Seed Projects: The Fiction of Alejandro Zambra

by Marcela Valdes The Nation. June 17, 2009.

When it was published in Spanish in 2006, Alejandro Zambra's novel Bonsai filled just ninety-four generously spaced pages, and its recent English translation by Carolina De Robertis stretches only to eighty-three. Still, each of these volumes should be considered a marvel of book design and production since in interviews the author has let slip that his original text ran only to forty sheets. Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled--and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size. As the venerable Santiago newspaper El Mercurio commented in April 2008, "The publication of Bonsai...marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters."

Reading the book a continent away, I would never have predicted such a fuss, though Bonsai is a delightful work. A love story that's both wry and melancholy, the novel opens in 1980s Santiago, at a study session turned party, where textbooks give way to vodka and two university students fall casually into bed. "Julio didn't like that Emilia asked so many questions in class," Zambra writes, "and Emilia disliked the fact that Julio passed his classes while hardly setting foot on campus, but that night they both discovered the emotional affinities that any couple is capable of discovering with only a little effort."

Such knowing, cynical observations save the love story of these twentysomethings from sentimentality, and Zambra keeps the zingers coming as he traces the development of Julio and Emilia's "conceited intimacy," which allows them to feel not only loved but also "better, purer than others." The relationship withers by page 35, at which point the novel--this little book has been insistently presented as a full-fledged novel in Spain and Latin America--turns poignant. The brief romance, brimming with heartfelt confessions and adolescent posturing, emerges as the one great love of Julio's dispirited life.

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Windows Into the Night: The collected nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño

by Marcela ValdesThe Nation. March 13, 2008

Never one to proceed by half-measures, Roberto Bolaño dropped out of high school shortly after he decided to become a poet at age 15. The year was 1968, a time as wild in Mexico City, where Bolaño and his parents were living, as it was in the United States--but much more dangerous. There, student protests, rock 'n' roll and sexual liberation were the pursuits not only of poets but also of activists and leftist guerrillas, and the Mexican government greeted them with a dirty war. Four unlucky students died at Kent State in 1970; some 300 were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Yet for Bolaño, who'd just arrived from a small country town in Chile, the atmosphere of the big city was intoxicating. Years later he recalled that the capital had seemed to him "like the Frontier, that vast, nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are the spectacles of every day."

Bolaño's own transformation began with a five-year period of isolation. Rather than join the party, he shut himself in his bedroom to consume book after book after book. The poet Jaime Quezada, who came to visit the family when Bolaño was 18, recalls that the young writer was living like a hermit. "He didn't come out of his bed-living-dining-room," Quezada has said, "except to go to the toilet or to comment out loud, pulling on his hair, about some passage in the book he was reading."

Young and broke, Bolaño stocked his shelves by shoplifting from bookstores all over Mexico City. His captures included volumes by Pierre Louÿs, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Pepys, Alphonse Daudet, Juan Rulfo, Amado Nervo and Vachel Lindsay. But the book that changed his life was Albert Camus's The Fall, in which a lawyer who hangs out at an Amsterdam bar named Mexico City resigns himself to a life of calculated hypocrisy. Bolaño explains in his essay "Who's the Brave One?" that after reading it, he was possessed by a desire "to read everything, which, in my simplicity, was the same as wanting to or intending to discover the mechanism of chance that had led Camus's character to accept his atrocious fate." Bolaño's library was his own private Frontier.

Read more of this book review at The Nation.

His Stupid Heart: Roberto Bolaño’s Novels Were a Love Letter to His Generation, But What He Had to Say Many Chileans Didn’t Want to Hear

by Marcela ValdesThe Virginia Quarterly Review. Winter 2008.

1.

Any account of Roberto Bolaño’s life has to be divided into at least two stages: before the publication of The Savage Detectives in 1998, and after. Before there was rage, poverty, and obscurity. After, there was rage, security, and fame. In essays, lectures, and interviews, Bolaño’s friends often mention his kindness, his loyalty, his doting love for his two children. There’s no reason to doubt that their statements are true. In private, the man who is now widely recognized as the most influential Latin American novelist of the past three decades could have been a peaceful gentleman. But in public, in print, Bolaño preferred war. Before he died of liver failure in 2003, he told several interviewers, “My motto is not Et in Arcadia ego, but Et in Esparta ego.”

That creed may have come together during the years Bolaño worked as a garbage man, dishwasher, waiter, longshoreman, night watchman, reporter, grape picker, and seller of costume jewelry—all to support his habit of writing poetry. He was forty before he could ditch the odd jobs and live off his writing; forty-five when he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (AKA the Hispanic Booker) for The Savage Detectives. By then, he’d lost most of his teeth. “Bolaño lived through and for literature,” one of his best friends, Antoni García Porta, wrote. He read and wrote fanatically, and if he liked to toss bombs, his targets were usually literary.

Take for example, his 2002 essay, “On Literature, the National Prize in Literature, and the Strange Consolations of Service,” a napalm shower that burned many of Chile’s most prominent writers and included this backhanded compliment to the country’s bestselling author Isabel Allende:

"Made to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. Her glamour of South American in California, her imitations of García Márquez, her unquestionable boldness, her practice of a literature that goes from kitsch to pathetic and that somehow resembles, in a creole and politically correct fashion, the work of the author of Valley of the Dolls, winds up being, although it seems difficult, much superior to the literature of born functionaries like [Antonio] Skármeta and [Volodia] Teitelboim."

When it came to his countrymen, Bolaño was always especially generous with insults, but he didn’t restrict himself to slighting Chileans. He once dismissed Columbia’s Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez as “a man delighted to have met so many presidents and archbishops” and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa as the same sort of sycophant “but smoother.”

Journalists abetted these proclamations, of course—nothing makes better copy than a fight—but Bolaño hardly needed egging on. He appears to have relished the idea of making enemies. A few days before “On Literature” was published, for example, Bolaño sent the text to his good friend, the Spanish literary critic Ignacio Echevarría, who would later edit Bolaño’s posthumous collection of essays, Between Parenthesis. Bolaño attached the following note: “Dear Ignacio: Restif de Bretonne on the barricades or how to keep making friends in Chile. The neo-pamphlet will be the great literary genre of the XXII century. In this sense, I’m a minor author, but advanced.” A few days later, he added: “The reactions, frankly, mean nothing to me.”

Combative, sarcastic, high-handed, Bolaño could sound obnoxious, and the public record of trash talk has naturally led many people to see him as a sort of chest-thumping provocateur. But Bolaño wasn’t just a Norman Mailer-esque showman. His hatred of born functionaries and of people pleased to have met archbishops fits logically into his obsession with evil’s relationship to art, a subject that appears in almost all of his fiction. “Literature,” Bolaño told the reporter Luis García in the 2001, “has always been close to ignominy, to vileness, to torture.” Nowhere is this connection more clear than in Bolaño’s two little novels about Chile—Distant Star and By Night in Chile—a pair of subtle, damning romans à clef that exposed a history of collusion among critics, poets, and the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Read the rest of this essay at The Virginia Quarterly Review