I haven’t had many dealings with Roberto Bolaño in my life. By this I mean that I’ve read some of his work, but that I can’t call myself a Bolaño specialist, or anything remotely close. I know Nocturno de Chile (2000) quite well — it is one of my favourite Latin American novellas; I remember enjoying Los detectives salvajes (1998), even though I should re-read it, as I was too young and foolish when I tackled that beast; and I read several of his short stories over the years, without much discipline or method. Beyond the page, I once posted a link to his short story writing tips on Twitter, earning the ire of a terminally online Irish writer, who manifested no small amount of shock that a guy who died in 2003 didn’t include women among his favourite authors; later I received praise from an Anglophone translator for not including him in a list of my ten favourite Latin American short stories — I never knew what to make of this, or why it felt patronising.
That was the extent of my Bolañoing until this week, when I picked up his Llamadas telefónicas (1997), a collection of fourteen short stories. This is the first time I’ve read his short fiction sequentially and in the way it was originally published. One thing became apparent to me rather quickly: these are stories about stories. They also feel closer to the oral origins of storytelling than to a demonstration of writerly craft.
In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,”1 Walter Benjamin distinguishes storytelling from the mere transmission of information. For him, stories are carriers of experience rather than facts; he also argues that they are passed from mouth to mouth. When reading Llamadas telefónicas, I was struck by how often Bolaño's writing unfolds in precisely this way. Most of the pieces in this collection arrive delayed, often mediated by a character who experienced the story directly, who then tells it to the narrator, who then delivers it to us.
Take, for example, the opening lines of these stories (the italics are mine):