Is it still remotely possible to discover something new about the life of Roberto Bolaño? Can those who have met him or explored his oeuvre still reveal the hidden secrets behind his mythologized stamp as the last literary totem from Latin America?
That is the promise implied in the title of The Secret Life of Roberto Bolaño, by the Madrilenian author Montero Glez, published as recently as 2024. Born in 1965, Glez is a writer and journalist who has held a regular column in the influential newspaper El País and has published around 20 books. Both critics and Glez himself have described his literature as inspired by Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Beatniks, among other icons of mid-twentieth-century counterculture. Translated into the Spanish scene, Glez cultivates the anachronistic image of an enfant terrible who seeks to keep the ethics of la movida alive in our comparably more moderate times.
Knowing as little about the book as I did about Glez, I let its title mislead me. The expectation of finding something secret about Bolaño was quickly dashed when I looked at the index and saw that the book included five chapters, with only the last one referring to Bolaño. The remaining four consisted of semi-fictional portraits of other writers and artists whom Glez declares to admire and whom he situates in archetypally literary settings such as postwar Tangier, the bohemian ateliers of Paris, and the underground bars of post-Franco Madrid. The list features painters such as Miquel Barceló and Lluís Claramunt, the Flamenco cantaor Manuel Agujetas, and writers such as Enrique Vila-Matas and the abovementioned Burroughs.
The logic behind the selection reveals itself as we read the portraits. In all of them, Glez celebrates the quest of these writers and painters to enter a region of experience that is only accessible through art yet, at the same time, exceeds the aesthetic domain. As Glez writes about the works of the maudit painter Claramunt: “If I looked closely, and let myself get tangled in the chaos and the tangle of those blotches, I could make out figures and tortured faces, forever questioning the mystery of life, amid storms of ice and sand.”1 We are faced with a romantic and expressionistic understanding of art as the manifestation of an irrational core within the creator that challenges the prosaic limits of everyday life. Moreover, in most of the portraits, Glez depicts the artist in question through the voice of somebody else, who might even be another admired artist, such as the writer Juan Marsé or the visual artist Ceesepe. For example, through the fictionalized speech of the Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri, Glez evokes the ambiguous homoerotic relationship between Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr, punctuated with allusions to their participation in the murders of David Kammerer and Joan Vollmer:2 “El Chukri told me everything; his words striking the rain-dripping glass, giving his story the malicious dimension of a memory splashed with blood—the nourishing liquid of a crime that spans time and space until it arrives at the warm, humid night of Tangier.”
With metaphors alluding to nature and crime, the reflection on art is situated within a Mannerist, over-stylized literary construction that blurs the line between fact and imagination. The tales about eccentric artists, told by other eccentric artists, serve as the aesthetic mediation that enables Glez to craft his self-image as a writer: that of a character/witness in an ominous semi-fictional world that revitalizes somewhat passé counterculture beliefs. As he admits himself after talking to the cantaor Agujetas: “At that moment, I realized not only how fragile I was, as I have said, but something even more important: that I would never be anything in life except what I am now—a writer who lives like a character invented by someone else, existing only in the reality of literature.”
Until almost the end of The Secret Life of Roberto Bolaño, the connection between these tales and Bolaño remains implicit, only vaguely intuited in a shared belief in the power of art to create forms of an intense, poetic life. It is the last chapter, focused on Bolaño, which not only inspires the book’s title but is also the most overtly literary of all. So far, a fictionalized version of Glez himself has shared locales and dialogues with figures such as Burroughs, Marsé, and Vila-Matas; now he makes himself part of the Bolañesque universe by adopting and reinventing the identity of one of his most iconic characters.
It all begins when an aspiring writer, Arturo Belano, recalls meeting Bolaño on a train ride across Catalonia. Told in the first person, the story is set at the turn of the century, before The Savage Detectives was published, so we can credit the narrator when he claims he did not recognize Bolaño. He did, however, remember that a certain Roberto Bolaño had won a writing contest to which he had also submitted a manuscript. Eager to profit from this new literary connection, Arturo decides to read what Bolaño had published so far. His conclusions speak for themselves: “It was a heavy, mediocre catalog, written with the inferiority complex of someone who had never pursued higher education—burdening its paragraphs with pedantry and doctoral pretensions, as if it were a dissertation or an ill-conceived thesis.” He thus laments the metafictional games and intertextual hints that have become a Bolañesque trademark, but which also run contrary to the expressionistic approach to art that Glez outlined in the previous portraits. Again, in the words of his alter-ego: “What Bolaño sought was to create combinations of ideas, but those lacked substance, with the result that all he produced was bad rhetoric: verbal constructions that do little, if anything, to stir the reader’s emotions.” Still, out of interest in gaining his goodwill and securing his support for publishing his own works, Alberto sends a letter to Bolaño. He even thinks about telling him, after reading Nazi Literature in the Americas and feeling curious about the vignette of the infamous poet/murderer Ramírez Hoffman: “I would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirroring or exploding others, was, in itself, a mirror and an explosion.”
