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

Words from Outer Space. El Periódico (Barcelona), February 5, 1999. Bolaño alludes to some clandestine tape-recordings of telephone conversations between military commanders the day of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet, September 11, 1973.

A Modest Proposal. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published, though by all indications it was. In any case, the text was written after Bolaño’s first trip to Chile, in November 1998.

Out in the Cold. Text found among Bolaño’s posthumous papers. As with the previous piece, it hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was published, though by all indications it was.

Chilean Poetry Under Inclement Skies. Remarks commemorating the publication of a single-subject issue of the magazine Litoral (Málaga) titled Chile: Contemporary Poetry (with a Glance at Contemporary Art) , Numbers 223–224, November 1999, pp. 9–10. Also published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias , May 2000.

On Bruno Montané. Jacket copy for a book of poems by Bruno Montané, El maletín de Stevenson. El cielo de los topos [Stevenson’s Suitcase: The Moles’ Sky], Mexico, Ediciones El Aduanero, 2002.

Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra. Remarks commemorating the publication of the catalogue for the exhibition Artefactos visuales. Dirección obligada [Visual Artifacts: Address Required], by Nicanor Parra, on display at the Telefónica Foundation of Madrid from April 25 to June 10, 2001.

The Lost. Text found among Roberto’s posthumous papers. It hasn’t been possible to discover whether it was ever published.

The Transparent Mystery of José Donoso. Hoja por Hoja (literary supplement of the Mexican newspaper Reforma , Mexico), special issue for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, November 1999.

On Literature, the National Literature Prize, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life. Published as a stand-alone piece in Las Últimas Noticias , August 27, 2002. Shortly after sending this article to Las Últimas Noticias , Bolaño sent me a copy of it by email, with the following message: “Dear Ignacio: Restif de la Bretonne on the barricades or how to make more friends in Chile. The neo-pamphlet will be the great literary genre of the 22nd century. In this sense, I’m a minor author, but ahead of my times.” Soon afterward, in response to my questions and comments on the text, he wrote (August 26, 2002): “Friday is the national litherathure [sic] prize gala, tacky ceremony if ever there was one. I hope that my pamphlet won’t be read solely in that context. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what people think. Metaphor matters to me, meter matters to me. It’s not a suicidal gesture — no sir, as the excellent and always under-appreciated Lute said: legitimate self-defense, your honor, legitimate self-defense.” The National Prize that year was won by Teitelbaum.

BETWEEN PARENTHESES

As mentioned in the Introduction, the columns gathered in this section were published in the Diari de Girona (the early ones), and later on in the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias . The first Diari de Girona column appeared on January 10, 1999 (“The Best Gang”) and the last on April 2, 2000 (“Hell’s Angels”). Bolaño ended up publishing nearly forty columns in the Diari de Girona , at more or less weekly intervals. Here they’re presented in the order in which they appeared, except for a few which have been impossible to date. The columns were published in Catalan translation, and in some cases the Spanish originals couldn’t be found. Those pieces aren’t reproduced here, since it seemed pointless to include texts by Bolaño translated from another language. During the months that he published his column in the Diari de Girona , Bolaño gradually began to contribute to other publications (especially Diagonal , the cultural supplement of the now-defunct El Metropolitano of Santiago, Chile, which was headed by his friend Roberto Brodsky), to which he occasionally sent the same pieces, sometimes simultaneously. The reasons why Bolaño chose to stop writing for the Diari de Girona are unknown, though it’s easy to imagine that around this time, with his work in increasing demand, he might have grown tired of the weekly effort of writing a column that had a very limited readership and for which he couldn’t have been paid a very enticing amount.

The first column in Las Últimas Noticias appeared on July 30, 2000 (“An Afternoon with Huidobro and Parra”). Bolaño began by recycling many of the columns already published in the Diari de Girona , sometimes lightly revised. The columns in Las Últimas Noticias were published once a week, with very few exceptions, until July 4, 2001 (“An Attempt at an Exhaustive Catalogue of Patrons”). Around this time, Bolaño informed Andrés Braithwaite that he wouldn’t be able to send him new articles because he was so absorbed by the writing of 2666 . But behind this explanation lay a growing fatigue, due to health problems. In fact, beginning especially in January 2001, Bolaño’s correspondence with Andrés Braithwaite begins to contain frequent references to the deterioration of his health. “My health is bad,” writes Bolaño on January 16. “The long-awaited moment seems to have come or is imminent. . Of course, now I don’t feel like writing. In fact, I don’t even answer letters anymore. But maybe all of this will pass, and it’s caused by the fear or exhaustion that flare up in situations like this. Really, the situation has its humorous side.” On January 24 he returns again to the same subject: “I don’t feel much like working, it’s true. In my current state, what the body craves is the reading aloud of the Tibetan book of the dead or the praying of the rosary, but I won’t let you down.” And on February 7, never losing his sense of humor, he writes: “Today I sent you a piece [“The Ancestor”] that I think is good. A year from now you might even have enough material to put together a posthumous book. I suggest the following title: Thus Spake Bolaño . I don’t know, it seems tasteful and suggestive, as our friend Carlos Argentino Daneri from El Aleph would say.”

A little more than a year later, Bolaño decided to start up his column in Las Últimas Noticias again. “Get ready, girls, because Bolaño’s back. I’ll be writing. . weekly,” he tells Braithwaite on August 28, 2002. And on September 9, 2002, “Jim” is published, which marks the beginning of the third and final stage of Bolaño as columnist. This new round would end on January 20, 2003 (“Humor in the Wings”), once again for health reasons. Around this time Bolaño writes to Braithwaite, apologizing for the delay in sending the final column: “I’ve had it up to here with all the tests. And now I’m on the transplant list. In other words, they could call me at any minute, since my blood group — B+ — is rare, and according to the doctors, I’m not in a position to chivalrously give up my place in line. You know what this means. More Bolaño or finis terrae or c’est tout . I’m sorry to make things difficult for you, but ultimately that’s what editors are there for.” After he had stopped contributing to Las Últimas Noticias , as late as March 4, 2002, Bolaño promises Braithwaite that he’ll keep writing for the newspaper “as soon as I recover.” But as we know, that was not to be.

Like the columns for the Diari de Girona , the columns written for Las Últimas Noticias were eventually recycled by Bolaño for other publications, sometimes slightly recast, revised, or with new titles. On September 9, 2000, in sábado , the cultural supplement of the Mexican newspaper unomásuno, Bolaño published eight columns, under the title “Alfabeto de lecturas” [Alphabet of Readings] that had previously appeared in the Diari de Girona and were later reclaimed for Las Últimas Noticias . During the fall-winter of 2001–2002, in the same cultural supplement, Bolaño had a section titled “Carta de Blanes” [Letter from Blanes] that featured pieces that had generally been published before in one of the two newspapers. Later, in the summer of 2001, Roberto kicked off a short-lived new section titled “Ventana” [Window] in the Mexican weekly Cambio , for which he again used columns that he’d already written. And one can imagine the same thing happening here and there with whichever of the many publications, based in Spain or Chile, Mexico, Argentina, or any other Latin American country, that solicited contributions from Roberto.