We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with novelist Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World, The MANIAC) about the erotic darkness and compassion of Roberto Bolaño.
Why did you want to talk about Bolaño? What does he mean to you?
He’s probably the writer that I cherish above everybody else. If there’s one single writer I would credit with me becoming a writer—not just wanting to be a writer, but actually becoming one—it’s Roberto. For several very important reasons. I’ve always felt a strange kinship, to the point where I’ve become friends with his friends, with characters from The Savage Detectives—the actual real characters. I’ve gone to Barcelona, I’ve met the painters who inspired Ramírez Hoffman, and several of the main characters, including Thomas Felipe Müller, a Chilean poet who lives in Barcelona.
I really modeled a big part of my writing and myself on Bolaño, which is very embarrassing to admit, but it’s true. If Bolaño had not come along, I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have written anything, because I started writing around when I was 25, and I started reading him when I was about 23, and it was just like, okay. And that’s one of the main things about Bolaño that I think makes him very unique: he makes you want to write.
He turns writing into something urgent, and that is something very rare. Literature rarely does that. You can be bookish and have a dream of writing a book, but Bolaño just makes you want to get up and write the way other writers make you want to get up and have sex or shoot drugs. It’s infectious. There is something about it. He turns it into something transformative.
Everyone reads The Savage Detectives and 2666, but he wrote many others. Which of his other titles would you recommend beyond his most popular works?
I always point people to his first really great book, to me, which is one of his early homages to Borges: Nazi Literature in the Americas. That is a work you can go back to. As a writer, it makes you feel bad, self‑conscious. You’re like, how the fuck can a guy... how does his mind work like this? How can he be so creative, so in control, and at the same time so wild? It’s an incredibly elegant book, but it’s filled with jokes. The whole book is a joke.
His first novel, La pista de hielo—The Skating Rink. I actually read the photocopied manuscript, the first one, because it’s in his friend’s house. It’s yellowed, and you open it on the first page—it’s beautiful, printed very beautifully—and Bolaño’s already there, in his first novel. His style, his tricks, his voice, his rhythms. On the first page. It’s unbelievable.
But he came to that through failure, which is a very important part of his story. He was a failed poet and a failed writer. And I know he’s got good poems, but if you compare him to anybody he admired, he’s quite mediocre. But then he starts writing prose to scrape a living together. And the muscle he developed as a poet—it’s like he has an enormous forearm from arm‑wrestling, and suddenly he’s doing things in prose that I don’t think have been done the way he does them.
And all of these metaphors that, on a personal level, I don’t think work that well in his poetry—they come alive in prose in a way that’s unbelievable. That’s another factor. On the page, Bolaño has a dominion of metaphor that is unbelievable. It’s so effortless. The games he plays, the unique shape of his mind. Bolaño does this thing: I don’t know how it’s translated in English, but in Spanish one of his tricks is to say como si, “as if,” or “like.” And what comes after that. He will show you something that is “as if this.” “This is like this,” right? And after a while, when he was really in control of himself, he would just pile them on—this, and this, and this, and that—and they sound like orphic sayings. The sheer amount of lucidity and playful intelligence you can see in his metaphors and similes and in the way he ends a line. You can see that especially in Nazi Literature in the Americas. You get to the end of a paragraph and you are blown away—how did he...?
I always use sports metaphors to describe him. He's a bit like Lionel Messi. As a writer, you know what he’s doing, you know what he’s going to do, and somehow he does it in a way you don’t expect. You can even see it coming, and he just finishes it in a way that you’re like, holy shit, I wish I could do anything close to that. It makes me feel so envious. The good thing is that he’s long dead now, so we can start ripping him off and not feel bad.
What do you think writers can learn from him?
You could spend your whole life studying Bolaño and learn different things. I mean, he created a universe—which is normally reserved for fantasy authors, right? But all really great writers—like Dickens—build an entire universe. Roberto has his alter ego, it’s populated by his friends, there’s a recurring cast of characters, there’s always the detective figure, and this great love for everything that’s been cast aside by society. So: prostitutes, junkies, and so on.
But I think the thing people should take to heart and that a writer should learn from Bolaño is that literature is sacred. It’s something worth giving your life to. It’s a life‑and‑death sort of thing. He’s like: listen, this is like joining the army. That’s what he’s saying. Are you willing to give your life and soul to this? Literature as an investigation, as a road toward illumination.
His image is that of the samurai. A writer is a samurai who knows he will be killed as soon as he draws his sword. And people find that ridiculous, because every writer—every woman, man, and child who’s ever sat down to write—knows that it’s you alone. I mean, I have a couple of katanas in my house, but nobody’s going to come and cut me down. But he’s saying: this is an adventure of the mind, and you will put yourself at risk. And if you don’t, it’ll show. You can tell. You can tell when someone didn’t bet his life on a book.
And with Roberto—he bet his life on a book so much that I think he probably shaved at least a decade off his life. He really wrote himself to death. And the presence of death in his biography and his books is fundamental. There is a change when he gets the death sentence, when they tell him, listen, you have 10 years, your liver is going to fail. And he just gets propelled by this. There is great lucidity, energy, purpose. And to me, that’s what you learn—that this is the sort of thing you bet your life on.
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