Posts Tagged ‘Roberto Bolano’

“Tres” by Roberto Bolaño

Saturday, November 26th, 2011

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TRES is a compilation of three long poems, one written in 1981 and two in 1993, before Bolaño turned his energy to the composition of his major novels. It is a companion to another collection of poetry, Los perros románticos (“The Romantic Dogs”), which contains 43 poems dating from 1980 to 1998. Both volumes first appeared (in Spanish) in 2000.

“The movement of a free mind at play” is how the American writer Cynthia Ozick once described the quality of a well-written essay. I think it’s a suitable description for what readers find most appealing about Bolaño’s writing, no matter its ostensible literary form or its disruption of those forms.  All of his output — from the sprawling novels like “2666” and “The Savage Detectives” to the short stories to “Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003” — is of a piece.  His execution of the subject matter in tripartite TRES — the playing out of a love affair; the feverish road trip of a band of musicians traversing Chile, Peru, and Ecuador; and the extended set of dreams in which Bolaño defers to his fellow authors (among them, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Archibald MacLeish, and Carson McCullers) — follows Ozick’s credo.

The fact that TRES is labelled poetry is an irrelevance. Bolaño transgresses boundaries. If you are otherwise a fan of Bolaño’s novels and stories but generally don’t like “poetry,” my advice is to ignore the poetry tag.

One disappointment I had with the book was the relative paucity of Bolaño’s signature epigrammatic statements on art and life. Although the works were at times compelling, I think that for anyone new to this author, there are more auspicious places to start. My candidates: “By Night in Chile” or “The Savage Detectives.”

To state that TRES weighs in at 176 pages is deceptive. The book is actually a quick read because of abundant white space on the pages of the two prose poems. If you are reading only the translated pages of this dual-language book, expect to spend 20 minutes or less with each of the three parts.  The original Spanish text appears on the left pages and the English translation (by Laura Healy) on the right. Kudos to the publisher, New Directions, for using not a common glued binding but a binding sewn with thread. This allows the book to stay open and flat for bilingual readers who wish to follow the flow of the words in both languages.

One disappointment is the absence of any helpful editorial content to explain the bare texts — if not annotations or notes, then at least an Introduction would have been a welcome feature. Until someone pens a critical biography of Bolaño to guide the serious reader, bits and pieces of background and context are accessible on the internet. As an Introduction to TRES, I recommend a lengthy, breezy but enlightening 2009 blog post (“The Best of Bolaño is Yet to Come,” signed “Rise”) written in anticipation of  the appearance of an English translation of the book. The blogger includes some insider comments from the translator Laura Healy.

After reading TRES, I found the following online reviews helped me better understand what I had read. All three are strong in analytical insights:

1.  A review by Dawn Marie Knopf in The Faster Times (“Sharp Instruments and Lynched Messiahs”) here

2.  A review by Andrew R. Chow in The Harvard Crimson (“Poetry Collection Introduces the Real Roberto Bolaño”) here

3.  A review by Miguel Jimenez (“Another Bolaño Book, Another Work of Genius”) here.

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A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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“Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003” by Roberto Bolaño

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

This collection of non-fiction pieces is a treasure-trove for anyone who has read Bolaño’s fiction and who came away smitten by the author’s vibrant, mercurial, poetic voice.

Some elements of Bolaño’s novels and stories — their settings, aspects of their storylines, their narrators or chief protagonists, and their spirit of inquiry — are grounded in autobiography. This is especially true of the novels, “The Savage Detectives” and “Antwerp.” Bolaño’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, who has assembled the 125 pieces found in “Between Parentheses,” addresses this subject in his helpful Introduction to the book: “This volume amounts to something like a personal cartography of Roberto Bolano and comes closest, of everything he wrote, to being a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography’.”

Stated more broadly, there was, for Bolaño, no bright line between fiction and non-fiction.

What this means is that seasoned readers of this author will comfortably enter and enjoy the world of these essays, speeches, newspaper columns, travel articles, and other occasional pieces. If the reader perceives anything different it is that here the voice they have come to expect — opinionated (“plagiarists deserve to be hanged in the public square”), argumentative (a writer friend praises John Irving, but this is “an enthusiasm that I don’t share”), passionate (his love for his soon-to-be-orphaned son shines bright), and a bit of a rapscallion (“one of the best ways to steal . . . I had learned from an Edgar Allen Poe story”) — is even closer to the essence of “I, Roberto Bolano.”

