Roberto Bolaño

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Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño Ávalos (born April 28, 1953 in Santiago de Chile , † July 14, 2003 in Barcelona ) was a Chilean writer .

life and work

Many legends have arisen around the life story of Roberto Bolaño, to which the author himself has contributed greatly through misleading and ironic statements. Growing up in the rainy south of Chile, he traveled all over the country in his childhood because his parents moved frequently. The father was a truck driver and professional boxer. As a schoolboy, Roberto suffered from dyslexia . At the age of 13 he came to Mexico City with his parents , where he spent his adolescence.

In 1973 he returned to Chile to take part in the new beginnings under the socialist President Salvador Allende . After the 1973 coup in Chile , he was detained for eight days before he was able to leave the country with the help of friends. He went to El Salvador and later back to Mexico. With the Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro and others, he founded the avant-garde group of the infrared realists, who rebelled against the established literary scene.

After the end of the Franco regime , he moved to Spain in 1977 . He lived with his wife in Blanes , a coastal town near Barcelona, ​​where his two children were born. He earned his living by doing odd jobs, in the summer on a campsite in Castelldefells .

There he met a guest from France between 1978 and 1981: Miralles, the main character in Javier Cercas ' novel Soldiers of Salamis . Bolaño reported on his stories to the author in 2000 and thus provided him with the material for the third part of the book. Bolaño himself became a literary figure in Cercas' novel.

After remaining an unknown surrealist poet in his early creative years , Bolaño celebrated his first narrative success in 1996 with La literatura nazi en América ( Nazi literature in America ), a fictional encyclopedia of right-wing literature from Chile and Argentina. The novel Estrella distante from the same year went largely unnoticed. His breakthrough came in 1998 with the novel Los detectives salvajes ( The Wild Detectives ), for which he received the prestigious Latin American literary prize Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 1999 . A year later, the short novel followed Nocturno de Chile , a roman à clef about the Chilean Opus Dei -Priester and literary critic José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois . This work received little attention at first and was only discovered late by critics and readers, but is now widely regarded as a masterpiece. Estrella distante and Nocturno de Chile are the only Bolaños novels set in Chile, the other prose texts by the author are mainly in Mexico or Spain.

At the age of only 50, Roberto Bolaño died in Barcelona of cirrhosis of the liver - the result of an untreated hepatitis illness in his youth - after waiting in vain for an organ donation. Another novel was found in his estate, reviewed by his wife Carolina López: Los sinsabores del verdadero policía ( The Troubles of the Real Policeman ). His last book published during his lifetime, Una novelita lumpen (2002) (German Lumpenroman , 2010), and the posthumously published novel 2666 , are considered his literary legacy. His novel Amberes served as the template for the short film of the same name by Jasper Pollet (2011) and the rag novel as the template for the 2013 feature film Il Futuro - A rag story in Rome by Alicia Scherson .

Bolaño is considered one of the most talented writers of his generation in Latin America. At times compared to Julio Cortázar , however, the greatest influence on him is likely to have been Jorge Luis Borges . Many of his works are reminiscent of his bibliomanic fantasies. His split relationship with his native Chile and the literary tradition of Latin America as well as his pronounced satirical disposition are also striking . A central method of Bolaño is the mixing of fiction and biographical facts. It was only after his death that he became known to a wider audience through translations in the USA and Germany.

Prices

  • Premio Ámbito Literario de Narrativa (Novel)
  • Premio municipal de Santiago de Chile (Roman)
  • Premio Herralde (novel)
  • Premio Rómulo Gallegos (novel)
  • Premio Ciudad de Barcelona
  • Premio Salambó
  • Premio Fundación Lara
  • Premio Altazor
  • National Book Critics Circle Award (2008, USA)

Works (selection)

in spanish language:

translated into German:

Theater adaptations

Film adaptations

literature

in order of appearance

  • Patricia Espinosa Hernández: Territorios en fuga. Estudios críticos sobre la obra de Roberto Bolaño ( Colección ensayos ). Frasis, Providencia Santiago 2003, ISBN 956-8170-03-0 .
  • Alma Durán-Merk: Representaciones de la experiencia migratoria en la literature: “Los detectives salvajes” by Roberto Bolaño. Opus, Augsburg 2010 ( PDF file ).
  • Ursula Hennigfeld (Ed.): Roberto Bolaño. Violencia, escritura, vida . Vervuert, Madrid 2015, ISBN 978-84-8489-917-4 .
  • Susanne Klengel: Younger Bolaño. The terrifying beauty of ornament . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-8260-6692-4 .
  • Benjamin Loy: Roberto Bolaño's Wild Library. An aesthetic and politics of reading. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-065815-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ingrid Simson: Roberto Bolaño's version of memory: silence, irony and emotional emptiness in Nocturno de Chile. In: Rike Bolte, Susanne Klengel (Ed.): Probeings. Latin American literatures in the 21st century (= publications of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage , Volume 155). Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 47–65 (here: pp. 47 f.).
  2. ↑ Javier Cercas: Soldiers from Salamis. From the Spanish by Willi Zurbrüggen, Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8270-0464-0 , pp. 153-177.
  3. ^ Julia Encke on November 28, 2010 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
  4. ↑ See his last interview .
  5. ↑ Nicolas Freund: Bolaños Legacy Stories: Felt and Dreaded. Retrieved August 16, 2020 .
  6. ↑ A world, blessed with nothing , review by Eva-Christina Meier in taz , September 12, 2009, accessed on April 10, 2013
  7. ^ "The pyromancer of sadness" Roberto Bolaños very last novel , review by Andreas Breitenstein , NZZ , March 2, 2013, accessed March 6, 2013


personal data
SURNAME Bolaño, Roberto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bolaño Ávalos, Roberto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 28, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 2003
Place of death Barcelona