Roberto Bolano

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Book: Roberto Bolano Read Online Free PDF
Author: Roberto Bolaño
look the other way, González Rodríguez believes, brutal acts become ordinary events. The rape and murder of women, the assassination of journalists, the kidnapping of people for ransom: none of these crimes are page-one news in Mexico anymore. “A malevolent person, like a serial killer, can unleash a kind of sweeping effect,” González Rodríguez says, igniting a mechanism of extermination that rivals that of any totalitarian dictatorship. This “normalization of barbarism,” he argues, is the most serious problem facing Mexico and Latin America today.
    In the final section of
2666
, “The Part About Archimboldi,” Bolaño presents a more sinister vision of evil. The section opens at the end of World War I, with a wounded Prussian’s return home. Everything is changing, a stranger tells him: “The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin. [The Prussian] answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change.” Indeed, the whole finale of
2666
, which spans the First World War to the late 1990s, seems designed to prove Archimboldi’sbelief that history is nothing more than a series of instants “that vie with one another in monstrousness.” As Archimboldi fights for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front and starts his career as a novelist in the ruins of Berlin, Bolaño regales us with tale after tale of rape and murder. In the hills of Germany, a man kills his wife and the authorities turn a blind eye. During the war, city folk who flee to the country are routinely robbed, raped and killed. The land around a Romanian castle is filled with buried human bones, and allusions to the Holocaust abound.
    In this landscape of brutality and impunity, Santa Teresa seems less aberrant. It’s just one of many places where an underlying, pervasive evil has welled up and broken the surface. As it is now in Santa Teresa, the novel seems to say, as it has always been, as it shall be in the cemeteries of 2666. Evil is as widespread and eternal as the sea.
    This vision of violence brings to mind America’s own apocalyptic writer, Cormac McCarthy, but Bolaño’s novel has more sex and comedy, and his hero is quite different from those in
The Road
or
Blood Meridian
. Archimboldi marches through the battlefields of Poland and Romania like a man trolling along the bottom of the sea, immersed in the deep’s dark horror yet untouched by it. As a teenager, he reads Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival
and is captivated by the idea of a “lay and independent” medieval knight. His own holy grailturns out to be a dead man’s diary he discovers in an abandoned shtetl.
    A lay and independent knight: these words could describe both the great detectives and the great writers who wander through the pages of
2666
. All of them are loners who devote themselves to reading and swimming in the abyss. Being a writer in this world is as dangerous as being a detective, walking through a graveyard, looking at ghosts.

“LITERATURE IS NOT MADE FROM WORDS ALONE”
INTERVIEW BY HÉCTOR SOTO AND MATÍAS BRAVO
FIRST PUBLISHED IN
CAPITAL
, SANTIAGO, DECEMBER 1999
    HÉCTOR SOTO AND MATÍAS BRAVO: What is your relationship with writers from the Latin American Boom?
    ROBERTO BOLAÑO: Good, very good—as a reader, of course. Anyway the Boom is an imprecise notion. It depends on what parameters everybody gives. Does Sábato come in or not? How about Onetti? Most people would say no. Rulfo , who for me is one of the cornerstones of the Boom, is also left out.
    Argentine writer, Ernesto Sábato (b. 1911) was a driving force in the Argentine surrealist scene. Much of his work is available in English.
    Uraguayan novelist and short story writer Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994) sought to blend the real and the fantastic in his fiction. His novella
The Pit
(1939) is one of the first works of modern Spanish-language literature.
    After publishing the short story collection
The Burning Plain
(1953) and the novel
Pedro Párama
(1955), Mexican author
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