18 The New York Review
connections across the major novels
and stories he published between Nazi
Literature in the Americas (1996), his
first great book, and his death in 2003.
Reading him this way, though, has
grown more fraught with the regular
appearance of previously unpublished
work in the years since the apex of his
popular acclaim in the late Aughts.
Alongside the posthumously “dis-
covered” works, there has also been
a deluge of earlier books, published
in Spanish in some form, that began
to make their way into English fol-
lowing the popularity of the English
translation of The Savage Detectives
in 2007. The most recently published
stories, novels, and fragments provide
many new routes through the teeming
metropolis that Bolaño created, but
inevitably they leave the reader with
questions about the writer’s intentions,
and about how to incorporate these
new pieces into a broader understand-
ing of Bolaño’s work.
An illustrative example is the treat-
ment of Óscar Amalfitano, a Chilean
literature professor who is a main char-
acter in both 2666 , the epic novel Bo-
laño was furiously working on at the
time of his death (and which was pub-
lished to enormous hype and acclaim
in the US in 2008), and the even less
finished Woes of the True Policeman,
published four years later. Amalfitano
becomes a much more sympathetic fig-
ure in the later book, which seems to
be, in part, an early or alternative ver-
sion of its monumental cousin.
In 2666 , Amalfitano is the central
figure of a novella- length episode in
which, seemingly in the midst of a
breakdown, he recreates a Duchamp
project by hanging a geometry book
from a clothesline and argues with a
voice, claiming to be the ghost of ei-
ther his father or his grandfather, that
coarsely needles him about whether
or not he’s a homosexual. Toward the
end of the section, he befriends, or at
least tolerates the company of, the son
of the dean of his department, a voluble
young man given to unsettling mono-
logues, including one about going out
to gay bars only, in his telling, to fight
the men who try to pick him up. As in
much of 2666 , the bad vibes of these
passages are so thick as to be claus-
trophobic. Every digression leads to a
further revelation of violence and vio-
lation, climaxing, famously, in a section
that elaborately chronicles the murders
of hundreds of women in northern
Mexico.
In Woes of the True Policeman,
Amalfitano, following the death of his
wife in middle age, embraces his homo-
sexuality and embarks on an affair with
Padilla, a brash and outspoken student
in one of his classes at the University
of Barcelona. The relationship leads to
his being forced to resign, and he takes
a job at the far less prestigious Univer-
sity of Santa Teresa in the bleak Sonora
Desert. In contrast to the haunted and
ravaged Amalfitano of 2666 , the one
we meet in Woes of the True Police-
man is gently melancholic, comparing
himself to Thomas Mann and the “lan-
guid, innocent fairyhood with which
he was afflicted in his old age.” (The
homophobia is unmissable even in this
more self- accepting version of the pro-
fessor; there is, throughout Bolaño’s
writing, a kind of macho anxiety about
homosexuality even when he writes
with sympathy about gay characters.)
Amalfitano and Padilla continue to
exchange heartfelt letters after they are
separated; in the novel’s final pages,
Padilla recounts his AIDS diagnosis
and the fellowship he has found with
a fellow sufferer, a young drug dealer
named Elisa who has moved in with
him. Though hardly a conventional
happy ending, the vision of life in Woes
of the True Policeman allows for the
possibility of change and transforma-
tion, in contrast to the hopeless, apoca-
lyptic finality of 2666.
Bolaño’s work, as should be clear,
tends to make a gleeful mockery of the
question of what “really happens”—
what counts as “canon,” in the lingo
of the science- fiction and fantasy fan
communities to which some of his
characters belong. There are callbacks
and cameos sprinkled throughout.
