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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"And then I never saw him again": this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolano's ten novels and three story collections--all completed in his torrential final decade, before he succumbed to a chronic liver ailment that he suspected would seal his fate--characters go through life in a state of agitated migration. They sever friendships, quit jobs, abandon apartments without giving notice, skip the return flight home, assume new identities, flee combustive love affairs, cut off ties to everyone they have ever known, head off into the desert, simply disappear. Relationships, in Bolano's world, tend to be febrile but fleeting, yielding memories suffused by the afterglow of emotion; his narratives are often the testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind. It's no coincidence that Bolano's most heartbreaking creation--the rebellious, doomed poet at the heart of his 1998 masterwork, "The Savage Detectives," which Farrar, Straus has just published in translation--is named Ulises.
Bolano, who was born in Santiago in 1953 ("the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died," as he noted in an essay), led a life that was itself marked by uprootedness. His father's job was to roam: he was a truck driver. His mother was a teacher. When Bolano was a child, he and his family shuttled between towns in Chile, and then, in 1968, they moved to Mexico City. Bolano found the dislocation exhilarating: his new home, he later recalled, was "a vast, almost imaginary place where freedom and metamorphosis were a daily spectacle." By this time, he had developed an appetite for literature so ravenous that it practically outstripped that of his idol, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges, Bolano consumed everything from arcane poetry to dime-store fiction. Unlike Borges, he stole most of his books.
Bolano, who was dyslexic, didn't enjoy the classroom, and he dropped out of high school, devoting himself to poetry. During the late sixties, mass demonstrations erupted frequently on Mexico City's streets, and Bolano revelled in the political ferment. He became a Trotskyist and travelled to El Salvador, where he befriended leftist poets who carried guns alongside their notebooks.
In the summer of 1973, he went back to Santiago, hoping to join a leftist revolution that had taken hold in Chile, with the election of a Socialist government. That September, Augusto Pinochet launched his coup. Bolano became a spy for the resistance. He was a feeble conspirator--charged with transmitting messages between dissidents, he felt pathetically conspicuous as he bicycled along Santiago's emptied-out streets--but the experience thrilled him. "I recall the days after the coup as rich ones, full of energy, full of eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen," he once wrote. (Photographs of him from this period show a handsome but malnourished-looking hippie: his wavy black hair was untended, and his delicate eyes were not yet dominated by the ovoid glasses that he adopted in middle age.)
Soon after the coup, Bolano was stopped at a highway checkpoint. His accent had mutated during his years abroad, and the police booked him as a "foreign terrorist." Bolano was detained for eight days, and perhaps would have been killed--Pinochet's regime murdered many dissident writers--were it not for a bizarre reversal of the kind that animates his fiction. One day, a prison guard walked up to Bolano and said, "Don't you remember me? I'm your buddy." The two men had briefly attended high school together; Bolano was promptly released. After four more months in Chile--a whirl of "black humor, friendship…and the danger of death"--Bolano realized that he had written only one poem, and that it wasn't any good.
He returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a cafe on Calle Bucareli--Mexico City's Left Bank--Bolano met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolano christened the infrarealistas. The group's aesthetic, Bolano later said, was French Surrealism fused with "Dadaism, Mexican style." They published iconoclastic magazines and...
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