In my quest to read everything by and about Roberto Bolaño ever, I recently picked up Nazi Literature in the Americas, a very odd, fascinating, detailed book about people and things that do not exist. So basically, it does what fiction does, but on a whole other level.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is meant to be an encyclopedia of right-wing authors, carefully detailing their lives, works, and political views. The thing is that none of the authors are real. The intricate details of their lives, the lists of various book they've written or read are also made up. In the back of the novel, is not only a glossary of 'secondary figures' in the lives of the authors already written about, but a glossary of all of the works, real and imagined, that are mentioned in the novel, including their supposed publisher and year released. The ability to make up this kind of detail, to create this entire web of lives, is a great example of what makes Bolaño such an incredibly important writer.
In Bolaño's writing, I am perpetually fascinated by the narrative voice in his works. As in By Night in Chile, Amulet, or parts of The Savage Detectives, we get a first-person narration, and in many other of his works, there seems to be a third-person omniscient narrator, although that is never quite the case. As we zoom in and out of the lives of the numerous characters in Bolaño's works, there is a sense that the narrator is close to the characters in that they overlap and run in similar circles in the universe of the story or novel. This is really salient in Nazi Literature in the Americas, and by the end, we even find out that this narrator has been Roberto Bolaño himself, though most likely that is still a persona, as Arturo Belano is Bolaño's surrogate/persona in many of his stories, and most prominently in The Savage Detectives and Amulet.
Let me provide an example. In Nazi Literature in Americas, we get what seems to be a simple retelling of the events of their lives. But then we get lines from the narrator that are interpretive because of a personality. For example, the account of Silvio Salvático (47-48), a prolific poet who died in an old-age home, and whose 'books were never published. His manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies' (48). A simple third-person omniscient narrator would be able to tell us whether those manuscripts were trashed or burned, but we are left with the narrator speculating - the life of Silvio Salvático and his works are still a mystery to our narrator, and to us.
Little moments like the one above are peppered throughout the novel, and in the last story, the account of Carlos Ramirez Hoffman (179-204), the narrator is a part of the story, and named Roberto Bolaño. Hoffman was a poet that would write his poetry in the sky with an airplane, and was also a murderer. Bolaño's character is asked to help find Hoffman, because he knew him at one point.
This tenuous, gradual reveal of the narrator actually being Bolaño, or as I said before at least a persona Bolaño takes on, especially considering Hoffman is not a real person, is so fascinating to me because it perfectly showcases this kind of smashing of fiction and reality in the endeavor that is Nazi Literature in the Americas. All of fiction is about reading about people that are not real, but Bolaño makes that the very foundation of this novel: the constant acknowledgement and participation in something that is not real. The verisimilitude of the novel would make you think that you could get lost in the novel, but I think the effect is much more in 1) making you kind of wish these people and their works were real, because their lives are rendered so lucidly, and their works seemingly so interesting 2) wondering why are you are reading account after account of the 'biographies' of people that do not exist. So as a reader, we are never 'lost' in the world of the novel, and the lives of these characters, while Bolaño is our unknown, mysterious guide.
As with all of Bolaño's works, I never walk away from them feeling comfortable or sure of what I've read. I think because the characters and the loping paths they take are so perfectly rendered, that as a reader, you become aware of a profound inability to understand them and their world, which I think is a crucial element of Bolaño's works. With Nazi Literature in the Americas, we only get a glimpse into the enormous and sprawling world these characters inhabit, and perhaps the only thing to do is to make the effort to see into that world.
No comments:
Post a Comment