Over the past two weeks we have chronicled the reading habits of Roberto Bolaño. We discussed Bolaño’s tastes for French, Spanish, Argentine, and American literature. And we looked at his favorite literary forms: the novel, poetry, the short story, and, even, the fake encyclopedia. Yet we have yet to scratch the surface. There’s of course much more.

But to recap: Here is your homework, assigned by Bolaño himself and in no particular order:

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

The complete works of Jorge Luis Borges

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares

Nadja - André Breton

Philosophical Dictionary - Voltaire

The Waste Books - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The Temple of Iconoclasts - Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

Imaginary Lives - Marcel Schwob

The Burning Plain - Juan Rulfo

Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

Bartleby & Co. - Enrique Vila-Matas

Montano’s Malady - Enrique Vila-Matas

Your Face Tomorrow (Series) - Javier Marías

The Speed of Light - Javier Cercas

The Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas

Complete Works & Other Stories - Augusto Monterroso

Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great - Nicanor Parra

Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole.

Ubu Roi - Alfred Jarry

Life: A User’s Manual - Georges Perec

The Castle and The Trial - Franz Kafka

The Tractatus - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Satyricon - Petronius

Pensées - Blaise Pascal

"Life itself is a quotation."

The work of Jorge Luis Borges made an indelible mark on Bolaño. When speaking of the books that marked his life, Bolaño refered simply to “the complete works of Borges.”

In an interview with Eliseo Álvarez published in 2005 in the Spanish literary journal Turia Bolaño describes the Borgian influence: “Borges illuminates a ton of writers and painters. For example, Xul Solar, who, if it weren’t for Borges, would probably only be known in Argentina. Perhaps Solar’s paintings deserve only to be known in Argentina, but by being touched by Borges, through the Borgian experience, they become paintings that transcend the limits of Argentina.”

In an essay in Entre paréntesis, Bolaño further expands on the influence of Borges by saying “While Borges was alive, Argentine literature became what most people now know of it.” He goes on to enumerate a list of Argentine authors like Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sábato, and Julio Cortázar who were “illuminated” by personal contact with Borges. Bolaño seems to have be enamored with the entire literary scene surrounding Borges: people like Macedonio Fernández (Borges’ mentor) and Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose book The Invention of Morel Bolaño describes as “the first and best fantastic novel in Latin America.” According to Bolaño,”When Borges died, everything stopped. It was as if Merlin had died, even if the literary salons of Buenos Aires weren’t exactly Camelot…Apollonian intelligence gave way to Dionysian despair.”

In a wonderful essay entitled “Windows into the Night,” published in The Nation in 2008, Marcela Valdes notes “that it was Borges who moved Bolaño from Dionysus’ to Apollo’s side. In “The Book That Survives,” Bolaño recalls that the first book he bought after he moved from Mexico City to Europe at 24 was the complete poems of Jorge Luis Borges. Almost thirty years later, he still remembered the ‘completely irrational’ joy he felt at holding the volume in his hands. ‘I bought it in Madrid in 1977,’ he writes, ‘and, though Borges’s poetry wasn’t unknown to me, that same night I read it until eight in the morning, as if the reading of those verses were the only reading possible for me, the only reading that could effectively distance me from a life that was, until then, immoderate.’”

Bolaño’s admiration of Borges cannot be overstated, not even by Bolaño himself. In a 1999 interview with the Chilean magazine Capital he notes that “Borges said practically everything.” In fact, when asked in in the same interview to describe his dedication to the Book, Bolaño echoes the famous Borges quote “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” by saying “In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings…a library is total generosity.”

In an another essay, Bolaño further simplifies by saying Borges was “Probably the greatest Latin American writer ever.”

Cervantes according to Dali

Bolaño spent much of his life in Spain, and he was deeply interested in the country’s literature. He was well versed in everything from the Spanish Golden Age to the works of Spanish friends and contemporaries. But when outlining Spanish literary history Bolaño traces it back to one man: Cervantes.

What better praise could Bolaño give Cervantes than this from a 1999 interview with the Chilean magazine Capital?

“I think all writers who write in Spanish have or should have a Cervantean influence. We are all indebted to Cervantes, in large or small part, but we are all indebted.”

Except maybe when, in an essay in Entre paréntesis, he claims that Cervantes may have “invented the novel.”

Here is a word on the strength of Quixote from the same 1999 interview:

“A work like Don Quixote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it—bad translation, incomplete and ruined—any version of Quixote would still have very much to stay to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature.”

Cervantes isn’t the only Spanish Golden Age author cited by Bolaño; he also names Francisco de Aldana and Jorge Manrique as parts of his Spanish canon. Both were military men and poets; Manrique died storming a castle.

Of his Spanish contemporaries, Bolaño was most impressed by the literature of Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marías. Bolaño claimed that the Vila-Matas novel La asesina ilustrada and the Marías novel Los dominios del lobo “marked a point of departure for our generation.” Neither of these works are available in English, though both men have enjoyed success in English. New Directions published two Vila-Matas works, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, translated by Jonathan Dunne and Marías’ acclaimed Your Face Tomorrow series translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Bolaño was also a fan of Javier Cercas, whose works The Speed of Light and The Soldiers of Salamis are both available in English from Bloomsbury, as translated by Anne McLean. Of The Soliders of Salamis Bolaño says “Javier is in the small group at the head of the Spanish narrative. His novel plays with hybridism…and hyper narrative…without any generic slip into poetry, into epic…it is always moving forward.” In fact, Bolaño is himself a character in The Soliders of Salamis.

This is the eighth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

In a 2002 interview with Carmen Boullosa published in Bomb magazine Roberto Bolaño made the hefty claim “I’m interested in Western literature and I’m fairly familiar with all of it.” He went on to say: “I’m also interested in American literature of the 1880s, especially Twain and Melville, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Whitman. As a teenager, I went through a phase when I only read Poe.”

In an essay in Entre paréntesis (forthcoming from New Directions in 2010, translated by Natasha Wimmer) he elaborates on Melville and Twain: “All American novelists, including those who write in Spanish, at some point in their lives get a glimpse of two books on the horizon, they are two roads, two structures, and two arguments. Sometimes: two destinies. One is Moby Dick by Melville, the other is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.”

But Bolaño’s grasp of American literature was certainly not limited to the nineteenth century. (Though he once claimed that everything Faulkner and Hemingway wanted to write can be summed up in a page of Huckleberry Finn.) He was also greatly influenced by the Beats and in an essay refers to William Burroughs as “a saint who approached all the viciousness of the world because he had the delicacy and imprudence to never close the door.”

Bolaño also read the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In Bolaño’s final interview he says he would have rather been Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade: “I would like to have been a homicide detective, much more than being a writer. I am absolutely sure of that. A string of homicides. I’d have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night and not be afraid of ghosts.”

Bolaño also loved Philip K. Dick. He wrote a poem about him, published in The Romantic Dogs. And in 2002 he participated in a published discussion with the writer Rodrigo Fresán, where both writers discuss the science fiction author. Bolaño calls Dick “a prophet.”

This is the seventh installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

"Once there was a Flash of Lightning that struck in the same place twice. But it found that it had done enough damage the first time round and was no longer necessary, and it got very depressed."

In an essay in Entre paréntesis that appeared in English translation in World Literature Today in 2006, titled “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories,” Roberto Bolaño outlines a twelve point plan on how to be a “successful short story writer.” Written in true Bolaño style, the list includes advice on everything from how to avoid melancholy to which authors one should dress like. Bolaño even includes points designed to give the reader time to consider the previous point, like number ten: “Give thought to point number nine. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number nine. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.”

In point four Bolaño makes reference to the Guatemalan short story writer Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003) saying succinctly: “One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso.”

Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”

Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:

Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.

Not all of Monterroso’s work is so short. His Complete Works and Other Stories, translated into English by Edith Grossman and published by the University of Texas Press, is full of works of varying length. All tend to have the simplicity of folktales. In the Massachusetts Review interview Monterroso defends his style, saying “Traditional stories are useful in that they broaden our scope by showing us what people enjoy most: simplicity.”

Bolaño was drawn, in particular, to Monterroso’s ideas about literature in exile. Monterroso lived in Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Mexico, and Chile–often under political duress. Exile was very personal for Bolaño and he relates, in his essay “Exiles” from Entre paréntesis, a story told to him by Enrique Vila-Matas about Vila-Matas attending a conference that included a panel discussion on exile. Monterroso was on the panel and, unlike the other panelists who considered exile “something atrocious” and “awful,” Monterroso said he found it “cheerful, happy.” This spoke to Bolaño who goes on to say “I wasn’t at the conference and Vila-Matas didn’t push the issue, but I can say without a doubt that I agree with Monterroso’s version.”

This is the sixth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

Roberto Bolaño read tons of French literature. And he claimed to be influenced by many genres and eras, everything from Voltaire to the surrealists.

