The Last Interview and Other Conversations

I decided to re-read this one in anticipation of Bolaño’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 due later this month. I thought: it’s short, quickly accomplished, and that it will allow me a ‘jump’ in the Reading Challenge, freeing up some time for something longer (more Marías?) or something meatier (the upcoming Bolaño).

I happily proceeded, getting a kick out of his occasional contrariness and admiring his familiarity with and advocacy for various other Central and Sou

I decided to re-read this one in anticipation of Bolaño’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 due later this month. I thought: it’s short, quickly accomplished, and that it will allow me a ‘jump’ in the Reading Challenge, freeing up some time for something longer (more Marías?) or something meatier (the upcoming Bolaño).

I happily proceeded, getting a kick out of his occasional contrariness and admiring his familiarity with and advocacy for various other Central and South American authors ( Horacio Castellanos Moya says of Bolaño: In his literary beginnings, in Mexico City, he led the foundation of the Infrarrealistas (the ones he calls Visceral Realists in his novel [[book:The Savage Detectives|63033]]), and in the last years of his splendid career, he still didn’t lose that sense of literary “tribe,” only then it was at a Latin American level. And since he was a generous man he would mention all those who wrote works with which he identified, and since he was a voracious and intense reader he was up to date with the latest writing published in Latin America, and since he was brave and had no hairs on his tongue he became the reference of the new generation of Latin American writers. I committed myself to read those works that Bolaño would mention as the best that were being produced in Latin America)—authors whom I’m enjoying now.

And then I came to a discussion of three types of literary silence as evidenced by Juan Rulfo, Arthur Rimbaud, and Georg Büchner. In a 2005 interview, Bolaño says:

Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he sees himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops. Rimbaud would probably have been able to write something much better, which is to say bringing his words up even higher, but his is a silence that raises questions for Westerners. Rulfo’s silence doesn’t raise questions. It’s a close silence, quotidian. After desert, what the hell are you going to eat? There is a third literary silence—one doesn’t seek it—of the shade which one is sure was there under the threshold and which has never been made tangible. There stands the silence of Georg Büchner for example. He died at twenty-five or twenty-four years of age, he leaves behind three or four stage plays, masterworks … All before he turned twenty-five. What might have happened had Büchner not died; what kind of writer might he have been? The kind of silence that isn’t sought out is the silence of … I do not dare call it destiny… a manifestation of impotence. The silence of death is the worst kind of silence, because Rulfian silence is accepted and Rimbaudian silence is sought, but the silence of death is the one that cuts the edge off what could have been and never will be, that which we will never know … We’ll never know what he might have written at thirty. And that extends across the planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.

The Introduction (Alone among the Ghosts by Marcela Valdes) is well worth the price of admission, the uncompiled bibliography (gleaned from the sidenotes) is compelling, and any time with RB is time well-spent.