Bolaño and the Canon

Abstract

Roberto Bolaño’s biography and literary career can be summarized in a few words: He was born in Santiago in 1953; left his native Chile with his family in 1968; led a group of marginal poets in the Mexico City in the mid-1970s; moved to the Catalan region of Spain later that decade where he took up writing novels and stories; published Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) in 1998, for which he won the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes in consecutive years; and died in 2003 of a liver condition shortly after being consecrated as the most important writer of his generation and a year before the publication of his monumental work 2666 (2004). He was a writer who labored in relative obscurity for over two decades before making his mark in the literary world, writing poems and authoring some hard to classify novels set in Barcelona, Girona, Paris, and Blanes but featuring Latin American characters. ¹ Canonization in the Hispanic world was followed by canonization in the English-speaking world, where the Bolaño boom was, however, conditioned by the repackaging of his figure for a US audience (see Pollack). ² Whereas Bolaño’s stature abroad depended to some extent on a new set of cultural stereotypes, in Latin America and Spain his standing among fellow writers and readers was grounded on his ability to recast the avant-garde tradition and the legacy of the Boom in a fresh narrative language that is simultaneously visionary and colloquial.