Roberto Bolano and Me

My relationship with Roberto Bolano and his work is like a Roberto Bolano novel. I have read the works of Roberto Bolano, I have gotten down on my knees in awe of the man's work and in some example of cosmic irony I will never see him. It's not like in Bolano's work, where he is hiding out in the Sonara Desert, he simply died before I could meet him face to face.

I've been thinking of this because I've been reading 2666, which is Roberto Bolano's last novel in every sense of the word. It was the last novel he ever wrote and it is the culmination of years of writing novels. I can see connections with The Savage Detectives, since both have plot elements of searching for a writer that has disapeared. This is also key to my relationship to Bolano and his writing, because somehow you loose the writer, or never find the writer.

This is all part of somekind of underlining fatalism that runs through Bolano's work, but despite this I can't help but feel somekind of optimism that runs through his work. I wondered earlier if Bolano believed in God, and if so what he thought of God. That might help me understand his writing more.

I'm trying to emmulate Bolano's writing at the moment. He has a certain way of writing that I am picking up in his translations. For one thing he almost never uses dialouge. I'm trying that in a short story, but I don't want to get to into it because then I'll sound too much like Bolano. This is also part of another story where I, or my fictional avatar, goes on a mission to find Roberto Bolano, or a fictional avatar of Roberto Bolano, in the Sonora Desert or something. I don't know if I'll write this, because it sounds to much like a Bolano story, or if I'll just write it as a piece of Gonzo literary criticism.

Maybe Bolano still is alive, maybe he is hiding out in the Sonora Desert, or maybe he has left warnings about something that lurkes in the Sonora Desert, something sinister. Maybe it is ourselves.