MM: What bores you?
RB: Empty discourse from the left. I take for granted the empty discourse from the right.
MM: What entertains you?
RB: To see my daughter Alexandra play. To eat breakfast at a bar by the sea and to eat a croissant while reading the paper. Borges’ literature. Bioy’s literature. Bustos Domecq’s literature. Making love.
A professor of literary criticism at the University of Chile, Patricia Espinosa wrote a critical essay on Bolaño in 2003 entitled “Bolaño, un poeta junto al acantilado” (Bolaño, A Poet Close to the Cliff).
An Argentine writer, Celina Manzoni is a co-author of Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia (Roberto Bolaño: Writing as Bullfighting).
H. Bustos Domecq was a pseudonym used by Borges and Bioy Casares for collaborations.
MM: Do you write by hand?
RB: Poetry, yes. For the rest, I use an old computer from 1993.
MM: Close your eyes. Out of all the landscapes you’ve come across in Latin America, what comes to mind first?
RB: Lisa’s lips in 1974. My father’s broken-down bus on a desert road. The tuberculosis wing of a hospital in Cauquenes and my mother telling my sister and I to hold our breath. An excursion to Popocatépetl with Lisa, Mara, Vera and someone else I don’t remember. But I do remember Lisa’s lips, her extraordinary smile.
MM: What is heaven like?
RB: Like Venice, I’d hope, a place full of Italian men and women. A place you can use and wear down, a place that knows nothing will endure, including paradise, and knows that in the end at last it doesn’t matter.
MM: And hell?
RB: It’s like Ciudad Juárez, our curse and mirror, a disturbing reflection of our frustrations, and our infamous interpretation of liberty and of our desires.
MM: When did you know you were gravely ill?
RB: In 1992.
MM: What change did your illness have on your character?
RB: None. I knew I wasn’t immortal, which at thirty-eight it was high time I learn.
MM: What do you wish to do before dying?
RB: Nothing special. Well, clearly I’d prefer not to die. But sooner or later the distinguished lady arrives. The problem is that sometimes she’s neither a lady nor very distinguished, but, as Nicanor Parra says in a poem, she’s a hot wench who will make your teeth chatter no matter how fancy you think you are.
MM: Whom would you like to encounter in the hereafter?
RB: I don’t believe in the hereafter. Were it to exist, I’d be surprised. I’d enroll immediately in some course Pascal would be teaching.
MM: Have you ever thought about committing suicide?
RB: Of course. On one occasion I survived precisely because I knew how to kill myself if things got any worse.
MM: Have you ever believed you were going crazy?
RB: Of course, but I was always saved by my sense of humor. I’d tell myself stories that made me crazy with laughter. Or I’d remember situations that made me roll on the ground laughing.
MM: Madness, death and love. Which of these three things have you had more of in your life?
RB: I hope with all of my heart that it was love.
MM: What makes your jaw hurt laughing?
RB: The misfortunes of myself and others.
MM: What things make you cry?
RB: The same: the misfortunes of myself and others.
MM: Do you like music?
RB: Very much.
MM: Do you see your work the way your critics and readers see it: The Savage Detectives above all, then all the rest?
RB: The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Amberes, maybe because it continues to be unintelligible. The bad reviews it has received are badges of honor from actual combat, not skirmishes with simulated fire. The rest of my “work” is not bad. They’re entertaining novels. Time will tell if they’re anything more. For now, they earn money, get translated and help me make very generous and kind friends. I can live, and live well, off literature, so complaining would be gratuitous and unfounded. The truth is I concede very little importance to my books. I am much more interested in the books of others.
MM: Would you not cut a few pages out of The Savage Detectives?
RB: No. In order to cut pages, I would have to reread it and my religion prohibits me that.
MM: Does it scare you that someone might want to make a film version of the novel?
RB: Oh, Mónica, I fear other things — much more terrifying things, infinitely more terrifying.
MM: Is “Silva the Eye” a tribute to Julio Cortázar?
RB: In no way.
MM: When you finished writing “Silva the Eye,” didn’t you feel you had probably written a story on the level of, say, “A House Taken Over”?
RB: When I finished writing “Silva the Eye” I stopped crying or something like it. What more could I want than for it to resemble a Cortázar story? Although “A House Taken Over” is not one of my favorites.
MM: Which five books have marked your life?
RB: In reality the five books are more like 5,000. I’ll mention these only as the tip of the spear: Don Quixote by Cervantes, Moby-Dick by Melville. The complete works of Borges, Hopscotch by Cortázar, A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. I should also cite Nadja by Breton, the letters of Jacques Vaché. Anything Ubu by Jarry, Life: A User’s Manual by Perec. The Castle and The Trial by Kafka. Aphorisms by Lichtenberg. The Tractatus by Wittgenstein. The Invention of Morel by Bioy Casares. The Satyricon by Petronius. The History of Rome by Tito Livio. Pensées by Pascal.
A French surrealist writer, Jacques Vaché (1895–1919) worked closely with André Breton in the foundation of surrealism. A collection of his works, Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism, is available in English.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a German scientist and satirist. A collection of his aphorisms is available in English as The Waste Books, 2000.