Read Roberto Bolano for Free Online

together, from this and that side of the Atlantic: Rey Rosa, Villoro, Marías, Vila-Matas, Belén Gopegui, Victoria de Stefano .
    Spanish novelist, critic, and columnist Javier Marías (b. 1951) is one of the most respected contemporary Spanish writers in the world. Eleven of his books have been translated into English, including the acclaimed “Your Face Tomorrow” series.
    Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958) is a Guatemalan short story writer and novelist. Paul Bowles translated many of Rey Rosa’s works into English.
    A Mexican writer and journalist, Juan Villoro (b. 1956) was highly praised by Bolaño. In a television interview Bolaño claimed Villoro’s work was “opening up the path of the new Spanish novel of the millennium.” Currently no full English translations are available, but excerpts from
El Testigo
(2004) have appeared in various journals including
The Quarterly Conversation
and
Common Knowledge
. His short story “Among Friends” was published in the journal
n+1
(Issue 8).
    A Spanish novelist and friend of Bolaño’s, Enrique Vila-Matas (b. 1948) is a force in contemporary Spanish literature. He is the author of over twenty-five works. His novels have just begun to be translated to English, including
Bartleby & Co
. and
Montano’s Malady
.
    Spanish novelist and screenwriter, Belén Gopegui (b. 1940) has won many Spanish language literary awards for her fiction. An English translation of
The Scale of Maps
will be available in 2010.
    Born in Italy, Victoria de Stefano (b. 1940) moved to Venezuela in 1946. She has authored a number of novels and essay collections. Her work is not currently available in English.
    Writer of the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) was a prominent poet and politician. Much of his work is concerned with wordplay and metaphor.
    HS/MB: Is it disturbing to think we have read many of our gods (James, Stendhal, Proust) in translation, in second-hand versions? Is that literature? If we spin the matter around, it’s possible we might end up concluding that words don’t have an equivalent.
    RB: I think they do. Furthermore, literature is not made from words alone. Borges says that there are untranslatable writers. I think he uses Quevedo as an example. We could add García Lorca and others. Notwithstanding that, a work like
Don Quijote
can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it—bad translation, incomplete and ruined—any version of
Quijote
would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature. We may lose a lot along the way. Without a doubt. But perhaps that was its destiny. Come what may.

“READING IS ALWAYS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WRITING”
INTERVIEW BY CARMEN BOULLOSA, TRANSLATED BY MARGARET CARSON
FIRST PUBLISHED IN
BOMB
, BROOKLYN, WINTER 2002
    Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the Seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel
The Savage Detectives
, for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize.
    A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: He is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Blanes, the town in northeast Spain where