Could we even think of someone other than Roberto Bolaño when we come across a book titled Chilean Poet? Should we read this 2020 novel about a group of young poets in Santiago as the most Bolañesque story ever written by someone who was not Bolaño?
I will take a closer look at the novel before answering these questions. For the moment, what we know for a fact is that its author, the also Chilean Alejandro Zambra, is a fellow Bolañista. He said it himself in numerous interviews and publications. For instance, Bolaño is central to the narrative of A Christmas Story (2023), a non-fiction book that evokes the beginnings of his career as an aspiring writer and literary critic. Among other references to Bolaño, Zambra retells the time he wrote a review of 2666 in 2004, which he claims was the first article about the novel to appear in Chile. He also alludes to the “little scandal” that followed the publication of his and other laudatory reviews in the Chilean press. In his words: “But for a while, there was talk—without naming me […] nor the other reviewers accused of Bolañism or Bolañitis—about those hyperbolic critics who knew nothing about anything.”1
Zambra thus reminds us of the still-controversial status of Bolaño in the early 2000s, when some of the most prestigious cultural figures in Chile responded to his famous diatribes about the state of Chilean literature. For example, in his last interview before death, Bolaño was asked whether getting drunk with Isabel Allende and Ángeles Mastretta could have changed his appreciation of their works: “I doubt it. First, because there’s no way those two ladies would go out drinking with me. Second, because I don’t drink anymore. Third, because even at my drunkest moments I never lost a certain basic clarity, a sense of style and rhythm, a horror of plagiarism, mediocrity, and silence.”2 In this way, Bolaño turned literary choices into a personal matter that marked the division between friend and foe. And many of them answered back: Allende pictured him as a “very unpleasant man,” and Diamela Eltit used expressions such as “bootlicker,” “toady,” and “not really smart.”3 Regardless of the debatable fairness of his opinions, the rhetorical form of the invective certainly gave Bolaño the means to fuel his myth as an avant-garde polemicist at the precise moment of his canonization.
Chilean Poet deals with the influence of Bolaño on Chilean literature two decades later, when these polemics have become old history, and his canonical status is unquestioned. Zambra turns such an incendiary approach to literary disputes into the narrative dilemma of how to portray a group of poets in the footsteps of Bolaño and his Visceral Realists. As he said during an interview with the Argentine newspaper Página 12: “The Savage Detectives changed our lives and even contributed to creating a sense of community because we were several friends reading it at the same time.” To which he added: “I find it exaggerated to talk about Bolaño as a paralyzing influence. Bolaño did not take literature home with him; on the contrary, he left the door open. He took care of that.”4
The words of Zambra hint at the strategies that new cohorts of writers have adopted to deal with—and take advantage of—the paradigmatic influence of Bolaño on the global circulation of Latin American literature. From a fictional angle, Chilean Poet develops a reflection not just on how to write, but on how to be a writer after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano set the role model of the “savage” Latin American poet.
The novel is divided into four chapters, each corresponding to a different stage in the lives of Gonzalo and Vicente, a stepfather and stepson who are both aspiring poets. The first half is set across the 1990s and early 2000s, and follows the love story between Gonzalo and Carla. In keeping with the motifs of the coming-of-age genre, it all starts when they are high school students and continues when Carla decides to break up with him, driving Gonzalo to write poems in a hopeless attempt to win her back through literature. A time skip takes us forward to the moment when they bump into each other again at a nightclub and resume their romance. Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente, and the narrator describes their incipient family life as a novel in progress: “During the following weeks, on walks in the park and over pistachio ice cream dipped in chocolate, the rough draft of a family began to be written, but neither of them was sure whether that draft could eventually become a book.”5
Six years later, their life as a family comes to an end with a final breakup between Carla and Gonzalo, who moves to New York to pursue an academic career. At this point, a teenage Vicente discovers his passion for reading when he comes across a few books that Gonzalo left behind. Just as his ex-stepfather once devoted himself to literature to cope with heartbreak, Vicente begins reading poetry to navigate the emotions and drama of adolescence. The narrator recaps: “He read those poems many times, and they changed his relationship with objects and words, or his way of looking at the world, forever.” Performing a typical Bolañesque gesture, Zambra now cites the favorite writers of Vicente, presenting us with a list of the authors who could offer the perfect literary-sentimental education: César Vallejo, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Oliverio Girondo, among others.
