Sunday Read: “Bolaño, Inc” by Horacio Castellanos Moya

November 8th, 2009 by Ben - Editor

What’s to be done when a writer, one of your own, becomes an international literary superstar?

Toward this time last year, Imraan Coovadia said, in his charmingly elliptical way, that the best contemporary novel that he had yet to read was Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. (It was in the Sunday Independent, I think.) Why Bolaño, suddenly? It’s true that the peripatetic Chilean poet and novelist’s name had begun to appear, even then, everywhere one turned. That the author had died added to his burgeoning mythos. Now, Bolaño swims in a school of fish called “the canon” - albeit close to the perimeter, which is, as we know, the most dangerous place.

His coeval Horacio Castellanos Moya complains that the reason for Bolaño’s prominence is: marketing, damned marketing, and yet more marketing. He’s upset by the way his deceased friend has been packaged and presented to unsuspecting readers around the world. Moya has been moved to write against what he sees as a conspiracy to push Bolaño like a kind of literary designer drug to the consuming masses - especially the American consuming masses - and his essay, “Bolaño, Inc”, published in Guernica Magazine, comprises today’s Sunday read.

Doth Moya protest too much? What if one of our own names - Imraan Coovadia’s, for instance - began to march unstoppably into the leafy suburbs all across North America? Even if this happened at the expense of the writer’s multi-faceted identity, I imagine that I’d be more inclined to cheer than growl.

But that’s hypothetical; meanwhile the shouting about Bolaño is a reality in Moya’s echo chamber, and so the latter will be heard:

No North American journalist highlighted the fact, Sarah Pollack warns, that The Savage Detectives and the greater part of Bolaño’s prose work “were written as a sober family man” during the last ten years of his life—and an excellent father, I’d add, whose major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family. Pollack notes that “Bolaño appears to the reader, even before one crosses the novel’s threshold, as a cross between the Beats and Arthur Rimbaud (another reference for his alter ego Arturo Belano), his life already the stuff of legend.” Yet the majority of critics have passed over the fact that Bolaño didn’t die as a result of drug or alcohol abuse, but from a case of poorly cared-for pancreatitis that had destroyed his liver; or that his case was more similar to those of Balzac or Proust, who also died at fifty after a tremendous work effort, than it was to those of North American pop idols.
I can tell you, though, that Bolaño would have found it amusing to know they would call him the James Dean, the Jim Morrison, or the Jack Kerouac of Latin American literature. Wasn’t the first novella that he wrote a quatre mains with García Porta called Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic? Maybe he wouldn’t have found so amusing the hidden reasons that they called him that, but that’s flour for another sack. What is certain is that Bolaño was always a non-conformist; he was never a subversive or a revolutionary wrapped up in political movements, nor was he even a writer maudit. He was a non-conformist, just as the Royal Spanish Academy defines it: “One who polemicizes, opposes, or protests[...] anything established.”