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

Sources

The references that follow don’t pretend to be exhaustive. As is not uncommon, Bolaño occasionally submitted for publication pieces that had previously appeared elsewhere, especially if in a different country. To follow the trail of each and every one of the pieces gathered here through the many Spanish and Latin American newspapers and magazines to which Bolaño contributed is a task that lies outside the scope of this volume. In fact, the volume was assembled in the knowledge that some pieces that had been overlooked would inevitably turn up here and there after it was published. At least there won’t be many of them, since access was had to the computer files where Bolaño himself kept most, if not all, of his contributions — in considerable disarray, it must be said. Which means that it’s impossible to be sure whether a few of the pieces included here were ever previously published. When it’s known that a certain piece was published in more than one place, the different sources are given. In just a few cases, and in fairly arbitrary fashion, some explanatory notes are included when judged to be of interest to the reader.

PREFACE

Self-Portrait. Brief autobiographical statement written at the request of the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies when, in 1999, Bolaño won the prize awarded by the Center.

THREE INSUFFERABLE SPEECHES

The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom. Read December 14, 2002 at the Kosmópolis International Festival of Literature hosted by the Centre de Cultura Contemporànea (CCCB) in Barcelona. Bolaño introduced the reading of the text with the following remarks (which are transcribed from a tape recording): “This piece is very limited in scope and hasn’t been revised, which means that everything said in it is subject to subsequent rectification. Originally I wanted to discuss the literature of the Southern Cone of America, or Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but Argentine literature is so rich, so powerful, that in the end it seemed more fitting to focus exclusively on it; on Argentine fiction, basically. My initial idea was to talk about Argentine literature from Borges to Rodrigo Fresán, but I soon realized that in order to do that I would’ve needed one hundred pages, not ten, and I was no more prepared to write one hundred pages than you would’ve been to listen to them. The piece is therefore limited to the drift of Argentine literature since Borges’s death; to its gangster drift since Borges’s death, basically. Sadly, this gangster literature, or literature of doom is the most vital, the richest. Personally, it doesn’t excite me much, mostly because I’m sick of the literature of doom, but there’s no doubt that it’s the most vital, and that it has the most influence on the rest of Latin American literature. The literature of doom, as I’ve said, is a kind of sub-world or infra-world outside the law.” For his reading, Bolaño numbered the paragraphs of the text.

Caracas Address. Read August 2, 1999 at the award ceremony for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, in Caracas. Published in Diagonal (cultural supplement of the newspaper El Metropolitano, Santiago de Chile), September 5, 1999 (under the title “Corriendo la línea” [Running the Line]). Also published in the Spanish edition of the magazine Letras Libres, Number 10, October 1999, and in the magazine Lateral (Barcelona), Number 59, November 1999, pp. 40–41. Collected by Celina Manzoni in Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia [Writing as Tauromachy], Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2002, pp. 207–214.

Literature and Exile. Read April 3, 2000 as part of “Europe and Latin America: Literature, Immigration, and Identity,” a symposium organized by the Austrian Society for the Literature of Vienna. Published in sábado (cultural supplement of the newspaper unomásuno, Mexico), October 7, 2000; also published in the magazine Turia (Teruel), number 54, November 2000, pp. 41–46.

FRAGMENTS OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND

Exiles. Possibly unpublished text, in any case written before Bolaño’s first trip to Chile, in November 1998. It’s likely that Bolaño wrote it for the lecture series “Literature and its Limits,” organized by Jesús Ferrero as part of the Navarra Festivals, 1997. Bolaño gave his talk on August 13.

Fragments of a Return to the Native Land. Published in the magazine Paula (Santiago de Chile), Number 792, February 1999, pp. 98–101. The piece was preceded by the following editor’s note: “Last November, when the writer Roberto Bolaño was in Chile as a juror for Paula’s story competition, we asked him to write his impressions of the country after 25 years away. Two months later he sent us what he’d written, begging us not to cut a thing or change a single comma. We obeyed, and here’s his piece in full, exclusively for our readers.”

