Understanding Roberto Bolaño by Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Roberto Bolaño by Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Ryan Long Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo. Understanding Roberto Bolaño. Columbia: The U of South Carolina P, 2016. 238 pp. ISBN: 978-16-1117-648-3. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat's outstanding book forms part of the "Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature" series, placing Roberto Bolaño alongside nearly fifty other writers, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Marcel Proust, Christa Wolf, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Octavio Paz. Bolaño's readers may wonder how he would respond to sharing a list with Paz, a target for criticism of the actual Infrarealist and fictional Visceral Realist poets. Regardless of what that response could be, Bolaño is institutionalized, if not canonized. By dint of its existence, Gutiérrez-Mouat's book attests to this fact, at once presupposing and reinforcing Bolaño's literary historical importance. Gutiérrez-Mouat does not justify Bolaño's recognition, perhaps because he deems it unnecessary. In fact, his book [End Page 166] does something much more useful than that. Written for an audience determined by the parameters of the series to consist chiefly of undergraduates, graduate students, and general readers, Understanding Roberto Bolaño succeeds in developing an exceptionally clear, concise, and thorough explication of Bolaño's oeuvre, from the poetry collection published in 1976, Reinventar el amor, to the posthumous novel, 2666, published in 2004. Gutiérrez-Mouat's lucid style, logical organization, and judicious pacing guarantee his book's accessibility. He combines biographical, literary, and historical context, summary, and formal analysis (often narratological) in such a way that his readers will be able to situate Bolaño's works in relation to one another and his oeuvre in relation to those of other Latin American and world writers. Gutiérrez-Mouat's readers will also find ample inspiration for investigating further the numerous research topics his book introduces, including the relationships of poetry and prose, the reconfiguration of the detective figure and the crime novel genre, and literature's capacity for political critique. Gutiérrez-Mouat presents Bolaño's work almost entirely chronologically, in order of composition. The only exceptions are sections about select stories and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011), which appears reasonably and helpfully just before 2666. The book begins with Bolaño's poetry and then continues with novels written but not necessarily published prior to 1996, the year of Bolaño's first major publications, La literatura nazi en América and Estrella distante, and then proceeds through Los detectives salvajes (1998), Amuleto (1999), Nocturno de Chile (2000), and Una novelita lumpen (2002), before concluding with the story collections, including the posthumous El secreto del mal (2007), Sinsabores, and 2666. The book's chronology gives readers a strong sense of Bolaño's development, an emphasis that, though logical and certainly viable on the whole, occasionally straightens the circuitous path Bolaño's work often takes, such as its constant returns to a central group of topics, among them reading and writing, the avant-garde, intermediality, gender and sexuality, and political violence. In addition to chronology, the book emphasizes biography. It combines detailed information about Bolaño's life with excellent summaries and readings of his work. Gutiérrez-Mouat does not fall prey to biographical determinism but instead deftly negotiates relevant facts of Bolaño's life together with helpful discussions of autobiography and autofiction. Though aimed primarily at students, Understanding Roberto Bolaño is of great interest to established scholars as well. It offers perhaps the best complete study of Bolaño so far, especially in regard to contextualizing his work in terms of biography, autobiography, genre, theme, and the ways in which his different texts evince and maybe even rely upon interrelations with one another. Gutiérrez-Mouat's scholarship is remarkable. He clarifies difficult questions regarding dates of composition; he reminds readers of less-familiar titles, such as the short story, "El contorno del ojo" (1983); and he has a very keen eye for detail, which, combined with his knowledge of several literary traditions, helps him elucidate important aspects of texts that would probably otherwise...