Surreal metaphors bloom without warning: “It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness … the grass and earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings.” This all adds up, indisputably, to great literature-at his best, Bolaño strikes a new kind of balance between aim (quests, escapes, investigations) and aimlessness (dreams, description, metaphorical riffing), in which the aimlessness is so energetic and oddly urgent it steps up as a whole new species of purpose. Single sentences stretch on for pages, obsessively sifting the most minor gradations. He follows his restless talent down every available rabbit hole of improvisation, no matter how dark and unpromising.
He loves (like Borges) to invent elaborate bibliographies for fictional authors, which occasionally creates the sensation that you’re reading a card catalogue instead of a novel. He seems personally offended by the artifice of narrative closure although he’s addicted to detective plots, he employs them almost purely as philosophical exercises, often abandoning them halfway through. He has an apparently life-threatening allergy to cuteness, fictional convention, and reader-enabling shortcuts. His novelistic skill-set seems designed to repel consumers. This is funny because Bolaño’s fiction-dreamy novellas in which air-force pilots skywrite opaque poetry and priests tutor despots in Marxism-is perhaps the least commercially viable body of literature ever written for the alleged purpose of making money. (Who can forget the time he impregnated a dragon using nothing but the power of his neglected avant-gardism?) My favorite episode of his biographical legend is the part where, at the age of nearly 40, having spent his wild-haired youth as an experimental poet obscurely chasing revolutions (political and aesthetic) all over Latin America, he finally decided it was time to hang up his spurs (or whatever revolutionaries had worn in the seventies) and try, with the air of a man resigning himself to becoming a vacuum salesman, to earn a stable living by writing fiction.
Since his death in 2003, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño has become one of the more colorful gods in the pantheon of international literary myth.
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