The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out. Ajoblanco (Barcelona), Number 116, May 1999, pp. 54–57. The piece was accompanied by the following editor’s note: “The writer Roberto Bolaño, winner of the Herralde Prize for The Savage Detectives, has returned to his native Chile after twenty-five years of exile. Three months ago he told us in these very pages that he hoped to find a ‘tolerant country,’ but that was ‘just a dream.’ This is the account of his bitter homecoming.” As noted in the Introduction, the piece soon made the rounds in Chile, arousing feelings of resentment, so that when Bolaño returned to Chile in November 1999, he was the frequent target of hostile remarks and attitudes. By then, Bolaño had won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and his growing fame and prestige did much to heighten the suspicions and offense fostered by his often defiant declarations about the culture, politics, and society of his native country. An unpublished text discovered among Bolaño’s posthumous papers describes an incident that occurred during his first trip to Chile, in 1998: “The next year, in 1999, I traveled to Chile at the invitation of the Book Fair. Possibly to celebrate my recent receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, almost all the Chilean writers decided to attack me en patota, as they say in Chile, or en masse. I counterattacked. An older woman, who had lived all her life on the handouts that the State gives to artists, called me a lackey. I’ve never lived on the largesse of any country, so this accusation surprised me. It was also said that I was a patero, which doesn’t mean the same thing as patota. A patero doesn’t necessarily belong to a patota, as one might inadvertently assume, although in every patota there are always pateros. A patero is a flatterer, a smooth-talker, a bootlicker; an ass-kisser, in proper Spanish. The incredible thing about this is that the people who were calling me names were Chileans, left-wing as well as right-wing, who kissed ass incessantly to cling to their shreds of fame, whereas everything that I’ve achieved (which isn’t much) I’d gotten without the help of anyone. What was it they didn’t like about me? Well, someone said it was my teeth. There I have to say they were absolutely right.” This isn’t the place to explain the allusions that Bolaño makes here, though it’s worth confirming that everything he reports is true, including the remark by a distinguished Chilean writer about his teeth.

Words from Outer Space. El Periódico (Barcelona), February 5, 1999. Bolaño alludes to some clandestine tape-recordings of telephone conversations between military commanders the day of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet, September 11, 1973.

A Modest Proposal. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published, though by all indications it was. In any case, the text was written after Bolaño’s first trip to Chile, in November 1998.

Out in the Cold. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. As with the previous piece, it hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was published, though by all indications it was.

Chilean Poetry Under Inclement Skies. Remarks commemorating the publication of a single-subject issue of the magazine Litoral (Málaga) titled Chile: Contemporary Poetry (with a Glance at Contemporary Art), Numbers 223–224, November 1999, pp. 9–10. Also published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias, May 2000.

On Bruno Montané. Jacket copy for a book of poems by Bruno Montané, El maletín de Stevenson. El cielo de los topos [Stevenson’s Suitcase: The Moles’ Sky], Mexico, Ediciones El Aduanero, 2002.

Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra. Remarks commemorating the publication of the catalogue for the exhibition Artefactos visuales. Dirección obligada [Visual Artifacts: Address Required], by Nicanor Parra, on display at the Telefónica Foundation of Madrid from April 25 to June 10, 2001.

The Lost. Text found among Roberto’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published.

The Transparent Mystery of José Donoso. Hoja por Hoja (literary supplement of the Mexican newspaper Reforma, Mexico), special issue for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, November 1999.

On Literature, the National Literature Prize, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life. Published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias, August 27, 2002. Shortly after sending this article to Las Últimas Noticias, Bolaño sent me a copy of it by email, with the following message: “Dear Ignacio: Restif de la Bretonne on the barricades or how to make more friends in Chile. The neo-pamphlet will be the great literary genre of the 22nd century. In this sense, I’m a minor author, but ahead of my times.” Soon afterward, in response to my questions and comments on the text, he wrote (August 26, 2002): “Friday is the national litherathure [sic] prize gala, tacky ceremony if ever there was one. I hope that my pamphlet won’t be read solely in that context. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what people think. Metaphor matters to me, meter matters to me. It’s not a suicidal gesture — no sir, as the excellent and always under-appreciated Lute said: legitimate self-defense, your honor, legitimate self-defense.” The National Prize that year was won by Teitelbaum.

BETWEEN PARENTHESES

As mentioned in the Introduction, the columns gathered in this section were published in the Diari de Girona (the early ones), and later on in the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias. The first Diari de Girona column appeared on January 10, 1999 (“The Best Gang”) and the last on April 2, 2000 (“Hell’s Angels”). Bolaño ended up publishing nearly forty columns in the Diari de Girona, at more or less weekly intervals. Here they’re presented in the order in which they appeared, except for a few which have been impossible to date. The columns were published in Catalan translation, and in some cases the Spanish originals couldn’t be found. Those pieces aren’t reproduced here, since it seemed pointless to include texts by Bolaño translated from another language. During the months that he published his column in the Diari de Girona, Bolaño gradually began to contribute to other publications (especially Diagonal, the cultural supplement of the now-defunct El Metropolitano of Santiago, Chile, which was headed by his friend Roberto Brodsky), to which he occasionally sent the same pieces, sometimes simultaneously. The reasons why Bolaño chose to stop writing for the Diari de Girona are unknown, though it’s easy to imagine that around this time, with his work in increasing demand, he might have grown tired of the weekly effort of writing a column that had a very limited readership and for which he couldn’t have been paid a very enticing amount.

