{"id":1007,"date":"2010-02-09T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T18:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/02\/roberto-bolanos-eternal-life.html"},"modified":"2010-02-09T10:51:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T18:51:00","slug":"roberto-bolanos-eternal-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/02\/roberto-bolanos-eternal-life.html","title":{"rendered":"Roberto Bolano&#8217;s Eternal Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Given the perilous state of publishing these days, it makes my heart sing whenever a writer of substance generates a serious following. And I keep bumping into people who feel passionate about the Latin American writer Roberto Bolano, who died near Barcelona in 2003. He&#8217;s in the news these days for the publication of a slender sort-of-mystery novel called <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/07\/books\/review\/Blythe-t.html\">Monsieur Pain<\/a>, <\/i>but he has not stopped coming up in conversation since his work emerged on FSG in 2007.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Roberto_Bola%C3%B1o\">Bolano<\/a>, of coruse, writes often about bohemia, idealism, crushing disillusionment, sex, fascism and the romance of art and literature.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2007\/apr\/15\/entertainment\/ca-bolano15\">HERE<\/a> is my piece on Bolano, written for the publication of <i>The Savage Detectives<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>I must admit to having mixed feelings about the writer and his resurrection: My sense is that he&#8217;s gotten a long way from having a romantic life, from attacking better-known writers (Paz, Garcia Marquez), from coming along just as people had tired of &#8220;magical realism,&#8221; and from taking a very good picture early in his career, when he had a kind of poetic dessication. (He also writes about literary people &#8212; poets, authors, critics &#8212; flattering us that we&#8217;re more important than we are.)<\/p>\n<p>But what Bolano does well, he does better than almost anybody I know. My book group &#8212; who I led in the novella\u00a0<i>Distant Star<\/i> a few years back &#8212;\u00a0is now reading what&#8217;s considered his masterpiece, <i>2666<\/i>, and I look forward to digging in deeper.<\/p>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/S3GuhxxZFlI\/AAAAAAAAApY\/ELhurqLiJqs\/s1600-h\/Bolano_cover.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"320\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/S3GuhxxZFlI\/AAAAAAAAApY\/ELhurqLiJqs\/s320\/Bolano_cover.jpg\" width=\"240\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Photo courtesy Melville House<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Given the perilous state of publishing these days, it makes my heart sing whenever a writer of substance generates a serious following. And I keep bumping into people who feel passionate about the Latin American writer Roberto Bolano, who died near Barcelona in 2003. He&#8217;s in the news these days for the publication of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[138,302,35,323],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-bohemia","7":"category-bolano","8":"category-books","9":"category-latin-america","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}