Roberto Bolaño as World Literature ed. by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro (review)

Twelve chapters comprise the anthology, including the exemplary Introduction. It is the best Bolaño critical ensemble since Bolaño Salvaje (2006). It best compares with articles from a published conference, updating issues and inventing others, ahead of the next round on Bolaño it so well inspires. First Part: "Bolaño and World History" delves deep into fascism in fictional and counterfactual terms (Federico Finchelstein); into Nocturno de Chile, extended into Nietzsche and Junger and European aestheticism (Thomas O. Beebee); and also into Amuleto's "ethical turn" and its recasting of Mexico's 1968 students insurgency, less in revolutionary ideological terms, more so through the narration's distanced moral reflections (Juan De Castro). Second Part: "Bolaño's Literary Worlds" offers piercing and documented analyses of regional legacies and their cosmopolite betrayal by theory, counterfeit jargon, arcane correctedness (Will Corral); a subtle Bolaño who in Detectives Salvages experiments in modernist techniques as much as did older writers in the region (Patricia Espinosa); and the Bolaño authorship's passage and absorption into the global publishing system (Enrique Navarro). Third Part: "Bolaño's Global Readers" exudes learning and a tone of fierce irony in accounting for Bolaño's evanescent and often sublime targets of parody, bounced off the problematic challenges posed by Latin America's distinctive and defensive exceptionalism (Benjamin Loy); a witty see-through selfie on how much Chinese Bolaño's Chinese reception turns out to be, as it assimilates his tragic themes through stereotypes of Latin America, at times surpassed (Tweng Wei); Bolaño deftly brought home, momentarily from the basement to the penthouse of American letters, including some inmate cabin-mating with Herman Melville (Nicholas Birns); and, finally, the double-edge publishing negotiations through which Bolaño's resistance against postmodern hegemonies, on shrinking maps, faces absorption by the polymorphous strategies of neoliberalism, as stock is taken of 2666, The Third Reich, and Woes adding up to one huge fiction (Sharae Deckard); who in the collection's final's sentence writes

The proleptic trajectory of Bolaño's "total novel," culminating in Woes' fear of a "vulgar and savage fin de siècle" […] insinuates that early deathworlds of the twentieth century are likely to reproduced or echoed [sic.] in grotesque new forms in the twenty-first century, so long as both the horrors and the utopian possibilities of past conjunctures have been forgotten and capitalism continues uncontested.

(220)

The apocalypse in question actually reproduces and echoes the oldest cleavage in the ancient-to-modern culture quarrels about the grounds for authority being stubbornly indebted to religious confessionalism, among ancients, but also among moderns. Such is Carl Schmitt's baseline dictum about political theology's unvanquished claims to sovereignty. Should one write about the Sovereign Republic of Santa Teresa as a citadel adrift and governed by tenebrous Land-and-Sea German legacies? Should such place partially represent the nomadic City in Deckard's total novel by posthumous Bolaño?

Bolaño ancient or modern? Writing on this binary in The Battle of the Books, Jonathan Swift sets the cannibal spider against the laborious bee: "The question comes all to this.—Whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom, produces nothing at last but flybane and cobweb; or that which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax" (A Tale of the Tub and Other Works 112). Being a bee that died untimely by spidery habits, Roberto Bolaño is justly served by the articles in this collection, whose previous scant notice I will next supplement in more personal terms.

For the vanishing breed of us who came of...