Table Of ContentLITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS
About the series
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in litera-
ture in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical bound-
aries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United
States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues
of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in tra-
ditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge
scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist
approaches.
Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She has published widely in the
areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border studies. Her
numerous publications include the award-winning novel, Canícula: Snapshots
of a Girlhood en la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in Laredo,
Texas. The (co)edited volumes: Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change,
Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, Paths to Discovery: auto-
biographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science and Engineering,
Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes, and Ofrenda:
Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams. She is cofounder of
CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member of the Macondo
Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in Vandal, Prairie Schooner, and
Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues.
Books in the Series:
Radical Chicana Poetics
Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez
Rethinking Chicano/a Literature through Food: Postnational Appetites
Edited by Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca
Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico:
Deep Undercurrents
Paulo Moreira
Mexican Public Intellectuals
Edited by Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day
TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature
Edited by Brian L. Price, César A. Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz
The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics
Edited by Ellie D. Hernández and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson
Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from
Our America: Noteworthy Protagonists
Marco Katz Montiel
New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative:
Post-National Literatures and the Canon
Edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González
Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays
Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo
Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant
Star
Critical Essays
Edited by
Ignacio López-Calvo
ROBERTO BOLAÑO, A LESS DISTANT STAR
Copyright © Ignacio López-Calvo, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49517-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-50488-6 ISBN 978-1-137-49296-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137492968
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberto Bolaño, a less distant star : critical essays / edited by Ignacio
López-Calvo.
pages cm. — (Literatures of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003—Criticism and interpretation.
I. López-Calvo, Ignacio, editor.
PQ8098.12.O38Z79 2015
863(cid:25).64—dc23 2014035190
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my niece and goddaughter, Sara López Gandur
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Contents
Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño ix
Siddhartha Deb
Introduction 1
Ignacio López-Calvo
Part I General Overview
Chapter 1
Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship,
Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star 17
Rory O’Bryen
Chapter 2
Roberto Bolaño’s Flower War: Memory, Melancholy,
and Pierre Menard 35
Ignacio López-Calvo
Part II Two Major Novels
Chapter 3
666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bolaño’s
Double Time Frame in 2666 67
Margaret Boe Birns
Chapter 4
Ulysses’s Last Voyage: Bolaño and the Allegorical
Figuration of Hell 85
raúl rodríguez freire
viii CONTENTS
Chapter 5
“Con la cabeza en el abismo”: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage
Detectives and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, and
the Maquiladora of Death 105
Martín Camps
Part III Short Novels and Short Stories
Chapter 6
Valjean in the Age of Javert: Roberto Bolaño in
the Era of Neoliberalism 131
Nicholas Birns
Chapter 7
Literature and Proportion in The Insufferable Gaucho 149
Brett Levinson
Part IV Prose Poetry and Poetry in Prose
Chapter 8
Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in
Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita 171
Luis Bagué Quílez
Chapter 9
Roberto Bolaño’s Big Bang: Deciphering the
Code of an Aspiring Writer in Antwerp 189
Enrique Salas Durazo
Notes on Contributors 211
Index 215
Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño
Siddhartha Deb
A
t the age of 20, an aspiring writer goes back to his country to
help build socialism, an ideal that comes to a premature end with
a right-wing coup. After a brief period of imprisonment, the young
man begins a wanderer’s existence, crossing countries and continents,
finding fellow exiles scattered in large cities and provincial towns,
gathering moments of existential qualm that are transmuted into fic-
tion. His stories are full of wine and tobacco smoke, fittingly so for
an author often photographed pondering over a cigarette. At 50, as
he begins to make a reputation as a writer, he dies in exile, waiting for
a liver transplant.1
It sounds, at first, like a thumbnail sketch from some lost age of
literature, closer to Parisian exiles and the International Brigades
than the world we know, but the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was
born a little over half-a-century ago. Considerably younger than the
celebrated writers of the Latin American “Boom”—Gabriel García
Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar—he
died in Barcelona in 2003, so that what initially seems anachronis-
tic about his life is nothing other than the disorientation created by
literary circumstances unfamiliar to many of us reading and writing
from the metropoles in the age of globalization. These seemingly
anachronistic circumstances include the idea that writing, and the
life within which such writing is shaped, must often function with-
out a safety net; that literature must engage with politics even when
politics has foreclosed literature; and that a writer will often have to
subvert established forms in order to capture the nature of contem-
porary reality.
These are not new perspectives, but they seem to have been aban-
doned in the last 20 years, especially in the West. There, fiction often
guides readers along a cultural superstructure that might offer occa-
sional glimpses of politics but in general rises far above it, giving them
instead an exuberance of style that in turn suggests an exuberance
