speculate that, far from

trying to conceal its very miscellaneous

character, Bolao himself would have
underscored it, assigning the book to th
e same category as Putas
asesinas and El gaucho insufribl
e.
The fifth section deals entirely with writers an
d books. Again,
these are occasional pieces, written on
assignment, mostly prefaces and the odd
review, as well as a few stray obituarie
s (like Camilo Jos
Cela s) and pieces written to celebrate th
e publication of a book (like Notes
on Jaime Bayly ). At the end comes what is
certainly one of
Bolao s last pieces,

Sevilla Kills Me,

a frag

ment of an unfinished speech

that he planned to read at the first Enc
uentro de Escritores Latinoamericanos
[Conference of Latin American Writers],
organized by the publishing house Seix
Barral and held in Sevilla in June 2003.
Bolao traveled to Sevilla without
having finished the speech, reading inst
ead Los mitos de Cthulhu,

which was
already written. It s clear that if finish

ed, Sevilla Kills Me

would join the

company of the

insufferable speeches.

Its

content, in any case, makes plain

the context in which one must view the b
ack-slaps and knuckle-raps, the winks
and cuffs that Bolao deals his contempora
ries, particularly the young Latin
American writers who, justifiably or not
, constantly cite him as an influence.
The Private Life of a Novelist,

the last of the se

ctions into which

this volume is divided, consists of four
short pieces in which Bolao recalls
his education as a reader and reflects o
n his literary kitchen,

permitting
himself to offer some

advice on the art o

f writing stories and providing some

clues to The Savage Detectives.
The book ends with one of the last interviews th
at Bolao gave, if not
the last. The interview was conducted by
Mnica Maristain, for
the Mexican edition of Playboy, and it c
ame out on the day he died.
Bolao sent written answers, and claimed h
e d had fun with it. The result is a
kind of sketch, for which Bolao posed wit
h characteristic openness and irony.
In putting together this book, it was necessary

to overcome some
scruples about doing so without the expr
ess consent of the writer. But, as we ve
seen, Bolao himself more than once announ
ced his intention of preparing a
collection of his journalistic pieces, w
hich provides an initial alibi for
proceeding in his stead. There s room neve
rtheless, for reasonable doubt as to
which pieces Bolao might or might not hav
e decided to include, what his
selection criteria might have been, and
how he might have ordered the pieces. In
these matters there s no guidance to be ha
d, so an attempt has been made to
proceed as neutrally as possible, withou
t relinquishing minimal standards of
organization. There has been no censorshi
p, nor were any pieces automatically
ruled out (with the exception, previousl
y noted, of those published in Catalan
that couldn t be located in the original v
ersion). Another matter are the
undiscovered pieces that will doubtless
surface here and there once this volume
has been published. There are unlikely t
o be many of them. In any case, this
volume isn t defined by its zeal for exhau
stiveness, particularly since it was
decided at the outset not to reprint a n
umber of very old pieces, published
during the years when Bolao lived in Mexi
co. To include them in this volume
would have meant disrupting the notable
harmony of the elements of which it is
presently composed. Also, there was some
hurry to get these pieces into readers
hands. This haste was motivated by a wis
h that they be read while the memory of
the writer was still fresh, and as I wri
te these lines, a year has not yet
passed since his death.
At the end of the volume, the source for each pi
ece is provided, along
with a few explanatory notes. It can be
seen here that only in exceptional
cases, when a piece is of particular int
erest, has it been included without
definite proof of publication. Our aim h
as been simply to gather Bolao s
scattered writings, not to provide a pla
ce for unpublished pieces, or to pretend
to make inroads into his posthumous body
of work, which is immense.
At this point, it seems unnecessary to justify o
ur choice of title
he chose it. All of the collected pieces
were written by Roberto Bolao during
pauses in his incessant creative labors,

or

between parentheses,

and that
urgency inevitably shines through in thi

s volume, most of its pieces written in

the course of the writer s increasingly de
sperate struggle with death to finish
the monumental 2666, which will surely c
onfirm him as an utterly
exceptional novelist, an essential figur
e.
We began by saying that this volume amounts to s
omething like a
personal cartography of Roberto Bolao and
comes closest, of everything he
wrote, to being a kind of fragmented auto
biography.

That the pieces it

contains are

basically literary

as the author stressed

of a

nature,
doesn t contradict this assertion. Borges

boasted more about

the books he d read than the ones he d writt
en. In the self-portrait

at the
start of this volume, Bolao, assiduous re

ader of Borges, claims to be

much
happier reading than writing.
Criticism is the modern form of autobiography, say

s Ricardo Piglia
in Formas breves [Short Forms]. And he a
dds: Writing fiction changes
how we read, and a writer s criticism is t
he secret mirror of his work. Sergio
Pitol says something similar in El arte
de la fuga [The Art of Escape],
a book that, like Piglia s, bears a certai
n family resemblance to Between
Parentheses. One might suggest o
ther precedents for this kind of
confessional writing through reading, un
derstood as an autobiographical approach
to the fiction writer, but what has been
said will suffice to justify the
guiding role that this book is called to
play in the proper reception of Roberto
Bolao as an author whose influence in the
realms of Spanish and Latin American
literature has only just begun to be fel
t.
Ignacio Echevarra
Barcelona, May 2004
Preface: Self-Portrait
I was born in 1953, the year that Stalin and Dyl
an Thomas died. In 1973 I was detained for eight days by
the military, which had staged a coup in
my country, and in the gym where the
political prisoners were held I found an
English magazine with pictures of Dylan
Thomas s house in Wales. I had thought tha
t Dylan Thomas died poor, but the
house looked wonderful, almost like a fa
irytale cottage in the woods. There was