Besides literature, we learn that Vicente was also into political activism as a teenager: “He went to all the demonstrations for free education, and he even had a short-lived starring role as vice president of his school’s student federation, and he really does trust in those young leaders like Giorgio Jackson, Camila Vallejo, Karol Cariola, and Gabriel Boric, who are still in their twenties.” Allusions to protests for free education and the emergence of new political leaders situate his story within a particularly intense social context. These references conjure the impetus of rebellion that drove Chilean youth during the 2010s and led to the massive demonstrations demanding a new national constitution in 2019. Quite opposite to the historical background in which the Visceral Realists undertook their poetic adventures. Bolaño wrote books such as The Savage Detectives and 2666 in the aftermath of authoritarianism and neoliberal shock policies. His stories dialogue with the tale of a generation bearing the traumatic marks of political violence and disenchanted with the socio-economic outcomes of democratic transitions across the continent. In contrast, Zambra makes his young poet part of an emerging new Chile that saw the legacies of the Pinochet regime not only as undesirable but even reversible.
The hope for a more optimistic political future permeates the intentionally Bolañesque turn in the central part of Chilean Poet, when Vicente meets the North American journalist Pru. She works for an indie magazine in New York and is in Chile to report on the local literary scene. Her editor is fascinated with Bolaño and “loves the idea of an article about a literary country, a country where poetry is oddly, irrationally important.” Due to his global, cult-like stardom, the fictional world of The Savage Detectives leaps off the page and delineates the not-so-imaginary contours of Chilean literature. In the words of her editor: “We’re going to discover a bunch of savage detectives.” In this way, Zambra repeats the narrative strategies through which Bolaño turned the existing but little-known Infrarrealism into the iconic Visceral Realism. Looking at Chile through the eyes of a North American journalist, the novel serves as an intermediary between local literature and global readers, introducing them to the idiosyncratically Latin American beliefs of a group of poets who evoke the eccentric stamp of characters like Lima and Belano.
After a first round of interviews with poets, all men, including both established and emerging figures in Chilean literature, Pru feels disillusioned. We have access to extracts from her notebook where she notes that these writers love talking about themselves, that all of them gave her their books, but also shamelessly looked at her breasts, that she learned that emblematic authors such as Neruda, De Rokha, and Huidobro hated each other… With irony and sarcasm, Pru paints a belligerent scenario of petty disputes for publication and prestige, similar to the famous episode when the Visceral Realists fantasized with kidnapping Octavio Paz: “Chilean poets are extraordinarily competitive; it’s like I’m in New York. It’s as if we were talking about the stock market, as if there was a lot of money floating around. But there isn’t. There’s nothing.” Additionally, Pru laments the racial and gender limits of the poets she met: “None of the poets I interviewed, even the two with Mapuche last names, knew Mapudungun, and they all seemed uncomfortable when I asked. […] I need to interview two hundred more Chilean poets, ideally all women.”
The strategic use of Bolañesque motifs in Chilean Poet now becomes clearer. What Pru aims to find in Chile is a “bunch of savage detectives” who are not as opposed to the socio-cultural status of literature in the neoliberal Western world as much as to some of the most contentious edges of Bolaño himself. The novel thus proceeds to a second round of interviews with poets who defy the often endogamous and male-oriented nature of Visceral Realism, as exemplified by their bragging tales of sexual feats or their machista drive to “rescue” lost women such as Lupe and Cesárea Tinajero. Similar to the mosaic of testimonies on the fates of Lima and Belano, Zambra presents these interviews as a series of intimate vignettes in which we learn less about their work than about their emotions and everyday lives. For example, Pru interviews a sixty-year-old woman who calls herself a “poet-healer” and her studio a “consultation room;” a teenage girl who answers her questions by citing Radiohead lyrics; a middle-aged man who forgot to add his name on the cover of his first book and has remained an anonymous author ever since; a bisexual female poet who always writes two poems at the same time, one with each hand; and a Mapuche poet who mixes Mapudungun and Spanish, and shares with Pru her knowledge of Mapuche traditions. Such a selection of feminist, queer, and indigenous writers, among other minorities, prevents the authoritarian drift that Bolaño regarded as a possible outcome of the literary avant-garde in novels such as Distant Star and Nazi Literature in the Americas. Such a random and seemingly endless list of poets creates a sense of diversity that dispels racial and gender hierarchies. Rather than categorizing and ranking writers, it emphasizes that their sometimes absurd but always charming efforts to live a poetic life are all equally valuable.