Arturo Belano, last seen in Liberia in
The Savage Detectives, stars in a brief
episode set there in the story “Photo-
graphs,” published in Bolaño’s lifetime;
he appears again in the story “Death of
Ulises,” published posthumously, in
which he returns to Mexico City twenty
years after his last visit there and is
informed by a group of overweight
rock musicians that his old comrade
Lima has died (like his real- life model,
the poet Mario Santiago) after being
struck by a car. Perhaps the most con-
sequential example of the reader’s di-
lemma provoked by Bolaño’s multitude
comes in a note appended by the critic
Ignacio Echevarría to 2666 , in which
we learn that one of the author’s notes
for the novel states that “the narrator
of 2666 is Arturo Belano.” Does this
change anything? Everything?At their best, the posthumous books
collectively expand our sense of Bo-
laño’s network of novels and stories as
a living system, as illogical and abrupt
as the world we inhabit. Cowboy
Graves, the most recently published,
is, like The Secret of Evil and Woes of
the True Policeman (both translated
into English in 2012), a harvesting of
drafts and fragments that, despite their
often sketchy and incomplete nature,
shed light on Bolaño’s creative process
and fill in spaces that were previously
under explored in his published oeuvre.
The new book consists of three prose
pieces of differing lengths and degrees
of finish. It doesn’t seem quite right to
describe them all as novellas, as the
publisher does, though the title piece,
with its chapter breaks and (more or
less) intelligible through line just about
qualifies. The narrator of “Cowboy
Graves” is the fifteen- year- old Arturo
Belano, Bolaño’s regular alter- ego. The
novella’s preoccupation with the dy-
namics of a nuclear family is fairly rare
in Bolaño’s fiction, though the deadpan
narration bears some resemblance to
that of the teenage Bianca in A Little
Lumpen Novelita, a bleak, overlooked
gem that was the final work Bolaño saw
published in his lifetime. As in that
book, the voice in “Cowboy Graves”
is direct and authoritative: “My name
is Arturo and the first time I saw an
airport was in 1968.” He, his mother,
and his sister are moving from Chile to
Mexico to be with his Mexican father, a
process that is delayed at the airport by
obscure adult machinations.
Bolaño perfectly captures the dread
that descends when one’s name (or, in
this case, one’s mother’s name) is called
over the airport loudspeakers. “She
pretended not to know what was goingon,” he writes, “and she looked around
too, as if searching for the same person
everyone else was, but not as eagerly as
the other passengers on the Santiago–
Lima–Quito– Mexico City flight.” Even-
tually, the family is escorted out of the
boarding line by Interpol, apparently
because of an unpaid bill.
They have no choice but to return to
the house of a friend in Santiago with
whom they’ve been staying, and whose
Rilke- reading sister Arturo dreams
of seducing. In high Bolaño style, the
“Airport” section digresses associa-
tively, moving from a horseback ride
Arturo took with his father to the nar-
rator’s attempt, as an aspiring poet, to
meet the famed Chilean anti- poet (and
Bolaño hero) Nicanor Parra, illumi-
nating the character’s stifled yearning
through action and juxtaposition rather
than explanation. The section ends,
like many of Bolaño’s best stories, with
an abrupt plunge into the abyss, with-
out further elaboration. “And when
everything seemed most hopeless,”
he writes, “my mother had an asthma
attack.”
What follows is a series of stories
about Belano—his desolate afternoons
skipping class to furtively masturbate
in movie theaters, his journey by ship
to Chile to “join the revolution” (i.e.,
support Allende’s socialist govern-
ment), and his minor, farcical role in a
neighborhood group attempting to de-
fend against the military coup of Sep-
tember 11, 1973. This last section, “The
Coup,” expands on a much shorter ac-
count of the same episode in the story
“Dance Card,” a seemingly autobi-
ographical piece in Last Evenings on
Earth that reads, with its short, num-
bered sections, like Bolaño’s riff on
Joe Brainard’s I Remember project. In
that earlier story, the narrator reduces
his experience down to the bare essen-
tials: “I kept watch in an empty street.
I forgot my password. My comrades
were fifteen years old, retired, or out of
work.”
The version in “Cowboy Graves” is
more detailed, recounting the chaos
and confusion of the day—for example,
the head of the local Communist cell, a
“fat little guy,” bicycles off on a mission
“to get concrete orders and trustworthy
information,” having found no volun-
teers for the job, and never comes back.