In a piece from 1999, the autodidact Bolaño declares: “I’m much happier reading than writing.” His admiration is clear whenever he’s able to mention that this friend or that acquaintance “has read everything.” As for the scope of his own reading and interests generally, this is demonstrated by a nine-page Index that completes “Between Parentheses.” The Index contains the names of over 600 persons, including musicians, filmmakers, and artists. But mostly there are authors, among whom is a strong contingent of Americans Bolaño read with critical fervor.

These pieces were written during the period after he had been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease that in 2003 would take his life. It is no surprise, then, that a theme he returns to time and time again is the question of what constitutes a well-lived life. When describing someone’s accomplishments, for example, if he wants to impart his ultimate compliment he will write, “. . . and he was also a good man.” (George Orwell is one such man.) His critical gaze does not spare himself, his foibles and his imperfect works. In contrast, politics holds little appeal (although there are a few columns about the situation in his native Chile). When, in the final piece in the book, he is asked by an interviewer what things bore him, he answers: “The empty discourse of the Left. I take for granted the empty discourse of the Right.”

We learn that “By Night in Chile” was originally titled, “Storms of Shit.” He tells us we should consider “The Savage Detectives” to be “a response, one of many, to `Huckleberry Finn’.” At one point he declares: “Everything I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s.”

There’s his easy humor too. Attending a poetry reading, Bolaño notices the auditorium is “filled up with freaks who seemed to have just escaped from a mental asylum, which incidentally is the best audience a poet can hope for.”

His free spirit is everywhere. In speeches and essays ostensibly devoted to a specific subject, he wanders off path, pursuing diversions that lead to further diversions, which then are interrupted by a confessional revelation, or an informal bit of chat. The reader wonders, is this explained by a discovery Bolaño made as a youthful soccer player, now revealed to us — that he was “left-footed but right-handed”?

The aphoristic bent so characteristic of his fiction is on constant display: “Writers write with their hands and their eyes.” “Crime seems to be the symbol of the twentieth century.” “Literature is basically a dangerous undertaking.” “Books are the only homeland of the true writer.” He speaks of the impact of “fate — or chance, that even fiercer beast.” Every few pages a striking declaration stopped me short, such as this biographically-grounding insight capping his interpretative essay on “Huckleberry Finn”: “Twain was always prepared to die. That’s the only way to understand his humor.”

It occurs to me that it might be said that Bolaño, like the American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, found himself most productive, most freely communicative, when operating in the gap between art and life. There’s a good chance you’ll discover, while reading “Between Parentheses,” that this interstitial volume gives as much pleasure as anything else you’ve read by this author.

About this book as physical object:  It is compact but not small, feels sturdy and is comfortable to hold. The book is signature-bound, a traditional bookbinding method that has the practical effect of allowing the opened book to stay flat for your perusal, rather than springing shut. (Your hands don’t have to fight this book; it will likely survive use without warping.) The impression I come away with is that the editor and publisher meant for it to become a permanent addition to your library — a plan Bolaño, who was covetous of his personal collection of books, surely would be pleased with. There is no dust jacket, however. Using the same design approach it applied to “Antwerp,” the publisher, New Directions, has chosen to emboss the title, author, translator (the consistently excellent Natasha Wimmer), and other information on the front and back covers, this time using a striking, iridescent raspberry color on a black ground. In addition to the helpful Index, the editor has supplied an 11-page Sources section, with explanatory notes (Bolaño had filed copies of most of the original texts on his computer).

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An alternative version of this review appears on Amazon, here.

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“Open City” by Teju Cole

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

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There is no reason to believe Teju Cole intended his debut novel to present a challenge to reviewers, but that is what “Open City” does. The only way a critic can genuinely convey the force of this book — its full weight and effect — is to break a covenant with the potential reader by entering the forbidden territory of the spoiler, by revealing the specific shock that hits you like a block of concrete when you reach the novel’s final pages. No responsible critic will do that (nor will I).