The poetic beliefs that inspired Pru materialize when she attends a party that brings together most of the writers she has met. The poets drink, dance to pop songs, recite verses, make fun of renowned authors, and even throw punches at each other after accusations of stealing books. At dawn, as Pru looks at the poets still hanging around, the scene is described as a sequence of snapshots: “The owner of the house is sprawled on the sofa, hugging the guitar and snoring like a cartoon character; beside him, two poets are arguing passionately over the word tenderness. […] A very drunk poet is looking at himself in a small hand mirror and singing, with inharmonious melancholy, the Bunkers song ‘No me hables de sufrir.’” A pathetic yet heartwarming aura surrounds the sort of happening that these Chilean poets perform. As a new acquaintance tells Pru just before leaving the party: “Chile is classist, sexist, rigid. But the world of the poets is a little less classist. Only a little. At least they believe in talent, maybe they believe too much in talent. In community. I don’t know, they’re freer, less stuck up. They mix together more.”
Pru finally writes her piece and leaves Chile feeling part of this romantic clique of voracious readers and amateur writers. The narrator confides to us: “She likes to think of herself as a Chilean poet, a Chilean poet who is neither poet nor Chilean, but whose journalistic pilgrimage […] somehow unites her with those men and especially those women who skulk in the alleyways of myth and desire.” Compared to iconic Bolañesque writers and artists, such as the Visceral Realists and the Nazi writers of the Americas, Chilean Poet features what I would call an “avant-garde of kind people,” proud of being more diverse and inclusive that its role model. Everyone is free to join an open and welcoming circle that demands only an irrational love for poetry and a shared disregard for artistic hierarchies. A Chilean poet is neither a Chilean nor a poet, but whoever is willing to let literature create new affects and relationships and change their lives.
Back to the question I posed at the beginning of this article. Is Chilean Poet the most Bolañesque novel ever? It may be, since its explicit reuse of tropes and themes from The Savage Detectives creates a fictional narrative out of the dilemmas of a new cohort of Latin American writers caught in the net of a publishing market always on the lookout for the next Bolaño. Zambra demonstrates that, while his unavoidable shadow might become suffocating, it can also serve as a tool to facilitate the circulation of new Latin American fiction on the international scene.
Or, alternatively, Chilean Poet may be the least Bolañesque novel ever, the moment Zambra reinterpreted the legacy of Bolaño against Bolaño himself. After all, his compassionate troupe of Chilean poets not only omits the moral indeterminacy of a circle such as Visceral Realism, whose disquieting effects Bolaño saw as intrinsic to true artistic experimentation. In the end, it also dispenses with the belligerent drive that enabled Bolaño to shake up the status quo of mainstream Latin American literature at the turn of the century.
- Un cuento de Navidad (Gris Tormenta, 2023). ↩︎
- The Playboy Interview was included in the compilation Between Parentheses (New Directions, 2011). ↩︎
- Mónica Maristain reconstructed these polemics in Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations (Melville House, 2014). ↩︎
- “Poeta chileno y el regreso de Alejandro Zambra a la novela” (Página 12, 2020). ↩︎
- I cite the passages from the novel from its English version, Chilean Poet: A Novel, translated by Megan McDowell(Granta Books, 2022). ↩︎
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