Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño (b. 1953–d. 2003) is widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist of the turn of the 21st century. Bolaño’s reputation rests primarily on the fictional works he produced during a period of extraordinary creative activity from 1996 to his death in 2003: the novels La literatura nazi en América (1996), Estrella distante (1996), Los detectives salvajes (1998), Nocturno de Chile (2001), and the posthumously published 2666 (2004) as well as the short story collections Llamadas telefónicas (1997) Putas asesinas (2001), and El gaucho insufrible (2003). However, his oeuvre also encompasses a diverse corpus of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism written between the 1970s and the early 2000s, a substantial portion of which appeared in print for the first time after his death. Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in southern Chile, Bolaño moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968, the year of the infamous Tlatelolco student massacre. In 1973, he went to Chile to “support” Salvador Allende’s socialist government (as he later put it). After briefly being detained in the aftermath of the Pinochet coup of 11 September 1973, he left the country and returned to Mexico City. Shortly after, he co-founded the avant-garde poetry movement infrarrealismo with close friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. In 1976, he traveled to Europe and eventually relocated to Spain, living in Barcelona and Gerona before settling in the small Spanish coastal city of Blanes. Bolaño’s fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s obsessively reconstructs this itinerary—often through the guise of his alter ego Arturo Belano—as a means of exploring the effects of the Latin American dictatorships on an entire generation of writers, political activists, and ordinary citizens. Critics have thus tended to classify Bolaño both as a major practitioner of Latin American post-dictatorial fiction and as a prominent figure within the contemporary Spanish-language tradition of autofiction. The critical discussion on his final work, 2666, on the other hand, has revolved around his turn to a “depersonalized” style of narration and a new scene of violence in Latin America: the ongoing murder and disappearance of women in the US-Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (a fictional version of the real-life Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez). His novels, short stories, and essays have been translated into multiple languages. Bolaño’s posthumous canonization in the United States has led to a voluminous body of English-language criticism of his work.