A place to start with Bolaño?
Bolaño’s Voyage: “Last Evenings on Earth” by Donald Long
In “Anne Moore’s Life” we follow the peripatetic adventures of Anne from birth in Chicago to middle age in Berkeley, her serial sexual affairs in the U.S., Mexico, Asia, Europe, Africa and Barcelona, where the narrator finally meets her. He reads her 34 notebooks, diaries of a wandering, aimless existence that we have been privy to up to this point through the narrator, who now takes over as storyteller: “During the months when I didn’t see her, Anne went travelling in Europe and Africa, had a car accident, left the technician from the machinery-importing firm, saw Paul and Linda who came to visit, started sleeping with an Algerian, developed a skin condition on her hands and arms caused by nervous tension, and read several books by Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.” This 30-page story quietly fades out with one of Bolaño’s favorite exit lines, often appearing in other stories, “and then I never saw her [or him] again”. The narrator is a detached spectator watching Anne’s life unfold over the decades, for better or worse, and Bolaño’s tone in this instance hasn’t a trace of irony or the implication of a moral judgment. It is up to the reader to draw the conclusions.
And this on illness and literature:
The last stories and essays of Bolaño were published posthumously in 2003 with the title story “El Gaucho insufrible,” and “El Viaje de Alvaro Rousselo,t” appearing in The New Yorker in 2007. One of the essays, “Literature + Illness = Illness,” is divided into 12 sections, and dedicated to “my friend Victor Vargas, hepatologist.” Here, Bolaño mixes humor and irony in astonishing down-to-earth passages that reveal his tough philosophical stance during his last months of hospital visits before his death. He was third in line for a liver transplant. Sex, travel and books (Literature) are subjects central to this essay. Recalling the film “Dead Man Walking” where Bolaño infers that the nun Susan Sarandon reproaches Sean Penn for thinking of making love when his remaining days are numbered, Bolaño comments: “To fuck is the only act that those who are going to die wish for. To fuck is the only act that those who are in jails and hospitals wish for. Those who are impotent only desire to fuck….It’s sad to have to admit it, but it’s true.” In the section “Illness and French Poetry,” he turns to literature from film to make his case, citing Mallarmé’s poem “Brise Marine,” zeroing in on the first line: “La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres.” In characteristic fashion, Bolaño interprets this line and the poet’s subsequent lines on escaping through travel. “But what does Mallarmé mean when he says that the flesh is sad and that he has already read all the books? That he has read until satiated and fucked until satiated….That to fuck and to read, when all’s said and done, results in boredom and to travel is the only escape? I believe Mallarmé is talking of illness, the combat that illness wages against health, two states of being you could call totalitarian. I believe Mallarmé is talking of illness cloaked in the rags of boredom.”
Bolaño begins the section “Illness and Travel” with an autobiographical sketch of his own travels, from Chile to Mexico at fifteen, and the multiple illnesses he endured in subsequent and constant travelling, “abusing reading that obliged me to wear glasses….abusing sex but never contracting a venereal disease….the loss of my teeth for me was a kind of homage to Gary Snyder, whose life of a zen vagabond made him neglect his dental hygiene.” To this litany one could add the abuse of alcohol, drugs and heroin, but after these long years of travelling, “long walks without rhyme or reason,” there comes a settling down and life changes: “But everything arrives. Children arrive. Books arrive. Illness arrives. The end of the voyage arrives.” There is not the slightest trace of regret or self-pity in this account.
