The Bolaño industry

Horacio Castellanos Moya in Guernica:

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

“Nobody knows for whom it works” is a phrase that I like to repeat, but it’s also a coarse reality that has struck me again and again in life. And not only me, I’m sure of that. Let’s continue. The stories and the brief novels of Bolaño were being published in the United States very carefully and tenaciously by New Directions, a very prestigious independent publisher with a modest distribution, when all of a sudden, in the middle of negotiations for The Savage Detectives, appeared, like a bolt from the blue, the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune, who decided that this excellent novel was the work chosen to be the next big thing, the new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you will. And it was written, what’s more, by an author who had died a little earlier, which facilitated the process of organizing the operation. The construction of the myth preceded the great launch of the work. I quote Sarah Pollack:

“Bolaño’s creative genius, compelling biography, personal experience of the Pinochet coup, the labeling of some of his works as Southern Cone dictatorship novels, and his untimely death from liver failure on July 15, 2003, at the age of fifty contribute to ‘produce’ the figure of the author for U.S. reception and consumption, and in doing so, anticipate the reading of his work that is propagated in this country.”

The rest here.