Roberto Bolaño - Between Parentheses - Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

The third and last part of the novel is a futurist fable. Mexico City no longer exists, destroyed by perpetual earthquakes, and amid the ruins rises a new city called New Tenochtitlán of the Tremor. A robot returns to the heart of that strange city to search for his creator-father, Mantrax, thus keeping a promise made to his computer mother. Clearly, we have here a new version of Pedro Páramo or the perilous encounter of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Kubrick’s 2001 at the foot of a sacrificial altar, with a surprise ending.

Mantra is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years. It made me laugh more than any other book, and it seemed more virtuous and at the same time more roguish; it’s steeped in melancholy, but always to some aesthetic end, never lapsing into the preciousness or sentimentality always in vogue in Spanish-language literature. It’s a novel about Mexico, but like all great novels it’s really about the passage of time, about the possibility and impossibility of dreams. And on an almost secret level it’s about the art of making literature, though very few may realize it.

1. The title . In theory, and with no input from me whatsoever, the title of my talk was supposed to be “Where does the new Latin American novel come from?” If I stay on topic, my answer will be about three minutes long. We come from the middle classes or from a more or less settled proletariat or from families of low-level drug traffickers who’re tired of gunshots and want respectability instead. As Pere Gimferrer says: in the old days, writers came from the upper classes or the aristocracy, and by choosing literature they chose — at least for a certain period that might be a lifetime or four or five years — social censure, the destruction of learned values, mockery and constant criticism. Now, on the other hand, especially in Latin America, writers come from the lower middle classes or from the ranks of the proletariat and what they want, at the end of the day, is a light veneer of respectability. That is, writers today seek recognition, though not the recognition of their peers but of what are often called “political authorities,” the usurpers of power, whatever century it is (the young writers don’t care!), and thereby the recognition of the public, or book sales, which makes publishers happy but makes writers even happier, because these are writers who, as children at home, saw how hard it is to work eight hours a day, or nine or ten, which was how long their parents worked, and this was when there was work, because the only thing worse than working ten hours a day is not being able to work at all and having to drag oneself around looking for a job (paid, of course) in the labyrinth, or worse, in the hideous crossword puzzle of Latin America. So young writers have been burned, as they say, and they devote themselves body and soul to selling. Some rely more on their bodies, others on their souls, but in the end it’s all about selling. What doesn’t sell? Ah, that’s an important consideration. Disruption doesn’t sell. Writing that plumbs the depths with open eyes doesn’t sell. For example: Macedonio Fernández doesn’t sell. Macedonio may have been one of Borges’s three great teachers (and Borges is or should be at the center of our canon) but never mind that. Everything says that we should read him, but Macedonio doesn’t sell, so forget him. If Lamborghini doesn’t sell, so much for Lamborghini. Wilcock is only known in Argentina and only by a few lucky readers. Forget Wilcock, then. Where does the new Latin American literature come from? The answer is very simple. It comes from fear. It comes from the terrible (and in a certain way fairly understandable) fear of working in an office and selling cheap trash on the Paseo Ahumada. It comes from the desire for respectability, which is simply a cover for fear. To those who don’t know any better, we might seem like extras from a New York gangster movie, always talking about respect. Frankly, at first glance we’re a pitiful group of writers in our thirties and forties, along with the occasional fifty-year-old, waiting for Godot, which in this case is the Nobel, the Rulfo, the Cervantes, the Príncipe de Asturias, the Rómulo Gallegos.

2. The lecture must go on . I hope no one takes what I just said the wrong way. I was kidding. I didn’t mean what I wrote, or what I said. At this stage in my life I don’t want to make any more unnecessary enemies. I’m here because I want to teach you to be men. Not true. Just kidding. Actually, it makes me insanely envious to look at you. Not just you but all young Latin American writers. You have a future, I promise you. Sorry. Kidding again. Your future is as a gray as the dictatorship of Castro, of Stroessner, of Pinochet, as the countless corrupt governments that follow one after the other on our continent. I hope no one tries to challenge me to a fight. I can’t fight without medical authorization. In fact, when this talk is over I plan to lock myself in my room to watch pornography. You want me to visit the Cartuja? Fuck that. You want me to go see some flamenco? Wrong again. The only thing I’ll see is a rodeo, Mexican or Chilean or Argentine. And once I’m there, amid the smell of fresh horse shit and flowering Chile-bells, I’ll fall asleep and dream.