Instead, you are apt to come across a positive reviewer of “Open City” saying the novel is, in some non-specific way, a “tour de force.” Another will cagily suggest something’s amiss by labeling the story’s narrator, Julius, a 32-year-old Nigerian-American who is completing a psychiatry fellowship in New York City, “an unreliable narrator.” I will put it this way: what this enormously talented writer has succeeded in doing is crafting a multi-layered reading experience that, at the book’s close, will redouble your receipt of its literary rewards. “Open City” is a novel you will be dying to talk about with other readers.

Since Cole is a newcomer, reviewers are falling over themselves trying to position him next to some veteran. Which writer will Cole remind the reader of? Candidates are piling up. One is Joseph O’Neill, who, like Cole, is a writer of mixed parentage, multicultural perspective, and author of a novel, “Netherland,” which, like “Open City,” explores themes of displacement and anxiety in post-9/11 New York City. Another is Zadie Smith, who, like Cole, unabashedly tackles matters of race, class, the immigrant experience, and suppressed history that must not remain hidden.

W.G. Sebald has been mentioned as well, presumably for his erudition and a shared style of writing that is slow and meditative, seemingly without much of a plot, and dependent on the cumulative accretion of observations. Cole, however, is not a formal innovator like Sebald, and the reader may be relieved to learn Cole is a conventional technician, using standard-length sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” also has been cited as a model. At first blush this makes some sense (Meursault and Julius, twin protagonists of anomie) but my view is if Cole is following Camus, a stronger influence is “The Fall,” with its restless, talkative confessor.

An author I’d place on the list of comparables is Elizabeth Hardwick. Cole shares Hardwick’s keen turn of mind, her love of music, and her unerring command of language. Cole today, as Hardwick two generations ago, understands the seductive attraction of the walkable streets of Manhattan. Their ears are tuned to the innumerable personal stories waiting to be heard. (Cole has said wanted “Open City” to show how New York City is “a space full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.”) Finally, like Cole, Hardwick showed no fear in letting autobiography undergird her fiction, notably in “Sleepless Nights.”

And, to add one more plate to the table: I see resemblances to the methods of Roberto Bolano’s “By Night in Chile.” Although Bolano’s short novel uncovers different sins and belongs to an earlier time of stress in a foreign nation, it shares with “Open City” a narrator prone to non-stop outpouring of stories, of exquisitely observed morsels of experience. Both narrators, it could be said, are engaged in a sort of “talking cure,” on a path to revealed truth. In both novels readers may find the meandering style frustrating. A stream of consciousness leaves some cold. Yet in each story it all adds up, at last, to a devastating contemporary psychological portrait.

But enough. Let Teju Cole and “Open City” be what they want to be: each reader’s own discovery.

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Notes:

(1) A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

(2) Cole has created on Tumblr a page “for and about the the novel Open City” here. For readers of the book it is a worthwhile resource, it takes the place of informative footnotes that a book as dense with allusions as Open City cries out for. But at this point the Tumblr page is only a beginning toward a collection of helpful annotations (I hope Cole, or perhaps others, continue to add material).

(3) A short but revealing interview with Cole is found on the Goodreads site, here.

(4) Audio of a BBC interview of Cole is available here (scroll down the page to find the list of “Chapters” (Cole is interviewed in Chapter 3 which starts at 26:30). The author’s spoken eloquence matches his written eloquence:

“I have not written a book about 9/11. I have written a book about how New York has habitually been a place that very quickly tries to get past the past and move on into the future. And so for characters such as Julius who are highly sensitive to it, it becomes an extremely heavy space. It becomes a space that is full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.”

“I just think the work of mourning is very important, and if you don’t mourn properly your progress afterwards is sort of artificial, because there are things you haven’t dealt with.”

“It’s about finding your part in the human chain. And saying you’re not the first and won’t be the last.”

(5) Let me mention a few things that bothered me about “Open City.” One is the episode in which Julius takes a four-week vacation to go to Brussels in search of his maternal grandmother (his “oma”), with who he has lost contact. Yet Julius makes no effort to locate her, but instead continues his wandering habits (apparently it never occurs to him to simply hire a local detective). Although it is his essential psychological state, Julius demontrates a woeful passivity that began to grate on me somewhat. He is little more than an “eye and ear,” buffeted by events and strangers’ importuning, emasculated, a milquetoast set upon by bullies and opportunists. There is a wonderful moment during the BBC interview (linked to in Note 4) at 37:45 to 38:30. A fellow interviewee on the program, the passionately engaged sociologist Amitai Etzioni, shows frustration when Cole calmly mentions the Native Americans who once flourished in NYC but now are gone. Etzioni confronts Cole: “You’re so neutral, you’re so cool.” Cole is gracious in response, conceding the point, and assuring Etzioni that when it comes to the depredations of the past, “Believe me, I can get very strident.” “Please do,” recommends Etzioni.

