These liberties generally involve the interjection of strange or unexpected remarks, departing from the “normality” of the story. It’s the same freedom that poets are permitted. “Urns plain and simple: the flowerpots of hell”; beggars who wear Ray-Bans; Fernando screamed terrible screams and “he seemed to be asking for water. He seemed to be calling cattle. He seemed to be whistling a song”; “a guy in a sweater that looked like it was knit out of hair”; or “my college future was as bleak as a hopeless old bolero.” This freedom is rooted in humor and is never gratuitous, never a simple demonstration of brilliance. So too the frequent manifestations of horror, testament to an era and omnipresent in Latin America: like the net of traffickers who send children off to the slaughterhouse and who remind us of the women killed in Santa Teresa in 2666; or the natives of Villaviciosa who “[work] as hired killers and bodyguards.” In “Cowboy Graves”—the title is significant—this violence reaches its maximum expression in the military coup against Allende and the recurrent presence of the Nazis, inevitably taking us back to Nazi Literature in the Americas.
I won’t note here the succession of brilliant scenes and stories throughout the book, because the reader needs no guidance in that regard. Nor have I paused to point out the obvious differences between the three sections or to mention individual titles. The reason is very simple: I’m interested in highlighting the story dynamic, the narrative arc that leads nowhere—or rather, that leads to the whole of Bolaño’s oeuvre. Any attempt to bring order to chaos or to impose a logic having little to do with his own conception of his writing would be to diminish and even distort the aims of his project. In any case, the book—consisting of texts at once reliant on and independent of any idea of a whole—is full of allusions to this radical break. The protagonist of “The Grub,” like those of so many other stories, “devoted the first half of the morning to books and walking around and the second half to movies and sex.” In “The Trip,” we are told that the science fiction tale about the invasion of extraterrestrial ants is unfinished. But it is in “French Comedy of Horrors,” the most dementedly “bookish,” where the writer’s bold vision of writing is summed up: “It’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book-object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book.” Some other book by Bolaño himself or by the writers he mentions; his fellow travelers—because this is a trip we’re talking about. Suffice it to say that unbounded imagination, intensity of feeling, incisive criticism, feverish activity, and strange characters make Cowboy Graves a hugely attractive and original book within a Book.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
To identify the texts that make up this volume and to establish when each was written, the full resources of the Bolaño Archive have been consulted. The archive is maintained in the author’s home and consists of loose papers, notebooks, newspaper clippings, magazines, and—in the case of the later work—computer files.
“Cowboy Graves”
The complete text of this narrative appears in a file titled VAKEROS.doc on the hard drive of Roberto Bolaño’s computer. In addition, a backup copy was kept by the author on a 3½-inch diskette labeled Cowboy Graves.
Material was also located in the physical archive, in two files. File 9/33 contains a green folio notebook with the handwritten title Arturo, Cowboy Graves. I’ll give you ten kisses and then ten more. Found inside, along with assorted materials, were handwritten notes for “Cowboy Graves” on six loose folio sheets, folded in half, with a numbered list of chapters. File 2/12 contains notes on various works (including The Savage Detectives). Two notes pertain to “Cowboy Graves.” One lists page counts of The Savage Detectives, Llamadas telefónicas,[1] Nazi Literature in the Americas, Distant Star, and “Cowboy Graves.” The other includes notes for the first chapter of the text.
This text was therefore composed between 1995—when Roberto Bolaño began to use a computer—and 1998, the date of The Savage Detectives notes, which share space with those for “Cowboy Graves.”
“French Comedy of Horrors”
The complete text of this section appears in a file titled FRANCIA.doc on the hard drive of Roberto Bolaño’s computer. In addition, a backup copy was kept by the author on a 3½-inch diskette labeled File: France, French Comedy of Horrors. In the paper files, only one handwritten reference to this work has been found, on the envelope of a letter addressed to Roberto Bolaño and postmarked April 11, 2002. It is kept in File 31/209.
The date of the postmark, and the dedication in the computer files to his two children, Alexandra and Lautaro, allow us to conclude that the text was composed between 2002 and the date of Roberto Bolaño’s death in July 2003.
“Fatherland”
The materials for this text were found in three files. One, labeled File 4/17, contains notes and a draft of the narrative, both handwritten, along with other work by the author and a press clipping dated 1993; File 30/171 also contains a handwritten draft, part of a collection of loose sheets of graph paper from a half-folio notebook; finally, in File 34/5 there is a later version, sixty-two pages long, typewritten on an electric typewriter that Roberto Bolaño used between 1992 and 1995. To determine the date of composition, we considered the 1993 clipping, kept in the first file with the notes and draft and presumably from the same period, as well as the fact that the text was typed on an electric typewriter. Thus we conclude that “Fatherland” was written in the period between 1993 and 1995.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. A poet and novelist, he has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (The Los Angeles Times), and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. His books include The Savage Detectives, 2666, The Spirit of Science Fiction, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Romantic Dogs.
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