The multiple registers Bolaño can manage in a single story—in a single paragraph (wickedly funny, terrifying, morose, tender)—have always amazed me. Other qualities that particularly engage me are his love of the underdog and the marginalized (drifters; people working menial, makeshift jobs; porn stars) and his obsession with courage. While he touches on bravery in every book he ever wrote, he explicitly talks about it in his essay collection “Between Parentheses.” He writes:
“Courage takes many forms. Sometimes it’s a ghost that hovers over our heads. Sometimes it’s a gleam to which we are irrationally faithful.”
Bolaño’s own courage extended to his fearless tackling of all genres. A poet, he reinvents fiction. Bolaño pulls off all sorts of dangerous stunts on a high wire, with no net. And I love Bolaño’s love for literature: he doesn’t care if it might seem corny—I love his fearlessness about irradiating every page of every book with that love. And when you think that he was working away on “2666,” that masterpiece, as he was dying. It seems all the more extraordinary that to the very end he’s so spell-binding, frightening, entertaining, innovative, and shining. As Francisco says, “He’s in a race with Death and it’s as if Death is cheering him on.”
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