanwhile, is the setting for “Beach,” a purely fictional piece that might have been included in any of Bolaño’s story collections.

In this regard, it should be stressed that Bolaño’s books, from very early on, displayed a marked tendency to flow easily from one genre to another. In his last two “story” collections, this translated into the grouping together, without any sort of distinction, of texts of very different types. In the collection Putas asesinas [Killer Whores] (2001), a piece like “Dance Card” already has an unequivocally autobiographical slant. And in the collection El gaucho insufrible Bolaño planned to include what were originally two talks or speeches that, as we’ve seen, bear a clear resemblance to those included in the first section of this book. At the start of El gaucho insufrible, too, comes “Jim,” which Bolaño originally wrote as a column for Las Últimas Noticias and which the reader will find here again, so that it remains part of the series to which it first belonged. Like so many of the other pieces gathered here, “Jim” is ambiguous in nature, midway between autobiographical sketch and fiction. Meanwhile, “Beach,” whose narrator is an ex-junkie, belongs fully to the genre of fiction, though it clearly has its origins in another column by Bolaño: “Sun and Skull,” first published in the Diari de Girona, in 1999, and republished a year later, with slight modifications, in Las Últimas Noticias. All of which leads to the conclusion that this book sits naturally alongside the books that Bolaño himself published before his death, making it possible to speculate that, far from trying to conceal its very miscellaneous character, Bolaño himself would have underscored it, assigning the book to the same category as Putas asesinas and El gaucho insufrible.

The fifth section deals entirely with writers and books. Again, these are occasional pieces, written on assignment, mostly prefaces and the odd review, as well as a few stray obituaries (like Camilo José Cela’s) and pieces written to celebrate the publication of a book (like “Notes on Jaime Bayly”). At the end comes what is certainly one of Bolaño’s last pieces, “Sevilla Kills Me,” a fragment of an unfinished speech that he planned to read at the first Encuentro de Escritores Latinoamericanos [Conference of Latin American Writers], organized by the publishing house Seix Barral and held in Sevilla in June 2003. Bolaño traveled to Sevilla without having finished the speech, reading instead “Los mitos de Cthulhu,” which was already written. It’s clear that if finished, “Sevilla Kills Me” would join the company of the “insufferable speeches.” Its content, in any case, makes plain the context in which one must view the back-slaps and knuckle-raps, the winks and cuffs that Bolaño deals his contemporaries, particularly the young Latin American writers who, justifiably or not, constantly cite him as an influence.

“The Private Life of a Novelist,” the last of the sections into which this volume is divided, consists of four short pieces in which Bolaño recalls his education as a reader and reflects on his “literary kitchen,” permitting himself to offer some “advice on the art of writing stories” and providing some clues to The Savage Detectives.

The book ends with one of the last interviews that Bolaño gave, if not the last. The interview was conducted by Mónica Maristain, for the Mexican edition of Playboy, and it came out on the day he died. Bolaño sent written answers, and claimed he’d had fun with it. The result is a kind of sketch, for which Bolaño posed with characteristic openness and irony.

In putting together this book, it was necessary to overcome some scruples about doing so without the express consent of the writer. But, as we’ve seen, Bolaño himself more than once announced his intention of preparing a collection of his journalistic pieces, which provides an initial alibi for proceeding in his stead. There’s room nevertheless, for reasonable doubt as to which pieces Bolaño might or might not have decided to include, what his selection criteria might have been, and how he might have ordered the pieces. In these matters there’s no guidance to be had, so an attempt has been made to proceed as neutrally as possible, without relinquishing minimal standards of organization. There has been no “censorship,” nor were any pieces automatically ruled out (with the exception, previously noted, of those published in Catalan that couldn’t be located in the original version). Another matter are the undiscovered pieces that will doubtless surface here and there once this volume has been published. There are unlikely to be many of them. In any case, this volume isn’t defined by its zeal for exhaustiveness, particularly since it was decided at the outset not to reprint a number of very old pieces, published during the years when Bolaño lived in Mexico. To include them in this volume would have meant disrupting the notable harmony of the elements of which it is presently composed. Also, there was some hurry to get these pieces into readers’ hands. This haste was motivated by a wish that they be read while the memory of the writer was still fresh, and as I write these lines, a year has not yet passed since his death.

At the end of the volume, the source for each piece is provided, along with a few explanatory notes. It can be seen here that only in exceptional cases, when a piece is of particular interest, has it been included without definite proof of publication. Our aim has been simply to gather Bolaño’s scattered writings, not to provide a place for unpublished pieces, or to pretend to make inroads into his posthumous body of work, which is immense.

At this point, it seems unnecessary to justify our choice of title — he chose it. All of the collected pieces were written by Roberto Bolaño during pauses in his incessant creative labors, or “between parentheses,” and that urgency inevitably shines through in this volume, most of its pieces written in the course of the writer’s increasingly desperate struggle with death to finish the monumental 2666, which will surely confirm him as an utterly exceptional novelist, an essential figure.

We began by saying that this volume amounts to something like a personal cartography of Roberto Bolaño and comes closest, of everything he wrote, to being a kind of fragmented “autobiography.” That the pieces it contains are — as the author stressed — of a “basically literary” nature, doesn’t contradict this assertion. Borges boasted more about the books he’d read than the ones he’d written. In the “self-portrait” at the start of this volume, Bolaño, assiduous reader of Borges, claims to be “much happier reading than writing.”

“Criticism is the modern form of autobiography,” says Ricardo Piglia in Formas breves [Short Forms]. And he adds: “Writing fiction changes how we read, and a writer’s criticism is the secret mirror of his work.” Sergio Pitol says something similar in El arte de la fuga [The Art of Escape], a book that, like Piglia’s, bears a certain family resemblance to Between Parentheses. One might suggest other precedents for this kind of confessional writing through reading, understood as an autobiographical approach to the fiction writer, but what has been said will suffice to justify the guiding role that this book is called to play in the proper reception of Roberto Bolaño as an author whose influence in the realms of Spanish and Latin American literature has only just begun to be felt.

Ignacio Echevarría

Barcelona, May 2004