(6) I cannot help but like an author who chooses to be photographed, in the year 2011, in front of what has always been, for me, a comforting reminder of man’s durable commitment to preserving hard-earned knowledge. I’m speaking of something you can still come across in great old libraries: a massive, oak-drawered card-catalog.

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UPDATE (05-12-2012): Just found a YouTube video of a recent interview with the author, here (video published May 8, 2012 by WNYC Radio).  Responding to a question on the influence his photography has on his writing, Cole’s answer segues smoothly into a statement of purpose:

“One very particular influence is that photography inspires me to play with points of view, with actual physicals points, vantage points — to imagine a scene from above or from below. And so Open City is full of bird flights, people in skyscrapers looking down, people in planes, subways, wells. Because when you move up or you move down you actually change what you’re seeing — to defamiliarize the everyday.

“In photography and in writing, I want to give people the same sort of feeling, which is that there is someone else out there who’s noticing the small things of life, the things that are viewed obliquely, the things that deserve our attention but often elude our attention.”

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“Antwerp” by Roberto Bolaño

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

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Antwerp differs categorically from Bolaño’s mature novelistic output marked by such fully-formed successes as By Night in Chile and The Savage Detectives — books in which the author constructs a story line rich enough to communicate his considered view of the world. Antwerp dates from 1980 when the author was shifting his principal mode of expression from poetry to fiction. It consists of 56 numbered chapters totally a mere 76 pages. The setting is Barcelona. Characters include a Hunchback; a mysterious young woman caught in an abusive relationship with a cop and who appears slated soon to die; and the 27-year-old Bolaño. There is little in the way of plot connecting the 56 vignettes or mini-narratives or prose poems: each segment tends to be provisional, contingent, and relative. Antwerp, with its frustrating fragmentation and hallucinations, gives the impression of being a cobbled assemblage of pages. Not even Bolaño’s celebrated skill as a fabricator can dislodge this impression. There is no journey; instead, there is a seeming lack of intention. Yes, there is textual inventiveness throughout the book, but if the author meant this to be an experiment in meta-fiction, what he has rendered is, in my judgment, not a success.

To avoid disappointment the reader must alter his or her expectations before delving into Antwerp. In fact, it may be best if you take a pass on Antwerp unless you count yourself among the hardy crew of Bolaño aficionados. To those souls I offer these words.

One way to prepare for the book is to adopt the style and practice of a detective. Treat Antwerp as a sheaf of papers found in the drawer of a prospective master. (As explained in the author’s preface — for me the most interesting pages in the book — this is how Bolaño himself viewed the scatter-shot material when he decided to publish it 22 years after its creation.) Abetting this plan are the physical contours of the book — a small, slim object, jacket-less, black in color, looking like an intimate notebook, divorced from any context, apparently casually set aside. In his intentional novels, Bolaño routinely foregrounded detective activities. 2066 is the most rigorous example. And so I think the reader should adopt that mode when beginning carefully to thumb through Antwerp‘s pages. As many Bolaño protagonists soon learn, your work will consist of much drudgery . . . and lead to uncertain revelations. The principal payoffs in this instance are occasional poetic passages (“Someone stands in the shadows preparing for his death and his subsequent transparency” (p. 7)).  Not surprisingly, mordant observations predominate (“Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void” (p. 51)), with only occasional humor (“Some people choose the worst moments to think about their mothers” (p. 71)). Much of the text is cryptic, though parts have a Zen tang: “The word ‘shoes’ will never levitate” (p. 6). Cinematic touches abound. You know not to expect answers, or (in this book) a sustainable melody.

