But now Bolaño’s prevalence risks another over-simplification: that he is the only Latin American writer of importance to emerge since the original “Boom.”Įven if you grant publishers and literary magazines-and who would not?-the right to pad their coffers by any means, it is worth asking if there are hidden costs in this Bolaño worship, not only for other Latin American writers, but for Bolaño himself. His work seemed a welcome break from magical realism, which-through the writings of Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and other members of the “Boom” generation-had dominated most North American conceptions of Latin American literature for several decades. When Bolaño’s breakthrough book, The Savage Detectives, was published in English in 2007, he was heralded as an emissary from the next generation of Latin American literature. His publishers’ enthusiasm for his posthumous work is not difficult to understand: not since García Márquez has the American public fallen so hard and fast for a Latin American writer. His latest book, Woes of the True Policeman, is not even his first this year: last spring there appeared The Secret of Evil, a collection of nineteen largely unfinished stories. ALTHOUGH IT HAS been nearly a decade since Roberto Bolaño’s death, he has been publishing at an enviable clip.
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