In a 2002 interview with Carmen Boullosa published in the Brooklyn based arts magazine Bomb, Bolaño waxes poétique about a number of authors: “I’m interested in French literature, in Pascal, who could foresee his death, and in his struggle against melancholy, which to me seems more admirable now than ever before. Or the utopian naiveté of Fourier. And all the prose, typically anonymous, of courtly writers (some Mannerists and some anatomists) that somehow leads to the endless caverns of Marquis de Sade.”

Céline: Total jerk.

In his last interview, Bolaño also names Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary as one of a handful of books that marked his life. (One of the best characters in 2666, the Black Panther Barry Seaman, relates how Voltaire gave him solace during his long imprisonment.) First published in 1764, the Philosophical Dictionary is a collection of radical essays; it was widely condemned by religious authorities and others, and banned in Switzerland and France. Regardless, it became massively popular, and Voltaire continually made anonymous additions and reissues. It is today considered a masterpiece of Enlightenment literature. (Thinking back to our last post, the Philosophical Dictionary is also more encyclopedia than dictionary.)

Bolaño was also an avid reader of French Surrealists like André Breton and Jacques Vaché. Breton’s Nadja, one of Bolaño’s favorites, is absolutely stunning. Some even make the claim that the infrarealist manifesto, penned by Bolaño, was directly inspired by Breton’s own “Surrealist Manifesto”. The effect of Nadja on Bolaño’s writing is evident in the subtlety of the non-linear and dreamlike realities inhabited by many of Bolaño’s characters. Nadja’s surrealism is surely of the same cloth as 2666’s “surrealism.” It is the not surrealism of fantasy but rather that of hyper-reality, where the reader loses the ability to distinguish dream from waking reality.

Bolaño also gives massive credit to Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In a 1999 interview with the Chilean magazine Capital, Bolaño claims Céline is the only author he can think of who was both a “great writer and a son of a bitch. Just an abject human being. It’s incredible that the coldest moments of his abjection are covered under an aura of nobility, which is only attributable to the power of words.”

This is the fifth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

Lichtenberg was also very short.

Roberto Bolaño was an avid reader of philosophy. And he was especially drawn to the aphorism — clipped, profound, and, at times, terse thoughts, and a literary form engaged by many of the world’s greatest writers, including Blake, Kafka, Schlegel, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein, among many, many others.

Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, the character Captain Jünger shares aphorisms; 2666 is, in the words of Financial Times reviewer Henry Hitchings, “studded with aphorisms.” Bolaño also named, in his last interview, the aphorisms of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in a short list of books that significantly marked his life.

Lichtenberg was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1742. He was a pastor’s son and the youngest of seventeen children. He eventually made his way to Göttingen where he entered University. He suffered from chronic health issues for most of his life, including crippling back problems. Upon graduating from Göttingen he was hired on as a physics professor, a job he kept until his death in 1799.

In an essay in Entre paréntesis, Bolaño explains his admiration of Lichtenberg by saying his aphorisms “behave with humor and curiosity, the two most important elements of intelligence.” Bolaño goes on to say that Lichtenberg’s work “prefigured Kafka and the better part of twentieth century literature.” Among them:

“There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them.”

Lichtenberg was primarily a scientist and perhaps most famous among his peers for work with electricity and certain types of fractals now dubbed “Lichtenberg figures.” His empirical nature was also a source for much of his satire.

There is, in general, a lot of humor in his aphorisms, and Bolaño even referred to his work as a “masterpiece of black comedy.” A few examples:

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”

“If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.”

“A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can`t expect an apostle to look out.”

A collection of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms is available in an English translation by R.J. Hollingdale as The Waste Books.

This is the fourth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

In 1996, Roberto Bolaño published Nazi Literature in the Americas, a fictional encyclopedia of right-wing authors. In a review of the English translation by Chris Andrews, Francisco Goldman summarized the novel as depicting “literary Nazis,” portrayed as “self-deluded mediocrities, snobs, opportunists, narcissists, and criminals, none with the talent of a Céline.” Though the writers included in the book are imaginary (like the “airman, assassin and aesthete” Ramirez Hoffman) the world they inhabit is much like ours, and stocked with real-life writers like Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, and José Lezama Lima.

In describing the book, Bolaño said he focused “on the world of the ultra right, but much of the time, in reality, I’m talking about the left…. When I’m talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I’m talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general.”

The fictional encyclopedia is a great format for a novel, and one Bolaño clearly enjoyed: he reworked the character Ramirez Hoffman into Carlos Wieder, the central character of his novel Distant Star.