no story about Stalin. But that night I

dreamed of Stalin and Dylan Thomas: the
two of them were at a bar in Mexico City
, sitting at a little round table, a
table for arm wrestling, but instead of
wrestling they were competing to see who
could hold his liquor better. The Welsh
poet was drinking whiskey and the Soviet
dictator was drinking vodka. As the drea
m went on, however, I was the only one
who seemed to feel queasier and queasier
, ever closer to the verge of nausea.
Well there you have the story of my birt
h. As for my books, I should say that
I ve published five collections of poetry,
one book of short stories, and seven
novels. Almost no one has read my poems,
which is probably a good thing. My
books of prose have some loyal readers,
probably undeservedly. In Consejos
de un discpulo de Morrison a un f
antico de Joyce
[Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Jo
yce Fanatic] (1984), written in
collaboration with Antoni Garca Porta, I
talk about violence.
In The Skating Rink (1993), I talk about
beauty, which is fleeting and
usually meets a disastrous end. In Nazi
Literature in the Americas
(1996), I talk about the pathos and gran
deur of the writing career. In
Distant Star (1996), I attempt a
very modest approximation of
absolute evil. In The Savage Detectives
(1998), I talk about adventure,
which is always unexpected. In Amulet (1
999), I try to give the reader
the impassioned voice of a Uruguayan wom
an who should have been born in ancient
Greece. I omit my third novel, Monsieur
Pain, whose plot is
indecipherable. Though I ve lived in Europ
e for more than twenty years, my only
nationality is Chilean, which in no way
prevents me from feeling deeply Spanish
and Latin American. In my life I ve lived
in three countries: Chile, Mexico, and
Spain. I ve worked at every job in the wor
ld, except the three or four that
anybody with a little pride would turn d
own. My wife is Carolina Lpez* and my son is Lautaro Bolao.
They re both Catalan. In Catalonia, I lear
ned the difficult art of tolerance.
I m much happier reading than writing.

*In March 2001, after this piece

was written, Alexandra,

the second child of Carolina

and Roberto
It s odd that it was bourgeois writers who transported Jos Hernndez s Martn Fierro to t
he center of the Argentine
canon. The point is debatable, of course
, but the truth is that Fierro, the
gaucho, paradigm of the dispossessed, of
the brave man (but also of the thug),
presides over a canon, the Argentine can
on, that only keeps getting stranger. As
a poem, Martn Fierro is nothing out of th
is world. As a novel,
however, it s alive, full of meanings to e
xplore, which means that the wind
still gusts (or blasts) through it, it s
till smells of the out-of-doors, it
still cheerfully accepts the blows of fa
te. Nevertheless, it s a novel of
freedom and squalor, not of good breedin
g and manners. It s a novel about
bravery rather than intelligence, let al
one morality.
If Martn Fierro dominates Argentine literature an
d its place
is in the center of the canon, the work
of Borges, probably
the greatest writer born in Latin Americ
a, is only a footnote.
It s odd that Borges wrote so much and so well abo
ut Martn
Fierro. Not just the young Borge
s, who can be nationalistic at times,
if only on the page, but also the adult
Borges, who is occasionally thrown into
ecstasies (strange ecstasies, as if he w
ere contemplating the gestures of the
Sphinx) by the four most memorable scene
s in Hernndez s work, and who sometimes
even writes perfect, listless stories wi
th plots imitative of Hernndez s. When
Borges recalls Hernndez, it s not with the
affection and admiration with which
he refers to Giraldes, or with the surpri
se and resignation
evoked by Evaristo Carriego, that famili
ar bogeyman. With
Hernndez, or with Martn Fierro, Borges see
ms to be acting, acting to
perfection, in fact, but in a play that
strikes him from the beginning as not so
much odious as wrongheaded. And yet, odi
ous or wrongheaded, it also seems to him
inevitable. In this sense, his silent de
ath in Geneva is highly eloquent. More
than eloquent. In fact, his death in Gen
eva talks a blue streak.
With Borges alive, Argentine literature becomes
what most readers
think of as Argentine literature. That i
s: there s Macedonio

Fernndez, who at times resembles the Valry

of Buenos Aires;
there s Giraldes, who s rich and ailing; ther
e s Ezequiel
Martnez Estrada; there s Marechal, who late
r turns Peronist;
there s Mujica Linez; there s Bioy Casares,
who writes Latin America s first and best
fantastic novel, though all the
writers of Latin America rush to deny it
; there s Bianco;
there s Mallea, the pedant; there s Silvina
Ocampo; there s Sbato; there s Cortzar,
best of them all; there s Roberto Arlt, mo
st hard done by. When
Borges dies, everything suddenly comes t
o an end. It s as if Merlin had died,
though Buenos Aires literary circles aren t
exactly Camelot. Gone, most of all,
is the reign of balance. Apollonian inte
lligence gives way to Dionysian
desperatio