NYT Reports on The Bolano Myth

Readers will remember that about a month ago there was a kerfuffle over whether or not Roberto Bolano used heroin. In case you haven’t heard enough on that already, the NYT has gone out and gathered what quotes could be found pertaining to Bolano’s drug use.

Of slightly greater interest, in the same article the NYT discusses the possibility that Bolano was not in Chile during the coup, a fact that is often cited in biographical sketches of him, and which is of more interest as regards his literature, since two of his major novels do in fact take place in Chile during the coup:

Mr. Bolaño’s father, León, a former truck driver and boxer, said in a telephone interview from Mexico that he believed his son was in Chile, recalling a conversation in which the younger Mr. Bolaño said that he “was going to travel overland” to visit his father’s sister there. Though not sure of the date of that trip, León Bolaño, now 82 and ailing, said that after the coup he sought and obtained through his employer assurances from the Mexican government that it would evacuate his son through its embassy there.

Mr. Pascoe was one of thousands of young Latin Americans who went to Chile after Allende was elected in 1970 to participate in the revolution they all expected. During the bloodletting that accompanied the Pinochet coup, he and several hundred other fugitives took refuge in the Mexican Embassy in Santiago until they could be repatriated. Mr. Bolaño, Mr. Pascoe said, was “definitely not there.” He said that he once asked Mr. Bolaño directly if he had been in Chile and “his response was vague enough that it made me want to say, ‘Why don’t you just answer yes or no?’ But I liked him, and our friendship was not based on politics, so I didn’t really mind. But it was clear he had not been there."

The article situates both the heroin and coup discussions into the greater "Bolano myth" that has surely been emerging among English readers over the past couple years.

Although I’m generally not especially interested in the private lives of great authors, I do think the Bolano myth treads into some interesting territory for what it can tell us about how we as Americans create and respond to our literary heroes.

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