But where did Bolaño come up with the idea for a fake encyclopedia? In an interview with Eliseo Álvarez published in 2005 in the Spanish literary journal Turia, Bolaño explains the book’s lineage and its debts owed:

“Nazi Literature in the Americas, 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… 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 whom has a book called Real and Imagined Portraits. 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.”

This is the third installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

The rest is silence.

Roberto Bolaño is famously the author of two very long novels. The English edition of 2666 is 912 pages, The Savage Detectives, 672 pages. And though Bolaño died prematurely at age fifty, he produced more than 25 published volumes. A stash of unpublished manuscripts was discovered earlier this year. He was, simply, prolific.

But Bolaño was deeply interested in writers who chose not to produce or publish, as well as writers who were prematurely silenced. In an interview from 2005 in the Spanish literary journal Turia, Bolaño declared that “There are literary silences.” And he connected a number of his favorite authors to this notion.

“Kafka’s, for example, which is a silence that cannot be. When he asks that his papers be burned, Kafka is opting for silence, opting for a literary silence, all in a literary era. That is to say, he was completely moral. Kafka’s literature, aside from being the best work, the highest literary work of the 20th century, is of an extreme morality and of an extreme gentility, things that usually do not go together either.”

Another figure that Bolaño raised was Juan Rulfo, whose two books are among the most influential works of 20th century Mexican literature. After publishing the short story collection The Burning Plain (1953) and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955), Rulfo (who lived from 1917 to 1986) stopped publishing narrative fiction, despite the enormous critical success of the books. Both Faulkner and García Márquez admitted to having been influenced by his prose.

Rulfo’s silence, according to Bolaño, “is obedient to something so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time. There are several versions: One told by Monterroso is that Rulfo had an uncle so-and-so who told him stories and when Rulfo was asked why he didn’t write anymore, his answer was that his uncle so-and-so had died. And I believe it too…Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he sees himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops… After desert, what the hell are you going to eat?”

In the Turia interview, Bolaño also touched on Rimbaud, who famously gave up poetry at 20 for a life of gun-running, saying “Rimbaud would probably have been able to write something much better, which is to say bringing his words up even higher, but his is a silence that raises questions for Westerners.”

And, finally, the silence of passing… perhaps the only kind to which Bolaño succumbed: “There [also] stands the silence of Georg Büchner for example. He died at 25 or 24 years of age, he leaves behind three or four stage plays, masterworks. One of them is Woyzeck, an absolute masterwork…What might have happened had Büchner not died; what kind of writer might he have been?”

This is the second installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series charts the reading habits of Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean novelist, poet, and short story writer. It also celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all posts in the series.

Roberto Bolaño once declared that Franz Kafka was the best writer of the twentieth century. He also said the same thing about Anton Chekhov. And Raymond Carver. So when he refers to Chile’s Nicanor Parra as “the best living Spanish language poet,” we have to take his word for it.

It is a well known part of the “Bolaño myth” that, even though his most heralded works are prose, Bolaño spent most of is formative years writing, reading, and living poetry. In fact, according to his last interview he considered himself a better poet than narrator because, he said, he was “less embarrassed” by his poetry. Among the many poets Bolaño fell in love with was Nicanor Parra.

Nicanor Parra is tired of your nonsense.

Born in 1914, Parra, according to the standard biography, studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown University, and cosmology at Oxford, and spent many years as a teacher of mathematics and a professor of theoretical physics in Santiago. He published his first collection in 1938, and his major work Poemas Y Antipoemas in 1954. Much of Parra’s work resembles the later products of the American Beat poets.

In an essay Bolaño wrote called “Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra,” he noted “I’m only sure about one thing regarding Nicanor Parra’s poetry in this new century: it will endure…along with the poetry of Borges, of Vallejo, of Cernuda and a few others.” In a veiled compliment, one Parra probably loved, Bolaño went on to write “But this, we have to say it, doesn’t matter too much.”

In the essay, Bolaño also confesses the moment Parra stole his heart: “He once summarized Chile’s entire literary history in three verses.”

Chile’s four great poets
are three:
Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Darío.

Though Parra once said “real seriousness” rests in “the comic,”  Bolaño appreciated Parra’a solemnity, writing that he “writes as though he were going to be electrocuted tomorrow.” Take, for example, the poem “Chronos”:

In Santiago, Chile
The days are interminably long:
Several eternities in a day.

Like the vendors of seaweed
Traveling on the backs of mules:
you yawn–you yawn again.

Yet the weeks are short
The months go racing by
And the years have wings.

A collection of Parra’s work Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, which the poems above are taken from, is available from New Directions, translated by “antitranslator” (in the words of Edith Grossman) Liz Werner.