Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut
your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art,
if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very
busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous
to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?
That’s from one review of the newly translated Roberto Bolaño book. (Might it have been titled "Conservative Fascism"?) This work is not a structured narrative but rather a series of impressionistic portraits of how easy it is for some people to slip into being horrible and stay that way. Imagine a fictional bestiary of creepy aesthetes who are playing at human relationships, sleepwalking through their dreamlike yet trivial obsessions, and in the meantime pledging allegiance to tyranny. Literature is a "surreptitious form of violence" throughout.
Here are excerpts from other reviews. At this point it goes without saying that everything by Bolaño is essential reading; however you may find many parts baffling if you don’t have a strong background in things Latin American.
I should point out, just in case anyone else was confused, that these are 2 different guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Bola%C3%B1o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_G%C3%B3mez_Bola%C3%B1os
Is the book meant to be a parody of those who waxed poetically about Stalin?
You say “everything by Bolaño is essential reading”. Upon reading Goldman’s “The Great Bolaño”, let me say: No me vengas con chingaderas, Tyler Cowen. Borges could move between the fictive and the real because he wrote about a reality that he knew first hand. From Goldman’s review and my “strong background” in things Argentinian and Chilean, I got the impression that in his work Bolaño moved between the fictive and the LA’s “official story” as told by the Left.
While there wasn’t any “Nazi Literature in America,” there was plenty of “Stalinist Literature in America,” but we can drop that inconvenient fact down the old memory hole.
Bolano makes the point that winners write history using deft parody and humour…but this is a minor work. Not worth the raves it’s receiving.
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