The first column in Las Últimas Noticias appeared on July 30, 2000 (“An Afternoon with Huidobro and Parra”). Bolaño began by recycling many of the columns already published in the Diari de Girona, sometimes lightly revised. The columns in Las Últimas Noticias were published once a week, with very few exceptions, until July 4, 2001 (“An Attempt at an Exhaustive Catalogue of Patrons”). Around this time, Bolaño informed Andrés Braithwaite that he wouldn’t be able to send him new articles because he was so absorbed by the writing of 2666. But behind this explanation lay a growing fatigue, due to health problems. In fact, beginning especially in January 2001, Bolaño’s correspondence with Andrés Braithwaite begins to contain frequent references to the deterioration of his health. “My health is bad,” writes Bolaño on January 16. “The long-awaited moment seems to have come or is imminent. . Of course, now I don’t feel like writing. In fact, I don’t even answer letters anymore. But maybe all of this will pass, and it’s caused by the fear or exhaustion that flare up in situations like this. Really, the situation has its humorous side.” On January 24 he returns again to the same subject: “I don’t feel much like working, it’s true. In my current state, what the body craves is the reading aloud of the Tibetan book of the dead or the praying of the rosary, but I won’t let you down.” And on February 7, never losing his sense of humor, he writes: “Today I sent you a piece [“The Ancestor”] that I think is good. A year from now you might even have enough material to put together a posthumous book. I suggest the following title: Thus Spake Bolaño. I don’t know, it seems tasteful and suggestive, as our friend Carlos Argentino Daneri from El Aleph would say.”

A little more than a year later, Bolaño decided to start up his column in Las Últimas Noticias again. “Get ready, girls, because Bolaño’s back. I’ll be writing. . weekly,” he tells Braithwaite on August 28, 2002. And on September 9, 2002, “Jim” is published, which marks the beginning of the third and final stage of Bolaño as columnist. This new round would end on January 20, 2003 (“Humor in the Wings”), once again for health reasons. Around this time Bolaño writes to Braithwaite, apologizing for the delay in sending the final column: “I’ve had it up to here with all the tests. And now I’m on the transplant list. In other words, they could call me at any minute, since my blood group — B+ — is rare, and according to the doctors, I’m not in a position to chivalrously give up my place in line. You know what this means. More Bolaño or finis terrae or c’est tout. I’m sorry to make things difficult for you, but ultimately that’s what editors are there for.” After he had stopped contributing to Las Últimas Noticias, as late as March 4, 2002, Bolaño promises Braithwaite that he’ll keep writing for the newspaper “as soon as I recover.” But as we know, that was not to be.

Like the columns for the Diari de Girona, the columns written for Las Últimas Noticias were eventually recycled by Bolaño for other publications, sometimes slightly recast, revised, or with new titles. On September 9, 2000, in sábado, the cultural supplement of the Mexican newspaper unomásuno, Bolaño published eight columns, under the title “Alfabeto de lecturas” [Alphabet of Readings] that had previously appeared in the Diari de Girona and were later reclaimed for Las Últimas Noticias. During the fall-winter of 2001–2002, in the same cultural supplement, Bolaño had a section titled “Carta de Blanes” [Letter from Blanes] that featured pieces that had generally been published before in one of the two newspapers. Later, in the summer of 2001, Roberto kicked off a short-lived new section titled “Ventana” [Window] in the Mexican weekly Cambio, for which he again used columns that he’d already written. And one can imagine the same thing happening here and there with whichever of the many publications, based in Spain or Chile, Mexico, Argentina, or any other Latin American country, that solicited contributions from Roberto.

At the same time, Roberto would occasionally appropriate pieces originally intended for other purposes for his columns. This was the case, for example, of the column titled “A Few Words for Enrique Lihn,” published September 30, 2002 and originally written as the prologue to Tigre de Pascua [Easter Tiger], by Enrique Lihn, published by Calembé in Santiago de Chile in the fall of 2002.