Bolaño turns the forgotten password
into a comedy routine out of Beckett.
After waiting on a street corner for two
hours, watching out for only vaguely
perceived “right- wing radicals,” Be-
lano spots one of his comrades and
tells him he hasn’t seen anything. The
comrade insists on speaking in the
agreed- on code and Belano, unable to
remember the response, continues to
speak plainly. The piece ends on this
moment of forced miscommunication,
the minor players haplessly fumbling
their lines in the bright glare of history.“The Grub,” one of the sections of
“Cowboy Graves,” goes further than
the usual expansion/contraction of the
Bolaño system, reproducing verbatim
a story in Last Evenings on Earth.
Regardless of whether there’s artistic
merit in republishing the story in this
different context and sequence, it per-
haps serves as the editor’s subtle argu-
ment for the worthiness of publishing
the other unfinished stories. “The
Grub” might appear unfinished if one
didn’t know better, so why not imaginethat the unpublished stories might, in
fact, have been finished in the author’s
idiosyncratic fashion?
This line of reasoning, of course,
ignores the many choices that most
writers make before deciding that
something is ready for publication.
Joan Didion, in her 1998 essay “Last
Words,” recently collected in her book
Let Me Tell You What I Mean, argues
strongly against this kind of thinking,
specifically making the case against
the posthumous publication of novels
edited by Ernest Hemingway’s execu-
tors. “You care about the punctuation
or you don’t, and Hemingway did,” Di-
dion writes. “You care about the ‘ands’
and the ‘buts’ or you don’t, and Hem-
ingway did. You think something is in
shape to be published or you don’t, and
Hemingway didn’t.”
It doesn’t seem that Bolaño was
quite so exacting. He wrote fast and his
prose can be careless, sometimes skirt-
ing incoherence or bad taste. He cut a
characteristically paradoxical figure,
both in life and death, with regard to
the relationship between art and com-
merce. By many accounts, he started
writing fiction at least in part to sup-
port his family, ramping up production
after being diagnosed with a terminal
liver disease and even going so far,
according to Echevarría’s note at the
end of 2666 , as to suggest that his long
final book be divided into five separate
novels in order to maximize sales after
his death. Though Echevarría makes a
convincing case for the artistic merit
of publishing the book in one volume,
he leaves unsaid what now seems the
obvious fact that its commercial pros-
pects were improved by its status as a
totemic, even forbidding, work.
The last segment of Cowboy Graves,
after the noirishly entertaining but in-
essential return to the world of under-
ground poetry movements in “French
Comedy of Horrors,” is “Fatherland,”
a disjointed collection of drafts and
notes for fictions that were later real-
ized in Distant Star and other works of
the 1990s. We are in the world of young
poets at the time of Pinochet’s coup.
As in Nazi Literature in the Americas
and Distant Star, a young woman dis-
appears, and a poet skywrites cryptic
poetry using a vintage Third Reich
Messerschmitt plane while the narra-
tor watches, imprisoned. Near the end,
there is a section entitled “Family Plot”
that could be a photonegative of the
first part of “Cowboy Graves.” Pref-
aced with the sentence fragment “Ef-
fects of the coup on the family unit,”
the section reads like a series of notes
toward a more expansive meditation
on family life and politics than Bolaño
ever completed.
This version of the Belano family
lives in Chile during the coup, and
in this universe Arturo (now named
Rigoberto) has a brother named David
who is arrested, beaten, and returned
to the family a month later. Arturo’s
mother loses her teaching job; David
takes up martial arts and becomes a
Trotskyite. Arturo’s separated parents
reconcile briefly, until the stress of the
political situation leads his mother to
take his brother and sister out of the
country. Belano stays behind with his
father and begins receiving cryptic
postcards from his siblings (“I could
never figure out the clues, if there were
any”). The section is promising, a de-
sign for something like Ways of Going
Home (2011), Alejandro Zambra’s