In this essay, I’d like to try to answer the following question: how much of Roberto Bolaño do we have left in 2025, when he would have turned seventy-five?
We still have his books, the interviews he gave, and the documentaries in which he appears. But we also have a variety of young authors who still read him. And we have many others, already over forty themselves, who published their first books emulating passages from The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and Nazi Literature in the Americas.
It seems few writers in Latin America have kept to the path that opened in 2666. It’s as if this book were the future of the novel and the novel of the future all at once. But, as in the case of the Quixote, its echo can still be perceived in other lands and other literatures.
Bolaño is still on bookstores’ bestseller lists and lists of essential authors. He has been discussed at great length in academic spaces and even more in talks, seminars, and writers’ conferences all over the world. But, in a sense, Bolaño has remained what he always was: a writer who reformulated the literature he inherited from the classics and the Latin American Boom. He was a romantic and an innovator; he was, in his own way, a political writer and a highly literary writer. He was one of those writers’ writers.
And, nonetheless, the question is worth considering. We don’t know what he would have written from 2003, when he died, to the present. Surely silence would have fallen. You can’t go any further in literary terms after 2666. What remains, after a new artistic movement, is reinvention. And Bolaño surely would have reinvented himself. But he also would have kept his distance from the commercial book world, which is not to say he would have avoided altercations and confrontations with presses, prizes, and writers whom he detested, and whom he would have kept detesting.
Despite this, Bolaño would have done a better job of managing his author’s rights. He would have allowed others to transform his stories and novels into stage plays, comics, films, TV series, and other cultural artefacts because he was well aware that, once written, these books had already ceased to be entirely his and, from the moment of their completion, they also belonged to those who might adapt and appropriate them.
This is, of course, pure speculation. It’s also possible that he would have grown more radical in his literary and aesthetic stances, ensuring that his work and his legacy—although he had no faith in these words—would find the best means through which to reach readers.
Perhaps Bolaño is not a writer for all readers, but he never was. Only his death launched him into the cosmos of mass reading, research, and literary criticism. During his life, Bolaño played all possible fields so as to make his voice heard. Thus, his perception of the world was not in the interests of a select few. Rather, it served to build a literary temple on firm foundations: honor, honesty, courage, and impertinence.
All of these traits shifted and slid into every one of his books of stories, articles, and essays. And, above all, into his novels. Because his poetry, conversely, was reserved for another endeavor: there, he was an explorer.
He did not give himself over to the influence of a given style of phrasing. Nor to the syntax of everyday speech. Nor to the fading wake of the modernist, the classical, or the prosaic. Because, although he declared himself the heir of Nicanor Parra, his undertaking and his ars poetica were different. Where Parra plays, Bolaño elaborates; where Parra opens, Bolaño closes; and where Parra laughs, Bolaño is serious and summoning.
Bolaño the poet is the Bolaño who would have stood the test of all this time. He would have returned, in the end, to the roots of the word from the poem, turning flesh into language through free verse, attuned to a reality that was neither prosaic nor banal, but rather existentially daring and ambiguous.
Here we must turn to our imagination, questioning the value of Bolaño’s prose to the detriment of his verse practice. You can’t imagine Bolaño without poetry, when it comes to his phrases or their poetic accentuation. We should look closely at his books of poems: there we’ll find a new literary undertaking that was neither perceived nor pursued.
This is a poetic undertaking that converses with everything it finds in its path. Because where the novel ends, poetry begins, and in the poem, by virtue of its brevity, a whole system of signs, symbols, and political and cultural junctures comes into play—a system as disruptive to the established order as it is beautiful in its execution.
We cannot think of Bolaño in the present, since his death is still disputed.
On the one hand, he is a ghost called up by those who want to live their lives to the limit, to write from a place that seems romantic and dangerous.
On the other, we have the brotherhoods to which Bolaño gave his blessing, which, to this day, make much of the words he dedicated to them in some article.
Then we have Bolaño’s friends, who reinterpret and forget him piece by piece as the winds of the book market change.
Then come those who are visiting him for the first time. They are left dumbstruck, dazzled, and unable to identify what is happening to them as they read.
The latter are the most faithful: the generational turnover that every writer needs in order to keep on existing as an author.
Lastly, we have those who read him in the late nineties and the first decade of the oughts. Some have managed to write; others were published. But all of them discovered that Bolaño still brings a smile to their faces, a moving memory to their minds, an irreplaceable imagery and a variety of complex, contradictory sensations.
Many of them will keep wondering whether Bolaño is a great writer or an enigma, a farce.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe it has to be this way.
Maybe no one dies unpublished after reading Bolaño, but they can still die as cowards if they don’t give everything to their writing: all they are and all they remember, all they desire and pursue and all they’d rather forget and destroy.
Bolaño did not go out with a bang for no reason. He did not write as if his very life were slipping away through the process; he did not race against time just for the thrill of the chase. No. Bolaño wrote until the end because he placed literature at the center of his life in order to tell us, from this place, that life—as we knew it and know it still—is much more than delayed emotions, weekends with family, Sundays in front of the TV, or news we force down like canned food.
Bolaño wrote until the end because he had no other choice.
He did it to open our eyes. To open the world. And, in that crack he managed to open, he planted the seeds of new words with which we now define the world.
One of these words is honesty. The other is courage.
Together, they form the diptych of virtues that an author must posess in order to be a writer.
And, as long as those who write fail to take on writing with the courage of honesty, literature will continue to face one of its darkest and most dangerous hours. It will be tempted to rest on its haunches, to let itself die in the imminence of TV series, which have taken away a good measure of the best it once had.
Bolaño is laughing from the back of the room. We all know it. He is there and not there.
The more he laughs, the more he scares us.
The more he scares us, the more essential it becomes that we read him and hear him.
The rest, everything else, will be silence, or a desert of tedium in the midst of a maelstrom of boredom.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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