Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness and eight other books, has written a piece about the “construction of the ‘Bolaño myth’ in the United States” that contrasts this myth with the man he knew.
Moya claims that Bolaño would probably be amused by the “marketing operation” in which his reckless youth has been played up at the expense of his sober, productive final decade, when “the greater part of [his] prose work” was written, when his “major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family.”
But he’d be less amused, Moya continues, at what this operation implies, as far as crafting a new narrative by which North Americans will understand Latin American literature.
American readers, with The Savage Detectives, want to confirm their worst paternalistic prejudices about Latin America … like the superiority of the Protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbors to the South as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent. Pollack says that from this point of view The Savage Detectives is “a very comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized.”
Moya’s piece is based on an essay by Sarah Pollack, who teaches at CUNY Staten Island.
[Thanks to the Center for the Art of Translation for blogging about the essay.]
