Roberto Bolano Read Online Free PDF Page B

rhapsodic about it, but you’re not a gravedigger, or a critic.
    RB: I’m a survivor. I feel enormous affection toward this project, notwithstanding its excesses, immoderations and deviations. The project is hopelessly romantic, essentially revolutionary, and it has seen the failure of many groups and generations of artists. Though, even now, our conception of art in the West is indebted to this vision.
    HS/MB: If there is a concept that has been devalued in this era, it is that of revolution.
    RB: The truth for me—and I want to be very sincere—is that the idea of revolution had already been devalued by the time I was twenty years old. At that age, I was a Trotskyite and what I saw in theSoviet Union was a counterrevolution. I never felt I had the support of the movement of history. To the contrary, I felt quite crushed. I think that’s noticeable in the characters in
The Savage Detectives
.
    HS/MB: At some point in your life, we imagined that you were animated by great revolutionary ardor.
    RB: You imagined it correctly. I was against everything. Against New York and Moscow, against London and Havana, against Paris and Beijing. I even felt scared by the solitude entailed in radicalism.
    HS/MB: Does your sense of having survived come from that?
    RB: No, I feel like a survivor in a more literal sense. I am not dead. I say it like that because many of my friends have died, from armed revolutionary struggle, drug overdose, or AIDS. Although some who survived are now illustrious and famous celebrities of Spanish letters.
    HS/MB: Writers are always asked for their inspiration and today will not be an exception. Some are inspired more from life, while others more from literature.
    RB: In what concerns me, both.
    HS/MB: Notwithstanding that, you are an extremely literary writer—to put it one way.
    A: Well, if I had to choose one of the two things, and God pray that I never have to choose, I would choose literature. If I were offered a great library or an Inter-Rail ticket to Vladivostok, I would keep the library, without the slightest doubt. Besides, with the library, my trip would be much longer.
    HS/MB: Like Borges, you have lived through your reading.
    RB: In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.
    HS/MB: Nevertheless, literature is not purely a sanctuary for good sentiment. It is also a refuge for hatefulness and resentment.
    RB: I accept that. But it’s indisputable that there are good sentiments in it. I think Borges said that a good writer is normally a good person. It must have been Borges because he said practically everything.Good writers who are bad people are the exception. I can think only of one.
    HS/MB: Who?
    RB: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer and son of a bitch. Just an abject human being. It’s incredible that the coldest moments of his abjection are covered under an aura of nobility, which is only attributable to the power of words.
    HS/MB: Between Latin American and Spanish writers, where is your literary brotherhood?
    RB: Basically among the Latin Americans—but also among the Spaniards. I don’t believe in the separation of Latin American and Spanish writers. We all inhabit the same language. At least I think I cross those frontiers. And in my generation there is a mixed nucleus of writers, Spaniards and Latin Americans, the same way they were mixed in another era of Modernism, possibly the most revolutionary movement in Spanish literature of this century. Because of his strength, I think someone like Javier Marías is forced to influence Latin American literature, and he does. He is a great writer. By the same token, young Spanish writers should be influenced by someone like Rodrigo Rey Rosa or Juan Villoro , two enormous writers. I am extraordinarily blessed by a photograph of all of us