March 25, 2021 19
poignant, elliptical novel about family
life under the dictatorship. The rest of
“Fatherland” sweeps us back into the
familiar Bolaño territory of shadowy
killers and oblique dream sequences,
seemingly arranged at random. Much
of this echoes material in other books
and might, with clearer explanation,
make more sense as addenda or appen-
dixes to them.
In a concluding note on source ma-
terial for this book, Carolina López
Hernández, Bolaño’s widow and liter-
ary executor, attempts to provide some
sense of the methods used in putting
the collection together, but ultimately,
in focusing on physical materials rather
than editorial logic, her note obscures
more than it illuminates. She explains
that “the full resources of the Bo-
laño Archive have been consulted” to
identify the provenance of each piece,
noting that this archive “consists of
loose papers, notebooks, newspaper
clippings, magazines, and—in the case
of the later work—computer files.”
What follows are brief summaries of
where the works were found—on the
hard drives, in folders, etc.—and ed-
ucated guesses, based on these clues,
as to when they were composed. If the
goal is to inspire confidence in readers
that the author organized these pieces
to indicate how they were meant to
be published, it does not succeed. (A
fellow Bolaño reader went so far as
to suggest, conspiratorially, that, in
Bolaño- esque fashion, there was some-
one quietly churning out “lost” man-
uscripts and passing them off as the
real thing. Surely, I replied, if that was
the case, they would do a better job of
making them into cohesive works? Ah,
but that’s exactly what would give them
away, my friend replied.)
The collection contains an essay by
the Spanish critic Juan Antonio Maso-
liver Ródenas that posits, contrary to
the clearly contingent and disorga-
nized nature of the texts presented,
that Bolaño’s scattered works should
be seen less as fragments than as “puz-
zle pieces” because “they always lead
us back to the larger body of his work.”
“Like a painter in his studio,” he goes
on, “Bolaño works simultaneously on
several pieces, and if he abandons one
to start another, he never forgets what’s
come before.” He might not have for-
gotten, but the haphazard “remem-
bering” as represented in these books
wouldn’t pass a concussion protocol.
On the whole, I’m in favor of having
more access to the working processes
of great writers (even, contra Didion,
the perfectionist Hemingway), and the
nature of Bolaño’s work and the cir-
cumstances of his death seem to more
or less encourage the pillaging of his
(unsurprisingly disheveled) archives.
But with that choice comes a respon-
sibility to present the work clearly, to
give readers an accurate sense of what
considerations went into choosing to
publish. The high- flown language of
Ródenas’s essay is an obvious example
of protesting too much. It doesn’t seem
right to claim that this is all part of the
author’s grand design when he didn’t
live to make those decisions.
Presenting the work this way threat-
ens to damage the author’s legacy: it’s
been long enough since Bolaño’s as-
cent to international fame that a reader
only glancingly familiar with his name
could well pick up Cowboy Graves as
a first exposure to his work and decide
to give the rest a pass. It seems fairer to
the artist’s legacy to read these pieces
as alternatives, as possibilities for what
could have been. My hope is that, once
the commercial impetus to publish
these books as “indispensable” addi-
tions to the writer’s corpus passes, they
might be organized in a way that helps
readers better understand their rela-
tionship to the books Bolaño finished.
It’s helpful to remember, in that
spirit, what a significant impact the
“discovery” of Bolaño had when The
Savage Detectives and 2666 were pub-
lished in the US within a span of eigh-
teen months, in 2007 and 2008. The
excitement they generated felt, at the
time, like an isolated phenomenon—
dense, difficult books, translated from
Spanish, full of grueling violence and
inside jokes about Latin American
literary culture. They were extraordi-
narily well- marketed and publicized,
but that doesn’t quite explain the fever-
ishness surrounding their appearance.
In his excellent study Roberto Bolaño’s
Fiction: An Expanding Universe, Chris
Andrews, who has translated many of
Bolaño’s books, analyzes some of the
causes of the boom, noting the “trans-
latability” of his prose, the myths sur-
rounding his life and early death, his
particular appeal to male readers,
and the canniness of 2666 ’s release in
English soon after the success of The
Savage Detectives. Ultimately, how-
ever, Andrews places the most credit
on Bolaño’s “singularity as a writer”—
he really was so exceptional, Andrews
writes, as to create “a new position in
the literary field.”