Another way to approach Antwerp is to consider it a derivative of a fully-formed novel that doesn’t exist. If you are one of those readers so in love with an author, or a particular book, that you search for illumination in the author’s notebooks, journals, log-books, flotsam and jetsam, then here is another occasion to indulge your passion. Chapter 41, for example, is a straightforward 300-word diary entry about a night spent in a decrepit train station, as Bolaño and his (sleeping) girlfriend wait for the morning train to Portugal. I had a sense while reading Antwerp that it was not so much a novel as a preparation for a piece of fiction that defies categorization, mixed with a running account of Bolaño’s own emotional crises, blended further with actual dreams and other elusive autobiographical details. The text contains signs Bolaño knew Antwerp was a failure: “No work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles” (p. 62); “There’s something obscene about this” (p. 64); “Poor Bolaño, writing at a pit stop” (p. 66); and a dangling reference to “undisciplined writing” (p. 51). Yet Bolaño needed to write.

When the day comes that a full-scale biography of Roberto Bolaño is published, I believe Antwerp will be cited at length in a chapter devoted to his residence in Europe, circa 1980. On the evidence of the book’s hallucinatory fragments (there’s a chilling recurrent image of persons without mouths, for example) and references to illness (“nervous collapse in cheap rooms” (p. 32)), this was a difficult period of transition in the author’s young life (“My innocence is mostly gone and I’m not crazy yet” (p. 52); “I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time” (p. 62); “But you write … and you’ll get through this” (p. 44)). In retrospect, we know greatness awaited.

On final consideration, Antwerp is best viewed as an appurtenance to Bolaño’s legacy — a rickety outbuilding found on a sprawling literary estate, far from the main mansion; an inessential stop for all but the most devoted visitors.

Stray sentences from the notes I recorded as I read the book:

Sophie Podolski is mentioned on pages 4 and 10. Bolaño must have seen her as a true contemporary: both were poets, born in 1953. He recounts news of her suicide (on page 4) and her unfulfilled promise (she “wrote like a star” and “would’ve been twenty-seven now, like me” (p. 10)). She appears in “The Savage Detectives”.

As for Colan Yar, a mysterious figure mentioned throughout, I remain in the dark.

There is recurring mention of voices or, even more frequently, applause, coming from “a dark corner” or off-stage. In a variation, this device becomes the “wizened youth” who oppresses the priest in By Night in Chile.

Illness will be a major motif of any Bolaño biography, I predict. Not just the liver failure that took his life at age 50, but earlier illnesses, episodes of “blankets pulled up to my ears, motionless in bed, sweating and repeating meaningless words to myself” (p. 7).

Sometimes he is redeemed by love: “Doubly afraid of himself because he couldn’t help falling in love once a year at least” (p. 66). Or not: “One day the person you love will say she doesn’t love you and you won’t understand. It happened to me. I would’ve liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn’t say anything.” (p. 47).

Bolaño’s love 0f film is ever-present, from the makeshift movie screen erected in the woods for villagers’ delight (p. 21 and elsewhere), to some of the vignettes (chapters 18, 25, 40) that take the form of film scenarios, to a final bit of advice: “Don’t stop going to the movies” (p. 53).

In Chapter 49 Bolaño tests out the possibility of a narrative that interleaves a barroom pick-up with a news item about a traffic accident involving an overturned truck carrying pigs. (Hah!)

Chapter  50 is an apparent autobiographical snippet observing how additionally seductive it is when two persons seeking connection don’t understand each other’s language.

This is a book about writing; among the observations is this one: “What poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader” (p. 71). By 1980, Bolaño was transitioning from poet to prose writer to novelist. He was in state of  transitioning not only as a writer but as a person; or in his case did this amount to the same thing? There is an air of post-adolescent expectancy in the book, a feeling that “something’s coming,” that the surviving narrator is on the cusp of a new life.

Embossed on the back cover of the jacket-less book is this author statement: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” I think this is a riddle whose decipherment requires, first, rejection of the premise that “Antwerp” is a novel at all. The statement is a smokescreen, a subterfuge, a lie that shields the truth of his feared descent into sentimentality, of his condition post-Antwerp.

Ultimately the reader is left confused. Is this a novel driven by a postmodern, meta-fictional agenda? Is it the developmental record of a potentially fully-formed novel? Is it a denatured autobiography?

[Note: A condensed version of this review is found here.]

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“By Night in Chile” by Roberto Bolano

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

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“By Night in Chile” takes the form of a deathbed confession delivered by a Chilean priest, poet and conservative literary critic, Fr. Urrutia. The book’s principal challenge to the uninitiated reader is that it is set in a time, place, culture and political atmosphere unknown to all but a few American readers. An understanding of all the foreign details of the story, and a familiarity with the real life figures who pop up in the priest’s stream of memories (Pablo Neruda, Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, Marta Harnecker) are useful, without doubt. But such foreknowledge is not essential to an immediate enjoyment of the book, so long as you are the kind of reader who takes greater delight in experiencing a literary tour de force that draws you toward a readily understandable moral, a simple truth.

