Framing Roberto Bolaño

"Introduction Unpacking Bolaño's Library Over the course of the two prodigiously productive final decades of his life and career, and with a growing sense of urgency, Roberto Bolaño developed an acute, sustained awareness that writers in all genres compete in the literary marketplace for the reader's increasingly distracted attention. That competition, which Benjamin saw Baudelaire was among the first to understand, takes place not so much within an anodyne 'World Republic'-that utopian ideal-but rather, among 'combative literatures' continually under siege, the lived reality of which may be aptly described as what Franco Moretti has called the 'slaughterhouse,' what Bolaño himself once called the 'vast minefield' ('vasto campo minado') of literature. 'A library is a metaphor,' Bolaño remarks in ''Literature Is Not Made from Words Alone'' (''La literatura no se hace solo de palabras''), 'for human beings or what's best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity' ('Una biblioteca es como una metafora del ser humano o de lo mejor del ser humano tal como un campo de concentracion puede ser una metafora de lo peor. La biblioteca es la generosidad total'). Within the frame of that shared understanding, this book traces the evolution of Bolaño's work and his emergence as a synecdochic, exemplary, generational figure bringing together into varied, mobile, complex constellations four pervasive and enduring, inextricably interrelated, abiding, and overriding concerns"--