Bolaño’s “A Little Lumpen Novelita”: Marie Arana’s Review
The irony of Latin American letters is that the torch has not passed to the living. It has gone from dead giants of the boom — Paz, García Márquez, Cortázar, Borges — to a fresher voice, a voice that speaks to millennials — except that that voice, too, belongs to a dead man. Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003 and whose fame skyrocketed soon after, has become Latin America’s trendiest literary lion in a whirl of posthumous publication. From one international triumph to another — “By Night in Chile” to “The Savage Detectives” to “Nazi Literature in the Americas” and “2666” — his frantic, fearless and perceptive narratives have captured something about the Latin American zeitgeist that the living have not. Bolaño is, for all his mortal remove, the region’s most vibrant expositor: an acid-tongued, truth-telling, peripatetic genius, who lived all too briefly, wrote in a fever and did not go gentle into that good night.