A specter is haunting the English literary world. The ghost is a question. The question is what should be the Roberto Bolaño's posthumous success in the U.S. (and elsewhere).
by Javier Cercas
is a colossal success, which we hear regularly, the latest so far is that 2666-the novel Bolaño-received posthumous last March, the award for best novel published in 2008 given the National Book Critics Circle U.S., having garnered rave reviews and have become a real best seller, all things extraordinary in a country almost shielded from foreign literature. The answers to the ghostly question are certainly varied. I read that the success of Bolaño is due to his untimely death and the fact that is built around a cursed legend and partly false politically persecuted, marginalized literary and addicted to heroin. I read that the success of Bolaño is because in a way Bolaño was an American writer whose literary models are Americans and whose prose works better in English than Castilian. I read that the success of Bolaño is because he has found a large American publisher that has managed to use all those things to make Bolaño a great American success. I have read many answers, but they all produced an embarrassing feeling that have been engineered not only to reduce the merit of the success of Bolaño, which ultimately would have no importance, but to diminish the merit of the work Bolaño, what it does. I confess I do not understand them. There many writers who have died prematurely and surrounded by a legend about damn who have never achieved the success of Bolaño, and is unlikely to succeed. So many writers are somewhat American writers for their literary models are American and have never achieved the success of Bolaño, or is likely to get (what that Bolaño works better in English than Castilian have to explain it better, because and the truth is that it gives a little laugh.) And as for his American publisher, no doubt you are doing a great job, but also did very well his English publisher, and in any case, although the American editor has given Bolaño much, it is impossible that he has given more than he gave his English publisher, which is most important that at least at some point an editor can give a writer: self-confidence, a trust-me it seems that I am not mistaken Bolaño had not previously had.
the ghostly question actually is, I think, a question wrong, the correct answer is perhaps another. I assume that you have all read Bolaño, if you have not read, for once, and without a precedent-it from me: now throw to trash this article, run to the nearest bookstore, break the showcase kicks, "take any book Bolaño and, after paying religiously and showcase book, spend the next few days to read. Then agree with me that maybe the right question is not why Bolaño is successful when you are dead, but why did not he was alive. Of course, 2666-the posthumous work which has described the United States, and elsewhere, is an exceptional novel, but also exceptional Savage Detectives and Distant Star and The Nazi literature in America and his books of tales and all or almost everything he wrote from the time they became an omnivorous machine cutting reality and make it great literature. Some of us hurt boca de decirlo -lo que en honor a la verdad no tiene ningún mérito: para advertir que Bolaño era grande bastaba leerlo-, pero no sirvió de mucho y, aunque al final de su vida gozaba de un fuerte prestigio minoritario, lo cierto es que sus libros nunca le alcanzaron para llevar más que una modestísima vida monástica. Esto, a ratos, me parece triste; miento: me parece una putada tremenda. Pero sólo me lo parece a ratos.
Porque la realidad es que Bolaño conoció en vida un éxito absoluto. Quiero decir que la pregunta fantasmal es una pregunta equivocada y la pregunta que a primera vista parece acertada también es una pregunta equivocada. Todo escritor de verdad sabe que el éxito y el fracaso (o what is usually called success and failure) are illusions: the proof is that they get great writers, good writers, regular writers, bad writers and terrible writers, or put another way: every writer really knows what they are really successful and failure. Cyril Connolly wrote that "the true mission of a writer is to create a masterpiece." There are few writers who get to create, in my opinion, Bolan was one of them experienced the incomparable intensity of writing a masterpiece, but no more than one. Anyone I've known Bolaño knew better than that for a writer there is no success that could even remotely compare to that.