TY - JOUR
T1 - 'The water, the onion, the slow march of the stars'
AU - Glass, Rodge
N1 - —— (2008b), ‘Anne Moore’s life’, Last Evenings on Earth, New York: New Directions, pp. 91–131. —— (2008c), The Insufferable Gaucho, New York: New Directions. —— (2010a), ‘Snow’, The Return, New York: New Directions, pp. 1–19. —— (2010b), ‘William Burns’, The Return, New York: New Directions, pp. 25–34. —— (2010c), ‘Photos’, The Return, New York: New Directions, pp. 181–90. —— (2010d), ‘Meeting with Enrique Lihn’, The Return, New York: New Directions, pp. 191–99. —— (2011), ‘Introduction by the author’, Antwerp, London: Picador, pp. ix–xi. Harvey, Giles (2012), ‘Into the labyrinth: A user’s guide to Bolaño’, The New Yorker, 18 January, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/in-thelabyrinth-a-users-guide-to-bolao. Accessed 1 March 2014. Kerr, Sarah (2008), ‘The triumph of Roberto Bolano’, The New York Times Book Review, 18 December, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/ dec/18/the-triumph-of-roberto-bolano/. Accessed 1 March 2016. Maristain, M. (2014), Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations, Brooklyn: Melville House, pp. 159–70. Novillo-Corvalan, Patricia (2013), ‘Transnational modernist encounters: Joyce, Borges, Bolaño and the aesthetics of expansion and compression’, Modern Language Review, 108: 2, pp. 341–67. SUGGESTED CITATION Glass, R. (2015), ‘“The Water, The Onion, The Slow March of the Stars”: Roberto Bolaño and the secret story’, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 5: 1+2, pp. 11–19, doi: 10.1386/fict.5.1-2.11_1
PY - 2015/10/1
Y1 - 2015/10/1
N2 - To talk of the transnational is to accept that borders – the skipping over them in life and on the page – is a messy business. It’s understandable that writers such as Roberto Bolaño, usually labelled ‘a Chilean exiled to Mexico’, shouldn’t be included in discussions of contemporary European short fiction. Understandable, but not inevitable. Bolaño left Chile at 15, only returning briefly post-Pinochet before ‘co-founding a Surrealist-influenced, anti-status-quo school’ of writers in Mexico. It wasn’t until Bolaño got clean, got married and settled down in Europe (he moved there in 1977) that he produced the prose which is now his legacy. This article argues that aside from the European novellas (Antwerp, Monsieur Pain), there are three key collections which deserve to be included in European literary discussions, having been composed in Europe and having gone on to make Bolaño’s name. They have also served to move the form forward in the continent he made his home: Bolaño was responding largely to a European tradition. He wouldn’t limit himself to one continent – as Kerr puts it, Bolaño had ‘a deep scepticism about national feeling, and it has been said that his work starts to point the way to a kind of post-national fiction’ – but there’s no doubt that for 25 years, Bolaño was essentially a European with a transnational outlook. For these reasons and others, I argue for Bolaño’s inclusion in European short fiction discourse.
AB - To talk of the transnational is to accept that borders – the skipping over them in life and on the page – is a messy business. It’s understandable that writers such as Roberto Bolaño, usually labelled ‘a Chilean exiled to Mexico’, shouldn’t be included in discussions of contemporary European short fiction. Understandable, but not inevitable. Bolaño left Chile at 15, only returning briefly post-Pinochet before ‘co-founding a Surrealist-influenced, anti-status-quo school’ of writers in Mexico. It wasn’t until Bolaño got clean, got married and settled down in Europe (he moved there in 1977) that he produced the prose which is now his legacy. This article argues that aside from the European novellas (Antwerp, Monsieur Pain), there are three key collections which deserve to be included in European literary discussions, having been composed in Europe and having gone on to make Bolaño’s name. They have also served to move the form forward in the continent he made his home: Bolaño was responding largely to a European tradition. He wouldn’t limit himself to one continent – as Kerr puts it, Bolaño had ‘a deep scepticism about national feeling, and it has been said that his work starts to point the way to a kind of post-national fiction’ – but there’s no doubt that for 25 years, Bolaño was essentially a European with a transnational outlook. For these reasons and others, I argue for Bolaño’s inclusion in European short fiction discourse.
KW - short story
KW - European
KW - Roberto Bolano
KW - transnationalism
KW - identity
U2 - 10.1386/fict.5.1-2.11_1
DO - 10.1386/fict.5.1-2.11_1
M3 - Article
SN - 2043-0701
VL - 5
SP - 11
EP - 19
JO - Short Fiction in Theory & Practice
JF - Short Fiction in Theory & Practice
IS - 1 & 2
ER -