Los detectives salvajes
abril 17, 2007
No sé si tengo motivos para sorprenderme, pero varias de las grandes revistas y de los grandes periódicos han dado una extensa cobertura a la obra de Bolaño y los últimos días a la aparición de The Savage Detectives. Los blogs también lo han hecho, y de manera impresionante. Para no ir más lejos, el último número de Harpers le dedica un buen ensayo. Ya lo habían hecho Threepenny Review y New Yorker. Y hace unos días, en el NYT, James Wood escribió una generosa reseña:
Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.
"A novel all about poetry and poets, one of whose heroes is a lightly disguised version of the author himself: how easily this could be nothing more than a precious lattice of ludic narcissism and unbearably 'literary' adventures! Again, Bolaño skirts danger and then gleefully accelerates away from it. The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño has a worldly, literal sensibility."
Digo que no sé si debo sorprenderme. Bolaño es un buen escritor, uno de los pocos buenos escritores. Esta es una buena descripción de su estilo, del blog The Mumpsimus:
What is the nature of this passion of mine? Any love is difficult to explain fully, to analyze or dissect, but I have some idea of what it is about Bolaño's writing that makes it so attractive to me. His diction (in Chris Andrews's translations, at least) is disarmingly colloquial, creating a poetic effect that heightens ordinary speech and expression without churning it into lyrical goo. This is, to be honest, my favorite sort of style, but one I am wary of, because most of the time it is used by writers who don't know what else to do. Bolaño's stories drift around, often as monologues -- and since I was once an aspiring playwright, I have a weakness for monologues. I am happiest when hearing characters talk. His characters talk, and they talk about each other talking, and their talk is the substance of their stories.
But this is not all that attracts me -- such writing might be enough to spark a crush, but it is not, on its own, enough to fuel a passion. I am also enraptured by Bolaño's mix of the odd and the ordinary, the easy movement he makes between the logic of modernity and the logic of dreams, the willingness he has to indulge in goofiness and absurdity, and the general refusal in all of his work (that I have read) to turn terror and evil into simple melodrama. And I adore his allusions -- no literary geek like me could fail to fall in love with all the names dropped through the pages like confetti from The Reader's Encyclopedia. No-one with a sweet tooth for metafiction could fail to be charmed by the twists and turns of Bolaño's fictive realities, their palimpsests and funhouse mirrors, their chuckles and winks.Para bien o para mal, Bolaño ha influido a muchos escritores... en fin, esto lo sabemos muy bien. Lo que me pregunto es si la crítica estadunidense iluminará aspectos de Bolaño en los que no hemos reparado.
Etiquetas: ficción, lecturas, noticias, reseñas
posted by Mauricio Salvador @ 8:32 AM,
1 Comments:
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At 12:44 PM,
j. said...
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Pues parece que Chris Andrews hizo un buen trabajo. ¿Será que logró diferenciar los acentos y manerismos de los "entrevistados"? Tengo curiosidad por ver esa traducción.
Por lo pronto, los gringos están fascinados con el personaje. En un par de años empezarán a decir cosas interesantes sobre la obra. :)
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