Bolaño started out as a poet and its in poetry one can probably learn the most about the origins for his literary vision. Included with this would have to be the French traditions of symbolism and surrealism. Last weekend I came across an excerpt from a Aimé Césaire work, Notebook of a Return to a Native Land, and it immediately reminded me of Bolaño’s writing in both style and content. Césaire was originally born in Martinique, educated in Paris and then later returned to Martinique. Along with being a poet he was an active member of the French Communist Party.

Notebook of a Return to a Native Land consists of Césaire’s attempt to understand what it meant to be a black African within a country colonized by Europeans and contains themes Bolaño himself could identify with as a Latin American, such as oppressive political forces and the questionable influence of organized religion. Of course, matters such as these cannot be reconciled in the real world, but through the art of poetry they can be properly transformed:

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigi, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtle-doves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, suveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun.*

I find this in Bolaño’s writing as well. He presents dark human truths about the nature of life and history which are incapable of being resolved. But through the creative act, called imagination, a glory can become manifest from this crude material– a world as equally 'part of' as it is 'separate'.

*translation by Clayton Eshleman