2023-07-15 12:19:35
In 1992 when he learns that he is ill and soon sentenced, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño is almost forty years old. His most significant publications are still in front of him: The Wild Detectives, distant star, Amuleto, Nocturne of Chile, and to finish, 2666published posthumously in 2004.
According to the contributors to this issue of Une vie, a work by Céline du Chéné in 2010, Bolaño was animated in his last years by an energy comparable to that of a “kamikaze”. A literary “kamikaze” of course, the expression is by Javier Cercas who paradoxically evokes with this term a life force, an extremely intense creative drive.
Beyond the formula, it is impossible to understand Bolaño’s work without comparing it with his biography. The life of the writer is first of all akin to a long wandering, both personal and literary, to ward off or put at a distance a traumatic experience of youth: the end of the socialist experiment carried out by Salvador Allende in Chile with the coup military coup of September 11, 1973. Coup of which Bolaño was a helpless victim, he saw the events on the spot and was even imprisoned.
Then he spent most of the following years in Mexico, but also in Europe, from Spain to France. Bolaño rubbed shoulders with literary experimentation in the company of a certain number of poets. Wandering poets, like him. This period provided him with the material for a novel that marked a generation, The Wild Detectivesand of a whole work that its author is not afraid to measure up to that of the great tutelary figures of Latin American literature.
Understanding the work of this major writer of Hispanic letters with regard to his life is what this program offers in which Robert Amutio, the translator of Bolaño into French, intervenes, but also several of the author’s friends, Javier Cercas, Sergio Gonzalez-Rodriguez and Antonio Werli, as well as two specialists in the work of Bolaño, Karim Benmiloud and Raphaël Estève.
By Céline du Chéné With Robert Amutio (translator), Karim Benmiloud and Raphaël Esteve (lecturers in modern literature), Javier Cercas (writer), Sergio Gonzalez-Rodriguez (writer) and Antonio Werli (artist and translator). Directed by: Marie-Ange Garandeau Une vie, une oeuvre, Roberto Bolaño (1st broadcast: 05/12/2010) Web edition: Antoine Dhulster Archive Ina-Radio France
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