If this is true, it feels, from the dis-
tance of more than a decade, like a
position that has now been filled by
a succession of international liter-
ary phenomena, most notably Karl
Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante,
whose books and personae spark fierce
devotion through their intermingling
of mystery and candor. What gives
me confidence in Bolaño’s surviving
the vagaries of long- term literary rep-
utation is his ability to capture, even
in fragmentary or hallucinatory form,
the hard edge of reality. I think of the
final segment of The Spirit of Science
Fiction, a sixteen- page piece called
“Mexican Manifesto” that vibrates at
an entirely different frequency from
the rest of this early and otherwise un-
distinguished novel.
The narrator, Remo, describes his
and his girlfriend Laura’s adventures
frequenting the public bathhouses of
Mexico City, locations that represent
“the hidden face” of the city. He de-
scribes the ultimate fiction writer’s
high, “wandering the hallways, feed-
ing one’s indiscreet curiosity in small
doses,” the half- open doors presentingvivid tableaux to the lucky ob-
server: groups of naked men where
any movement or action was cour-
tesy of the steam; adolescents lost
like jaguars in a labyrinth of show-
ers; the tiny but terrifying gestures
of athletes, weightlifters, and lone
men.One night at a bathhouse, Remo and
Laura let an old man and two boys, who
are known to present “private shows,”
into their steam room, and what fol-
lows next... well, I won’t say. Perhaps
the secret of evil is finally revealed. I
wouldn’t count on it. QAND
If you would like to know more about this listing,
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A CURRENT LISTINGPhyllis Chillingworth, Winding Road
oil on linen, 24" x 32"Atlantic Gallery
548 West 28th Street, Suite 540, New York, NY 10001
(212) 219-
http://www.atlanticgallery.org; [email protected]
Gallery Hours: for updated viewing contact the gallery.Phyllis Chillingworth:
Cosmos... a personal journey.
March 30–April 17, 2021“Unexpected moments have astonished me and have
jumpstarted a new group of paintings, personal in na-
ture. In this show at Atlantic Gallery, they are captured
in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera painting.” —Phyllis
Chillingworth.For more info: http://www.phyllischillingworth.comMarlborough Gallery
545 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
(212) 541-
http://www.marlboroughnewyork.com
Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM–6PMBill Brandt
Nude, London, March 1952
Gelatin silver print mounted on museum board
13 ½" x 11 ½" image
20" x 16" mount
Signed lower right
Copyright Bill Brandt ArchivesAlexandre
25 East 73rd Street
New York, NY 10021
(212) 755-2828; [email protected]9LVLWWKHJDOOHU\·VYLUWXDOYLHZLQJURRPSUHVHQWDWLRQVDW
alexandregallery.comMarsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943),
Flowers, 1928–
oil on canvas, 24" x 19 ½"LewAllen Galleries
Railyard Arts District
1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 988-
[email protected]; http://www.lewallengalleries.comWorks from the Contemporary Art Collection of
Edgar Foster Daniels
February 19–March 27Long regarded for his patronage of numerous productions of
opera, chamber music, and theater across the US and abroad,
Daniels was also an ardent collector of visual art.John Fincher, Blood and Teeth, 1990, mixed media, 30" x 22"Yossi Milo Gallery
245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
(212) 414-0370; [email protected]; Tuesday–Saturday: 10AM–6PMHassan Hajjaj: My Rockstars
Through May 15, 20217KH0RURFFDQERUQ/RQGRQEDVHGDUWLVW·VSUHPLHUHVROR
exhibition at the gallery features vibrant mixed media portraits
of performers and musicians by whom he has been inspired, in
KLVUHLPDJLQDWLRQRI$IULFD·VLFRQLFOHJDF\RIVWXGLRSKRWRJUDSK\
through a globalized lens.Online Viewing Room: yossimilo.viewingrooms.comMarques, 2012/1433 (Gregorian/Hijri)
© Hassan Hajjaj, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York