“By Night in Chile” is a bravura performance by Bolaño in which the author has found a distinct way to enwrap and deliver each recollection, each story within a story, each aside, each shift in time, each gruesome discovery, and each blow to the soul, that passes through the dying priest’s sometimes clear, sometimes feverish, mind. One reviewer cites as a defining characteristic of the book, this constant outpouring of side-stories, little morsels, poetry masked by prose. Some readers may find this “meandering” style off-putting, but others of us appreciate the strategy as Bolaño’s signature mode. For us it is an ever-surprising joy. I think the generative force of Bolaño’s communicative charm is the practice and spirit of an all-night “bull session” conducted in college dorms and in fact wherever the intellectually curious are assembled in strange new quarters for purposes of undergoing mind-altering training. If you are of a mindset or personality that typically avoided invitations to join in such sessions, you should avoid “By Night in Chile.”

According to available biographical details, Bolaño life was bohemian — peripatetic, but immersed in the social lives of other poets, painters, musicians, actors. One imagines him as a great talker and a great listener. In a moment of fantasy — never to be fulfilled, alas — I imagine a chance meeting of Roberto Bolaño and the painter/collagist Robert Rauschenberg. What amazing things would have flowed forth had those two spent an afternoon interviewing each other. In my dream I imagine hidden microphones and cameras capturing the sparkling flow of dialog, an outpouring which turns heavenward after I bring to the gentlemen a bottle of Jack Daniels, for RR, and a drug of his choice, for RB.

Literature has been enriched by the confessional form. Think of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Camus’ “The Fall.” The confession is a hospitable device for an author interested in psychological exploration and revelation. A man unspools a story of some evil he witnessed or participated in, a sin that weighs upon him, a sin he now owns up to or, alternatively, seeks to justify. His speech ends with a request, express or implied, for the listener (the reader) to understand, to expiate. And yet, while the framework of “By Night in Chile” borrows from this tradition, the book is frustrating as a confession. Perhaps it is as much of a confession as the present era allows. The state of Fr. Urrutia’s soul at the close of his tale is, at least to me, uncertain. That uncertainty led me to trace my steps back to the beginning of the book, where I found the priest’s opening statement of purpose.

Then I understood this is a deeply religious tale, a profoundly moral story. The dying priest, who hoped he could convince himself he had committed no crimes, is by his own reckoning guilty of sins of omission. It is on page one that he reveals a simple credo. The reader, when first encountering these words, may dismiss them as a bromidic utterance, jejune, self-congratulatory. But when read a second time, after curling back from the novel’s end, the words shine clear:

“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them . . . so one must be very careful with one’s silences.”

[Note: A slightly altered version of my review appears on Amazon here.  Superior reviews are found here and here.]

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“Monsieur Pain” by Roberto Bolano

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) wrote “Monsieur Pain” in 1981-82, at the start of a brief but productive career as an imaginative writer of fiction. The Chilean-born Bolaño is best known for his dazzling breakthrough novel, “The Savage Detectives,” and the posthumously published “2666”. (For an excellent summary of Bolano’s main themes and motifs, see Henry Hitchings review of the “summative” novel “2666” here.)

“Monsieur Pain” is a short (134-page) work, and two audiences may find pleasure in spending a few hours in its spell:

Happy veterans — readers who have been entranced by one or more of Bolaño’s celebrated later works and who want to trace the origin of his mature themes, his obsessions, and his methods, back to the time of their youthful first expression, will find revelations in “Monsieur Pain”.

Wary novices — new readers who are intrigued by, yet also skeptical of, the Bolaño phenomenon. A Washington Post critic, reflecting on Bolaño’s death in 2003, declared: “Bolano has joined the immortals” — and this kind of passionate celebration, echoed many times over by the mainstream critical establishment, garners attention and maybe distrust among general reader population. Some potential readers are, understandably, daunted by the weight of his final writings. They may also be confused by negative reactions to the author, as voiced in the two dozen one- and two-star complaints among the customer reviews of  “2666” on Amazon.com. For those wary readers I recommend this novel as good investment of your time.

