In 1953, a boy named Roberto Bolaño was brought into the world, born to a Chilean truck driver and a schoolteacher. Bolaño was, by all accounts, not the stuff of legends. Scrawny and small, he spent his early and adolescent years as an outcast and a punching bag until slowly he came to prefer his private bookishness to the more normal hobbies of other Chilean schoolchildren. Finally, in 1968, he dropped out altogether and left his native Santiago with his family to pursue a future in Mexico City.
For the decade that followed, Bolaño lived the life of a vagabond: Traveling from city to Latin American city, he both worked for the papers and involved himself in politics—and occupied his free time with poetry all the while. An ardent Trotskyist who sought to destroy the status quo establishment in all things, Bolaño founded a laughable little poetic movement called “infrarrealismo,” the major tenets of which involved denouncing popular Latin American poets like Octavio Paz by disrupting their public readings. But, not surprisingly, the movement never went anywhere significant, and so, soon after it broke apart, Bolaño left Latin America to start anew on the shores of Spain.
In Europe, Bolaño largely left his preoccupation with politics behind and devoted his time to poetry instead. Working without success on his writing for the next 10 or so years, he finally decided to switch to fiction, a field in which he would experience almost infinite success and stardom. But first, he would fill his days with odd jobs just to stay afloat and would write through his nights so that, for all his varied experiences, he’d have something to show.
Slowly, Bolaño began to finish some shorter works of fiction—“By Night in Chile,” “The Skating Rink” and “Amulet,” to name a few—and found himself a publishing house that would take a chance on him. It would not be long from there before he would publish “The Savage Detectives”—the book which would rocket him to fame—and “2666,” which was published posthumously.
In 2003, the Chilean finally won himself the recognition that he deserved and was declared by his contemporaries to be the best Latin American writer of his generation. His search to subvert, through his writing, the standards of modern-day Latin American fiction had proven fruitful, and his achievement was enriched even further by the humble beginnings from which he came.
He died six weeks later. Apparently an avid heroin user, as many had gleaned from an apparently autobiographical short story of his, Bolaño had suffered from a failing liver for years, and finally it had caught up with him. Apparently, all of those years of using, which had produced such great works, revoked as well the hand that had written them, and the author died of the same sword by which he had lived.
Only, Bolaño had never done heroin. He had, according to friends and even his own wife, never touched the stuff. For that matter, he hadn’t even been in Chile during the Pinochet coup, either, as many—the man himself included—might have you believe. No, in the end, it seems Roberto Bolaño may have been little more than a troubled failure-turned-father whose impetus for success was his firstborn son. Bolaño considered himself, to his dying day, a poet first and foremost and made his move to fiction for the express purpose of leaving behind a legacy and inheritance for his children.
Why, then, the stories of drugs and revolutions? The reviews you’ll read will never fail to mention them, and the readers to whom you speak will lament the dirty habit. Why is it that this is the way we wish things were, even in the face of evidence otherwise?
I suspect that it is because we embrace the image of the tortured artist, not for his sake but for our own—so much so, in fact, that we go to great lengths to turn an artistic man into an addict, so we can say that his own brilliance is no benchmark for our collective lack thereof. We cannot resist attaching a certain evil to men whose successes far surpass our own, and it seems to be the sole means to cope with their apparent superiority. Whenever we discuss the great strengths of such a man, it is always as a neighbor to his weakness, which we can create if need be.
But Bolaño is long gone, and he got for his own that which he set out to get—so no harm is done. No harm is done when we do these things, at least not to him.
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