The plot skips ahead a few months. No answer from Bolaño, but there is news about his new novel: Distant Star. The narrator recalls his astonishment after finding his own name mentioned in the preface, in which Bolaño explains that it was his fellow Chilean, Arturo B., who gave him the idea of expanding on the final chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas, turning it into the novel in our hands: “Who else could Arturo B. be but myself? The most chilling part of it all was reading the very words I had written in my letter to Bolaño and then crossed out, so that they would not appear in the second draft of the letter.” Another timeskip. Arturo has now published his first novel and mailed it to Bolaño. In response, Bolaño sends him the newly published The Savage Detectives with a curious dedication: “To Arturo Belano. I hope you don’t complain; it would have been worse if you’d been a character of Pérez-Reverte.”
At this point, Bolaño begins sending Arturo postcards from cities such as Paris, Venice, Vienna, and Zürich. Remembering these postcards prompts Arturo to recall the cult-like status that Bolaño would attain after his death and the explosion of his fame across the global literary stage: “As if that weren’t enough, the name Arturo Belano became almost as famous as his own, even as I sold fewer and fewer books; and whenever it came time to promote my novels, some journalist—women tended to be the bolder ones—would invariably ask me about Roberto Bolaño.” Mysteriously, the postcards kept arriving. One from Tangier invited Arturo to meet Bolaño there. Added to the disconcertingness of receiving messages from a dead man, the arrival in Tangier brings the story back to the eccentric and ominous atmosphere of the previous portraits of Burroughs, Claramunt, or Agujetas: “In this way I stepped into a world that was at once utterly familiar and profoundly alien to me, where life’s mysteries grow in secret beneath the carpets until, one fine day, or one terrible night, they suddenly burst forth, engulfing everything and revealing their deadly secret.”
Bolaño is indeed alive. He meets Arturo at a hotel where Burroughs once lived. In the end, the “deadly secret” alluded to above combines the elements of genius and conspiracy that had permeated the depiction of every artist in The Secret Life of Roberto Bolaño before. It turns out that the man Roberto Bolaño and the public figure Roberto Bolaño were not the same. The fictional Bolaño tells Arturo that he and Antoni García Porta, Javier Cercas, Ignacio Echevarría, and Vila-Matas came up with the idea of inventing an ill-fated writer sometime in the 1980s: “After several meetings, they decided to create a poète maudit who would, over the years, become a mass-market author—a pop icon modeled on Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, also known as the Lizard King, who enjoyed little success during his lifetime.” For two decades, the group wrote the books together. Drawing on their growing influence on the cultural field, they fueled the myth of the adventurous poet and staged his death, only to continue publishing posthumous books and further increase his fame. The literary icon Roberto Bolaño is nothing but a malicious stratagem bordering on conceptual art, intended to debunk the banality of cultural recognition. The reason for inviting Arturo to Tangier was to convince him to write a new posthumous novel under the name Roberto Bolaño. Arturo refused to contribute to perpetuating what he called “an insipid literature,” and instead told Bolaño that he would write a story exposing the plot in which he had become involuntarily involved: “He looked at me with childlike delight over his glasses and, with a wave of his hand that meant ‘go ahead,’ gave me his permission. Then, after taking a drag on his cigarette, he warned me that no one would believe me.”
The final pages of The Secret Life of Roberto Bolaño thus reach a resolution that seems at odds with the literary beliefs defended throughout the book. After all, to construct his self-image as a twenty-first-century romantic, Glenz explicitly drew on the Bolañesque world, with countless references to other artworks and semi-fictional authors, to the point of embodying the figure of Arturo Belano and even rewriting the fate of Bolaño himself. We could simply conclude that the manufacture of his own text contradicts the critical views on meta-literature that his alter ego directed at Bolaño, and even that the book profits from the mechanisms of market-driven literary stardom that it so sarcastically mocks. Or, to make things more complicated, we could regard this iconoclastic take on Bolaño as a paradoxical form of criticism that actually expresses admiration for the narrative strategies that novels such as Nazi Literature in the Americas and The Savage Detectives turned into a global phenomenon.
- I translated the passages from the original Spanish version: La vida secreta de Roberto Bolaño (Navona, 2024). ↩︎
- David Kammerer, an older mentor and pursuer of Lucien Carr, was stabbed to death by Carr in 1944, while Joan Vollmer, the wife of William Burroughs, was accidentally shot and killed by Burroughs during a drunken “William Tell” stunt in 1951. Both deaths became defining events in the early history of the Beat Generation. ↩︎