Another reviewer described Bolaño’s worldview as “strange and marvelous and impossibly funny, bursting with melancholy and horror.” By Bolaño’s own reckoning, his formative literary influences were all over the map.  In the case of “Monsieur Pain” Bolaño turned to Edgar Allan Poe as the animating force for his narrative. This is not hidden. Between the Dedication Page and a Preliminary Note, on what is sometimes referred to as an Inspiration Page, Bolaño placed a dialog excerpt from Poe’s short story of 1844, “Mesmeric Revelation.” That tale is told as a conversation between a hypnotist and an invalid, a man on the cusp of death, who is placed under hypnosis in an experiment to see whether it will afford him a glimpse of the after-life.  At one point the hypnotized patient confides: “the mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.”

“Monsieur Pain” combines elements of a mystery and a detective story, the latter a genre Poe pioneered. But it is much more than that; the novel genuinely defies categorization. It is narrated by Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran survivor of the battle of Verdun, where he was gassed. Two decades later, he is a pensioner living, poorly, in the Paris demimonde. He has studied mesmerism. Pain is called upon to apply his mesmeric skills to save the life of a hospitalized poet. Not long after his initial visit to the Clinic, events begin to assume a surrealist bent. Blended with a free-floating paranoia, this surreal atmosphere holds sway over the remainder of the novel. Time and space bend: time, at one point, is described as running faster than a clock; the Clinic morphs into a prison, its corridors a labyrinth.

Try as he might, Pain cannot shake off a pair of Spanish assassins, one of whom, when given the chance, attempts to escape, Oswald-like, by ducking into a movie theater. (Whether Bolaño, who would have been 10 1/2 at the time, followed the news of the JFK assassination, is unknown.) Pain is amused by an odd pair of young artists, genuine twins, ensconced in a bizarre cafe whose every fixture and surface is painted a shade of green. These brothers construct miniature disaster scenes (car crashes, train wrecks) inside fish-tanks. (The novelty of this art eerily anticipates Jeff Koons’ likewise surreal basketballs-in-a-fish-tank constructions?) Pain learns about a conspiracy that may involve radiation experiments; he’s made privy to a rumored love affair involving Madame Curie’s daughter. Pain encounters a former friend who has since become a torturer for Franco’s forces.

Which brings us to the political. The dread hanging over Paris in the year 1938 is the specter of totalitarianism. For Bolaño, who considered himself primarily a poet, the personal sorrows of a young Keats (half in love with easeful death) are distant indulgences, supplanted in the modern era by men powerfully in love with half death. Poe would not have been surprised by this turn of events. The question of the poet’s response to fascism, hinted at in “Monsieur Pain,” will take on greater urgency in Bolano’s subsequent novels.

By the mid-point of “Monsieur Pain,” the narrator has fallen sway to paranoia, he is captive to waking dreams. (Those many dreams had a real effect on me: I went to sleep immediately after finishing the book, and that night had more vivid dreams than I’d had in a long time.) Encounters with labyrinths, real and metaphorical, multiply. No matter where you are, you never really find the way out of the labyrinth. The novel ends with an Epilogue for Voices that reveals the main characters’ fates.

Some readers will find all of this a weird, indigestible brew, a fun-house ride not worth taking. If the prospect of Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon is off-putting, best stay away. But if you stick with it, you will appreciate how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, how he manages to maintain a fast pace throughout, disorienting the reader yet maintaining equilibrium. For me, the reading experience was similar to watching a film noir with an experimental bent. From time to time I was reminded of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño “edits” a sequence for the reader’s consumption, and the way he uses physical surroundings to reveal psychological space, and vice versa. There is a cleverly unfurled scene in a movie house in which Bolaño’s piecemeal description of the plot of the film being screened serves as counterpoint to the stories exchanged by two former friends catching up in the audience. True, the book offers no big pay-off; it never soars. Instead, its rewards are modest. Yet you are sure to come away respecting how Bolaño, the poet, can access beauty through sensitive description. You will learn how touching he can be.

Despite or maybe because of the book’s incoherence I wound up liking it; another short novel of his, “By Night in Chile,” is on my near-term reading list.

[Update (01-30-2010): An abridged version of this essay is published as a book review on Amazon.com, here.]

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