Free Roberto Bolano by Roberto Bolaño Page B

the ready, enormously framed eyeglasses, a never-ending cigarette between his fingers and, whenever there is a shortage, sharp, blunt wit.
    Roberto Bolaño, born in Chile in 1953, is the best thing to happen to the writing profession in a long time. Since becoming famous and pocketing the Herralde (1998) and Rómulo Gallegos (1999) prizes for his monumental
The Savage Detectives
, perhaps the great Mexican novel of our time, his influence and stature have grown steadily: Everything he says, with his pointed sense of humor, his exquisite intelligence, and everything he writes, with a sure pen, great poetic risk and profound creative commitment, is worthy of the attention of those who admire and, of course, those who detest him.
    The author, who turns up as a character in the novel
Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas and is paid homage in Jorge Volpi’s last novel,
An End to Madness
, is a divider of opinions, like all brilliant men, and a generator of bitter antipathy, despite his tender good nature. His voice is somewhere between high-pitched and hoarse, and like any good Chilean, the one with which he responds is alwayscourteous. He will not write one story more until finishing his next novel, which will be about the murder of countless women in Ciudad Juárez. He is already at 900 pages and not finished yet.
    Bolaño lives in Blanes, Spain, and he’s very sick. He hopes that a liver transplant will give him the strength to live with the same intensity worshipped by those fortunate enough to address him in private. His friends say he sometimes forgets about his doctor’s visits because he’s writing.
    At fifty years old, Bolaño has crisscrossed Latin America as a backpacker, escaped the clutches of Pinochet because one of his jailers was a classmate in school, lived in Mexico (a section of Bucareli Street will someday bear his name), got to know Farabundo Martí’s militants before they assassinated the poet Roque Dalton in El Salvador, kept watch over a Catalonian campground and sold costume jewelry in Europe. Also, he always stole good books because reading is not just a matter of posturing. He has transformed the course of Latin American literature. And he has done it without warning and without asking permission, the way Juan García Madero, adolescent antihero of his glorious
The Savage Detectives
, would have done: “I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my aunt insisted and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.” The rest—the remaining pages of the novel—hasbeen compared to Julio Cortázar’s
Hopscotch
and even Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. In the face of such hyperbole, he might have said, “No way.” Thus, on this occasion, let’s get to what’s important: the interview.
    MÓNICA MARISTAIN: Were you blessed with a kind of courage in life by being born dyslexic?
    ROBERTO BOLAÑO: Not at all. There were problems when I played soccer, I’m left-handed; problems when I masturbated, I’m left-handed; problems when I wrote, I’m right-handed. So, as you can see, no significant problems.
    MM: Did Enrique Vila-Matas remain a friend after the fight you had with the organizers of the Rómulo Gallegos prize?
    RB: My fight with the jury and the organizers of the prize was due basically to their expectation that I blindly endorse, from Blanes, their choice without having participated. Their methods, transmitted to me by phone by a Chavista pseudo-poet, too closely resembled the deterrent arguments of the Casa de las Américas (Cuba). It seemed to me that eliminating Daniel Sada or Jorge Volpi in the first round was an enormous mistake, for example. They said what I wanted was to travel with my wife and kids—something that was completely false. Isuppose that from my indignation over this lie, a letter surfaced