2023-07-23 02:00:00
The first time I heard the name Roberto Bolaño I thought they were talking about Roberto Gómez Bolaños, that Mexican actor who became famous with El Chavo. What will the creator of El Chavo del 8 have to do, I remember wondering, with Nazi Literature in America? Could it be possible that Chavo was a Nazi? Or perhaps Bolaño, like every actor on the ladder of his ego, after the success of his character, had started making strident statements to attract attention again. But, obviously, it was none of this. Roberto Bolaño, except for the nominal suspicious resemblance, had nothing to do with Roberto Gómez Bolaños. He was a Chilean writer, almost secret, globetrotter and scholar, not to say quasi-cursed, who, after having suffered a very Latin American fate, with political imprisonment, Argentine flight and troubled stay in Mexico, had ended up living in a little coastal town called Blanes, an hour by train from Barcelona. He had gotten there by pure chance, according to what he confessed to me in the interview that I was lucky enough to do with him in 1999, and in the end he ended up dying nearby on July 14, 2003.
#artist #frustrated #dangerous #human