Free Roberto Bolano by Roberto Bolaño

Americas
does not come from there. This book, I’ll give it to you in descending order, owes a lot to
The Temple of Iconoclasts
by Rodolfo Wilcock , who is an Argentine writer but who wrote the book in Italian.
    Argentine author, critic, and translator Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919–1978) spent time working at nearly every major Latin American literary magazine. His work
The Temple of the Iconoclasts
, available in English, was a seminal text for Bolaño. He claims “buy it, steal it, borrow it, but read it.”
    EA: He’s almost a cult writer.
    RB: It’s just that he is an exceptional writer; he is a major writer. He is a writer who, I think, has done nothing but grow since death. Wilcock keeps growing. At the same time, his book
The Temple of Iconoclasts
itself owes a debt to
A Universal History of Infamy
by Borges, which is not surprising at all because Wilcock was a friend and admirer of Borges. Borges’
A Universal History of Infamy
, too, owes a debt to one of his teachers, Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican writer who has a book I think called
Real and Imagined Portraits
—my memory is in torpor.It’s just a jewel. Alfonso Reyes’ book also owes a debt to Marcel Schwob’s
Imaginary Lives
, which is where this all comes from. But at the same time,
Imaginary Lives
owes a major debt to the methodology and form of certain biographies perused by encyclopedic types. Those are the uncles, parents and godparents of my book, I think, which is without a doubt the worst of the bunch, but there you have it anyway.
    The French author Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a precursor to the surrealists. His major work is
Imaginary Lives
(1896).
    EA: Following the enormous critical impact
The Savage Detectives
had, were you certain then you were going to dedicate yourself to this forever?
    RB: No, I had been certain before—certain in the economic sense—that I could live from literature, as a matter of fact I had been certain years before. I started to live from literature starting in 1992 and
Savage Detectives
was published in 1998. Starting in 1992, which coincides with a grave illness, my income has been exclusively gained from literature.
    EA: There is a general contempt that writers have toward critics, but you ask for improvement from criticism.
    RB: Literary criticism is a discipline that represents something more for me than literature. Literature is prose, novel and short story, dramaturgy, poetry,and literary essays and literary criticism. Above all, I think it is necessary that there be literary criticism—without accident—in our countries, not ten lines about an author the critic will probably never read again. That is to say, it’s necessary to have criticism that mends the literary landscape along the way.
    EA: I know many book jacket critics.
    RB: I’ve practiced literary criticism myself, and one could say a lot about that.
    EA: Within mass media, there is a tendency to limit the importance of genre.
    RB: Perhaps, but I think it is very important. I view criticism as a literary creation, not just as the bridge that unites the reader with the writer. Literary critics, if they do not assume themselves to be the reader, are also throwing everything overboard. The interesting thing about literary critics, and that is where I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels, is that he assumes himself to be the reader, an endemic reader capable of arguing a reading, of proposing diverse readings, like something completely different from what criticism tends to be, which is like an exegesis or a diatribe. For me, Harold Bloom is an example of a notable critic, although I am generally in disagreementwith him and even enraged by him, but I like to read him. Or Steiner: The French have a very long tradition of very creative critics and essayists who are very good, who illuminate not just one work but a whole era of literature, sometimes committing grave mistakes, but us narrators and writers also commit