Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
The Great Bolaño
By Francisco Goldman
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 577 pp., $27.00
Distant Star
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions, 149 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
New Directions,219 pp., $13.95 (paper)
2666
by Roberto Bolaño
Barcelona: Anagrama, 1,125 pp. (to be published in English translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year)
'A writer's patria or country, as someone said, is his language. That sounds pretty demagogic, but I completely agree with him....' That is from Roberto Bolaño's acceptance speech for the 1999 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, an award given by the government of Venezuela for the best Spanish-language novel of the year in Latin America or Spain. Bolaño won the prize for The Savage Detectives, his sprawling, exuberant account of two Latin American poets over twenty-some years, which made him a literary celebrity and established him as one of the most talented and inventive novelists writing in Spanish. Bolaño was routinely asked in interviews whether he considered himself Chilean, having been born in Santiago in 1953, or Spanish, having lived in Spain the last two decades of his life, until his death in 2003, or Mexican, having lived in Mexico City for ten years in between. One time he answered, 'I'm Latin American.' Other times he would say that the Spanish language was his country.
Review, 5466 words
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