The dystopian world that Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño conjures up is one in which food tastes like ‘earth, decay and blood”, where a character stays up late watching TV while ‘waiting for the declaration of World War III” and where, not surprisingly, ‘history is like a horror story”.
These quotes, taken from Bolaño’s books, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions) and Amulet (Picador), help create the dystopia that permeates his oeuvre.
Nowhere is this sense of nightmare and a world irretrievably gone wrong more evident than in 2666 (Picador), his final novel, published posthumously.
The title — suggestive of the mark of the beast and apocalypse; of plague and disease as written in Revelations — is mystifying. It was first suggested in Amulet, a novella set during the Mexican military’s invasion of a university campus at the time of the student protests of 1968.
Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego), a friend and Auxilio Lacouture, the narrator of Amulet, are walking along an avenue in Mexico City. It occurs to them that Guerrero Avenue at that time of the night has the heavy air of a necropolis.
And not even a graveyard in 1974, 1968 or 1975, ‘but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else”.
Holocaust and death, horror and gore are themes that preoccupied Bolaño’s writing life. (Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953 — the year Stalin died, as he was wont to say. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Mexico where he lived for a decade before moving to France and Spain, where he died in 2003.)
The miserable lives his characters (invariably writers, poets, critics and artists) lead has something of the sinewy hand of fate about them. ‘Violence,” says a character in Last Evenings on Earth, a title suggestive of a nightmare that can’t be deferred for a moment longer, ‘real violence is unavoidable, at least for those of us born in Latin America during the Fifties and who were about 20 years old at the time of Salvador’s [Allende] death. That’s just the way it goes.”
This generation that populates the ‘absurd continent” has no means to fight back. (In Distant Star, published by New Directions, Belano is referred to as ‘a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions”.)
They are caught up in that ‘terribly Latin American nightmare: being unable to find your weapon; you know where you put it, but it’s not there”. Thus thousands die because, as Auxilio says in Amulet, ‘death is the staff of Latin America and Latin America cannot walk without its staff”.
The shadow of Augusto Pinochet hovers close by; there’s an irresistible impulse to invoke him, even though sometimes reference seems tangential — gratuitous, even. ‘He died in Brussels in 1973. In other words he died in the year of the military coup in Chile,” we read in Last Evenings on Earth.
Mexico City as conjured in The Savage Detectives (1999 winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the Hispanic world’s Booker) and Amulet is windswept and forlorn, desperate and desolate. ‘The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it.”
Not surprisingly, it has become ‘rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song”. A dust cloud, in all likelihood billowing from the Sonoran Desert (central setting of 2666 and to which the co-conspirators Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano decamp in The Savage Detectives), ‘reduces everything to dust”.
Of course, 2666 is the apotheosis of this apocalyptic vision. Most of the books that came before it — Distant Star, about a fascist pilot who wrote poetry from a plane; Nazi Literatures in the Americas (Picador), an imaginary bibliography of fascist writers; and By Night in Chile (New Directions), a deathbed rant by a fascist priest — were foreshadowing this monumental work.
2666 is part war novel, part detective story, part splatter film, part polemic, part academic, part philosophical, part horror, part reportage. It’s about Benno von Archimboldi, a disappeared post-World War II writer, being sought by a band of avid European literary critics.
As philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, who is the literary critics’ guide, sits on the front porch of his house in Santa Teresa (an imaginary place modelled on Ciudad Juarez, a town on the Mexico-United States border), it occurs to him that ‘madness is contagious”.
Lola, his wife, has been long gone; she deserted him and left for Europe, but, with no home in Spain, moves into a cemetery. Larrazabal, her truck-driving lover, remarks: ‘You are lucky — my whole life I’ve wanted to live in a cemetery, and look at you, the minute you get here, you move right in.”
The real cemetery, the city of the dead, is Santa Teresa — the setting of the killings in the novel. Hundreds of women turn up on the edges of the city and in dumps: raped and then killed. As one critic put it, it’s a ‘holocaust of women”.
One wonders to what extent this holocaust is owed to the hallowed position that Adolf Hitler occupies in the minds of right-wing litterateurs in the Americas. In Nazi Literatures in the Americas, an Argentine writer published by a company called The Fourth Reich ‘deems Hitler Europe’s providential saviour”.
Yet another Argentine writer advocated ‘the extermination of Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentine race curtailing the rights of anyone with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin colour, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population”.
But Bolaño is too cruel to dignify these rants. So, invariably, these litterateurs suffer anti-climactic fates, sometimes ending their days in demented delirium. One dies in an old-age home, his possessions consisting of a suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts that were ‘probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies”.
The profiles in Nazi Literatures in the Americas are brief and cutting, something that Distant Star seeks to rectify. The latter book picks up and expands on the story of poet-pilot-cum-assassin, Carlos Ramirez Hoffman, briefly sketched in Nazi Literatures in the Americas, and his sky-written poems from an aeroplane.
When Ramirez’s time comes to go, he’s not allowed a confession. He just goes, quietly and unceremoniously, unlike Father Urrutia, chief protagonist in By Night in Chile.
The Chilean Jesuit priest befriends agents of the Opus Dei who send him on assignment to Europe to learn how they can end the ‘deterioration of God’s house on earth”. (Later they arrange for him to give tutorials on Marxism to Pinochet and a few top aides.)
In Europe, priests have learned the art of falconry, the method of choice in ridding the church of pigeons that mess places of worship. By Night in Chile ends on a scatological, elliptical note: ‘and then the storm of shit begins”.
For a man who gave Marxist tutorials to the murderous Pinochet, one would have preferred if it were sulphurous fire. But perhaps ire will consume Urrutia and his types around the year 2666, the year Bolaño’s literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, described as the date around which the various parts of the novel 2666 will fall into place.
If we are lucky, we could be on hand to witness this apocalypse. But there’s no guarantee, for, in the words of a character, ‘the birth of History can’t wait, and if we arrive late you won’t see anything, only ruins and smoke, an empty landscape …”.
Mantel takes Booker prize
Bookies’ favourite Hilary Mantel took the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, beating a field that included double Booker winner JM Coetzee and another former winner, AS Byatt.
Wolf Hall, Mantel’s revisionist account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s henchman, won her £50 000, as well as the real Booker goodies: guaranteed leaps in both sales and recognition worldwide.
In accepting the award Mantel evoked the conditions under which even successful writers work. The Man Booker, she said, is ‘earnings”, and that although this might be a cold way of putting it, ‘cost out what an author earns per hour. It’s far, far less than the minimum wage … It must pay the mortgage, as authors have to do.”
Mantel emerged from the final three-hour meeting of the judges as a 3-2 winner. BBC broadcaster and author James Naughtie, who chaired the judging, said: ‘Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”
The other judges were Lucasta Miller, biographer and critic; Michael Prodger, literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph; Professor John Mullan, academic and author; and Sue Perkins, comedian and broadcaster.
The other shortlisted novelists were Byatt (The Children’s Book), Coetzee (Summertime), Adam Foulds (The Quickening Maze), Simon Mawer (The Glass Room) and Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger). — Darryl Accone