Rodrigo Fresan (the delectable genius of Kensington Gardens that I wrote about here) takes a look at the life and work of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano in the latest issue of The Believer.
I was not familiar with Bolano's work prior to settling down with Fresan's piece and I've now got a very strong Bolano-craving. I'm fairly certain nothing will satisfy this craving except for the consumption of his work, his books, his very writerly/readerly essence. Much of Bolano's work, it seems, centers on exploring the controversy that surrounds the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre that occurred in Mexico City. It also seems that Bolano is always exploring characters who love literature and who love to read. While Fresan carefully steps readers through Bolano's body of work and scatters gems of personal anecdotes throughout, the passage that finally got me, that finally made me feel as if no other books need be read until these are consumed, was this (the source of this quote is Bolano, although Fresan doesn't point out exactly where Bolano said it...in his fiction? in an interview?):
"...reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing an idea, like listening to music, like gazing at a landscape, like going for a walk on the beach."
If I believed in praising Hosanna on high, this would be where I'd do it. Fresan then summarizes with this:
"'...the books of Bolano the writer are full of books and writers. 'The truth is that reading is always more important than writing,' he said; and I've known few people who loved or relished the art of reading more, and who so enjoyed - an important detail - describing in their own words what they were reading, what others had written. Bolano believed in very few things, but one of them, I'm convinced, was the redemptive and curative power of the verbs to read and to write."
Not only do these descriptions of reading and writing resonate, deeply, with me, they also illuminate Bolano's influence on Fresan's own work. Here, a passage from Fresan's Kensington Gardens:
"Books are a point of escape, a place to let go, to let yourself fall and run into the forest with surprising ease and swiftness. It isn't a coincidence, I think, that books are made from the flesh of trees, and that libraries ultimately turn into petrified forests, into branches and roots that burrow into us and flower in our imagination."
Yum, no?
Bolano's books include: