The Life of Characters in Roberto Bolano's Works

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago de Chile on 1953. He spent his childhood in many backward towns in Chile. Father Leon Bola? is a truck driver and amateur boxer, and mother Victoria Avanos teaches mathematics and statistics at school.

1968, Bolano moved his family to Mexico city. For Bolanho, his youth began here. He often plays truant just to read his favorite books and write something, and he often acts rebellious in adolescence, and holidays are no exception. He often steals books. I often secretly pay attention to the writers I admire. As later said, he often writes like a masochist and gets sadistic pleasure from reading.

In adolescence under the shadow of dyslexia, chronic insomnia and "sexual problems", these activities are of great significance in his growth.

1973, when Bolanho was 20 years old, he decided to return to his old country, Chile, and go south by a long land route along the Pacific Ocean.

He plans to take part in a people's drama there. Fortunately, Pinochet arrived in San Diego only a few months before a coup broke out. That night, he found a civilian production organization entirely out of obligation and was arranged to stand guard in an empty street.

Nothing happened that night, but a few months later, his bus was stopped at a checkpoint, and his Mexican accent caught the attention of the police and he was arrested.

Bolano was recognized by two old classmates after eight days in prison, and they arranged for Bolano to be released.

Years later, he often made fun of his political imprisonment (some German newspapers said he spent six months in prison), but he was understandably proud of his participation in the struggle against Pinochet's coup.

Anyway, after the failure of the socialist revolution, he returned to Mexico City, and soon established a small group "Infrarrealista Poetry Movement" with like-minded people, with the intention of "opposing official culture", and its representative was the great poet Octavio Paz. Realists attacked many times, disturbed Paz's recital, coaxed the audience with strange cries, and even threw wine at Paz. Polano is on pins and needles. 1977 He went to Europe and did odd jobs on the coast near Barcelona. He lived a proud life as a poet, sometimes washing dishes, sometimes working as a waiter in a hotel, and once worked as a night watchman in a campsite or collecting waste for a living. He sold coolies during the day and wrote poems at night until his son lautaro was born in 1990. He is still poor and can't even afford a telephone. Du beat his brain instinctively, which made him make up his mind. For the sake of his son, he also wants to make the prodigal son return, restrain his wandering life as a poet and turn to novels in order to support his family.

After the Gallegos Prize 1999, he became famous, but his remuneration and royalties were still not much. And since 1993, knowing that he was seriously ill, he redoubled his efforts, raced against death and wrote crazily. In the last ten years of his life, he wrote several million words of long stories, mostly featuring decadent, rebellious or crazy poets and novelists, and wrote their eternal pursuit of poetry myth, whether through vagrancy, drugs, sex, crime or death.

Said his liver disease, from that year with * * * people infected with needles. Although hepatitis C has been at the forefront of the hospital waiting list for liver transplantation, he failed to persist until the day when he saved his life.

On July 15, 2003, Bolanho died of liver failure in Branas in northern Spain at the age of 50. Bolano seldom talks about his childhood. According to his mother, he taught himself to read when he was three years old. At the age of seven, he had written a novel about several hens falling in love with ducks, which surprised other animals in the corral. One of his earliest literary memories is listening to his mother read aloud Nie Luda's poetry anthology "20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair".

What excites Polano most is, of course, poetry. No matter how much attention was paid to his novels and short stories, he never gave up his poetry creation and always felt that the artistry of his novels was inferior. In order to oppose the proliferation of Nie Luda's lyric style, he wrote a poem imitating Nicanor Parra, the "anti-poet" who was born in 19 14:

Half a century.

Poetry has always been a paradise for serious fools.

Until I came on skates.

You can keep climbing if you want.

Of course, if you fall,

There is blood in the mouth and nose.

I'm not responsible.