SCENES

Town Crier of Blanes. Read at the opening ceremony of the holiday celebrations in Blanes, July 1999.

The Maritime Jungle. El Viajero (travel supplement of the newspaper El País, January 9, 2000.

Beach. El Mundo (Madrid), August 17, 2000. The piece was part of a section titled “The Worst Summer of My Life.”

In Search of the Little Bull of Teruel [ch]. El Viajero (travel supplement of the newspaper El País, Madrid), March 25, 2001.

Vienna and the Shadow of a Woman. El País (Madrid), “Summer Magazine,” August 25, 2000.

The Last Place on the Map. El Mundo (Madrid), November 2, 2001.

Fateful Characters. Remarks commemorating the publication of the catalogue of an exhibition of photographs by Sergio Larraín held at the IVAM [Valencia Institute of Modern Art] from July 1 to September 26, 1999.

THE BRAVE LIBRARIAN

Our Guide to the Abyss. Prologue to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, published by the Biblioteca Universal del Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 11–21. Bolaño felt a great and enduring admiration for this novel. Later, in the text “About The Savage Detectives,” he would write that his novel was “a response, one of many, to Huckleberry Finn.”

The Mad Inventors. El Periódico (Barcelona), February 29, 1999.

Words and Deeds. El País (Madrid), January 19, 2002. This article was written two days after the death of Camilo José Cela, and it is a response to the countless obituaries that portrayed him in a very admiring light.

Vila-Matas’s Latest Book. Published as a review in the cultural supplement of the Diari de Girona, March 17, 2000. Also published in sábado (cultural supplement of the newspaper unomásuno, Mexico) on November 11, 2000.

The Brave Librarian. Diagonal (cultural supplement of the newspaper El Metropolitano, Santiago de Chile), August 22, 1999. Also published in the Diari de Girona, May 23, 1999.

Bomarzo. Prologue to Bomarzo, by Manuel Mujica Láinez, published by Biblioteca El Mundo (sold with the newspaper El Mundo), 2001.

The Cubs, Again. El Mundo (Madrid), August 11, 1999. Article published on the occasion of the publication of The Cubs in the collection “Las 100 Joyas del Milenio” [The 100 Gems of the Millennium], sold with the newspaper.

The Prince of the Apocalypse. Prologue to The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa, published by the Biblioteca El Mundo in 2001.

Notes on Jaime Bayly. Lateral (Barcelona), Number 53, May 1999, pp. 37–38. Also in Diagonal (cultural supplement of the newspaper El Metropolitano, Santiago, Chile), May 23, 1999. Text of remarks commemorating the publication of the book Yo amo a mi mami (Barcelona, Anagrama, 1999), at an event at the Barcelona bookstore La Central on Thursday, March 25, 1999. In the magazine, the piece appears under the title “Disforzados Characters, Patas. .”; here it’s given Bolaño’s original title.

A Stroll Through the Abyss. Published as a stand-alone story in Las Últimas Noticias, May 22, 2002. Later it was also published in the newspapers Página 12 of Buenos Aires and Reforma of Mexico.

Sevilla Kills Me. Unfinished speech that Roberto Bolaño planned to read at the I Encuentro de Escritores Latinoamericanos [First Conference of Latin American Writers], organized by the publishing house Seix Barral and held in Sevilla during the month of June, 2003. In the end, Bolaño read the text “Los Mitos de Cthulhu” [“The Myths of Cthulhu”], previously presented in a course on his work offered by Cátedra de las Américas (Institut Català de Cooperació Iberoamericana de Barcelona) in November 2002. The text is collected in the volume Palabra de América [Word of America] (Barcelona, Seix Barral, 2003, pp. 17–21, which is a collection of the papers presented by the twelve participants in the conference.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A NOVELIST

Who Would Dare? Babelia (book supplement of El País, Madrid), January 31, 1998. The piece was part of a section titled “Mis lecturas” [Books I’ve Read].

The Private Life of a Novelist. Clarín (Buenos Aires), March 25, 2001. Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories. Quimera (Barcelona), number 166, February 1998, p. 66. In the magazine, it was published under the title “Numbers.”

About “The Savage Detectives.” Text published as part of the program for the ceremony in which Roberto Bolaño received the 1999 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, held in Caracas, April 1999.

THE END

Roberto Bolaño. Interview with Mónica Maristain published in the Mexican edition of Playboy, Number 9, July 2003, pp. 22–30. Also published in the Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12, July 23, 2003, under the title “Distant Star,” retained here.