3. The lecture must plant its feet firmly on the ground. That’s right. Let’s plant our feet firmly on the ground. Some of the writers here are people I call friends. From them I expect nothing but perfect consideration. The rest of you I don’t know, but I’ve read some of you and heard excellent things about others. Of course, certain writers are missing, writers without whom there’s no understanding this entelechy that we call new Latin American literature. It’s only fair to list them. I’ll begin with the most difficult, a radical writer if there ever was one: Daniel Sada. And then I should mention César Aira, Juan Villoro, Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Ibsen Martínez, Carmen Boullosa, the very young Antonio Ungar, the Chileans Gonzalo Contreras, Pedro Lemebel, Jaime Collyer, Alberto Fuguet, and María Moreno, and Mario Bellatin, who has the fortune or misfortune of being considered Mexican by the Mexicans and Peruvian by the Peruvians, and I could go on like this for at least another minute. It’s a promising scene, especially if viewed from a bridge. The river is wide and mighty and its surface is broken by the heads of at least twenty-five writers under fifty, under forty, under thirty. How many will drown? I’d say all of them.

4. The inheritance . The treasure left to us by our parents, or by those we thought were our putative parents, is pitiful. In fact, we’re like children trapped in the mansion of a pedophile. Some of you will say that it’s better to be at the mercy of a pedophile than a killer. You’re right. But our pedophiles are also killers.

The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place for shoplifting. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt. The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can’t remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis . I know that I was sixteen and that for a while Louÿs became my guide. Then I stole books by Max Beerbohm ( The Happy Hypocrite ), Champfleury, Samuel Pepys, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Rulfo and Areola, Mexican writers who at the time were still more or less practicing, and whom I might therefore meet some morning on Avenida Niño Perdido, a teeming street that my maps of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street performers had really been lost, just as I was lost at the age of sixteen. From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven , by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall , by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine — or shone — with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed. I remember the edition: it was a book with very large print, like a primary school reader, slim, hardback, with a horrendous drawing on the jacket, a hard book to steal and one that I didn’t know whether to hide under my arm or in my belt, because it showed under my truant student blazer, and in the end I carried it out in plain sight of all the clerks at the Glass Bookstore, this is one of the best ways to steal, which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story. After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a petty book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what one might expect, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasn’t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which is or was across from the Alameda, on Avenida Juárez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurai had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall , none of which I’d stolen there. Soon afterwards I left for Chile. If in Mexico I might have bumped into Rulfo and Arreola, in Chile the same was true of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, but I think the only writer I saw was Rodrigo Lira, walking fast on a night that smelled of tear gas. Then came the coup and after that I spent my time visiting the bookstores of Santiago as a cheap way of staving off boredom and madness. Unlike the Mexican bookstores, the bookstores of Santiago had no clerks, each of them was run by a single person, almost always the owner. There I bought Nicanor Parra’s Obra gruesa [Complete Works] and the Artefactos , and books by Enrique Lihn and Jorge Teillier that I would soon lose and that were essential reading for me; although essential isn’t the word: those books helped me breathe. But breathe isn’t the right word either. What I remember best about my visits to those bookstores are the eyes of the booksellers, which sometimes looked like the eyes of a hanged man and sometimes were veiled by a kind of film of sleep, which I now know was something else. I don’t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didn’t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man who’d been sentenced to death. The bookseller was standing in a corner, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and he had a prominent Adam’s apple that quivered as he spoke. I said it didn’t seem right. What condemned men are we talking about? I asked. The bookseller looked at me and said that he knew for certain of more than one novelist capable of recommending his own books to a man on the verge of death. Then he said that we were talking about desperate readers. I’m hardly qualified to judge, he said, but if I don’t, no one will. What book would you give to a condemned man? he asked me. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know either, said the bookseller, and I think it’s terrible. What books do desperate men read? What books do they like ? How do you imagine the reading room of a condemned man? he asked. I have no idea, I said. You’re young, I’m not surprised, he said. And then: it’s like Antarctica. Not like the North Pole, but like Antarctica. I was reminded of the last days of Arthur Gordon Pym, but I decided not to say anything. Let’s see, said the bookseller, who would have the audacity to drop this novel on the lap of a man sentenced to death? He picked up a book that had done fairly well and then he tossed it on a pile. I paid him and left. When I turned to leave, the bookseller might have laughed or sobbed. As I stepped out I heard him say: What kind of arrogant bastard would dare to do such a thing? And then he said something else, but I couldn’t hear what it was.