Besides Parra, Bolanho also read the works of avant-garde poets in Latin America in the 20th century, such as Cesar Vallejo, Vincent Vitobro, Martin Adan, Okito de Amas, Pablo de Roca, Gilbert Owen, Lopez Velarde and Olivier Girondo-all of them are very important to him. Equally important is the French symbolist poet. Bolanho often says that he has at least 65,438+00 different versions of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil.

He has an absolute preference for formal writers and Baudelaire-style outsiders, who will abide by some stricter and more classical harsh standards than any scholar. His love for strict standards attracted him to read Mexican critics and classical scholars Alfonso Reyes, Borges, Julio Cortázar (a member of the Big Bang Theory literature, from which Bolanho admitted to learning a lot) and Argentine fable writer ador Abby casares.

Bolanho is also interested in pornography and Gothic novels.

The first book he stole was Pierre Lous's pamphlet, but I can't remember whether it was Avelot Dite or Pelethis's song.

Other works include Muleto, Estrela Ditante, Song of Spain, Nocturnal of Chile, 2666 and so on.

After his death, his works were still discovered and published by western countries and received rave reviews. His novel 2666, published after his death, was selected as one of the top ten books in the 2008 New York Times Book Review, which was tied with Nobel Prize in Literature winner Tony Morrison's new book Kindness. This is the second consecutive year that Bolano has won this honor.

His novel The Savage Detective was also selected as one of the top ten books in the New York Times Book Review in 2007. It is extremely rare for a writer to be favored on this list for two years in a row. 1992, a Chilean writer living in Spain learned that his liver disease was getting worse and worse. Considering that there is not much time left, this 40-year-old but unknown writer, who has been mainly writing poems, decided to concentrate on writing novels, hoping that the money earned from publishing novels would improve the family's economic situation and leave a legacy to his children. So he shut himself in a room near Barcelona and didn't go out to write all day. This writer died in 2003. Before his death, he wrote millions of words of novels, including short and pithy works and nearly a thousand pages of books.

1996, his novel Nazi Literature in America was published. In this pseudo-encyclopedic work, Bolano made up a group of nonexistent writers and their works. Later published novel Estrella distante is an extension of the last chapter of American Nazi literature, and the protagonist is a Nazi poet.

From 65438 to 0998, the publication of Detective Wilderness made him a writer of great concern, and this work won the Romulo Gallegos International Novel Award, the most important prize in Spanish literature. At this time, his physical condition has deteriorated, but he insists on spending a lot of time writing every day, accompanied by only cigarettes and tea. He wrote for more than 40 hours in a row, because he forgot to go to the hospital for a physical examination when writing a novel.

1999, he published the novel Amoureux Toto, in which the heroine is a self-proclaimed "mother of Mexican poetry" in Detective Wilderness. Nocturno de Chile, a novel published in 2000, is about a priest and literary critic in Chile. He was an accomplice of Pinochet's government, but he firmly believed that he was innocent.

Before he was killed by liver disease, he was writing a novel called 2666. This masterpiece was not finished in the end, but it caused a sensation again after it was published in 2004 (one year after the author died). The Spanish version of the book is more than 1 100 pages thick. The novel is divided into five parts, and the last part has not been finished. This novel revolves around the story of several literary lovers from all over the world looking for a writer who has been missing for many years, and takes readers to a Mexican town where murders are constantly happening.

In 2009, the English version of the book won the National Book Review Award.

Perhaps he didn't expect that his novels would set off a heat wave in Latin American literary circles, and people would compare him with Marquez, Luiza, Cortaza and other literary masters, calling him "the most important writer in Latin American literature today". After his death, with the publication of the English version, this writer received extensive attention and admiration all over the world. His novels such as Detective Wilderness and 2666 are very popular in Europe and America, and the cheers of readers and critics are constant. It is said that since Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was born forty years ago, no other Latin American writer has been able to make such a loud voice.

The writer who died at the age of fifty was named Roberto Bolano (Roberto Bola &; Ntilde; O) With the publication of the Chinese version of Detective Wilderness, readers in China will be familiar with this name.