To read

I’ve just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, an encyclopedia of fictional pan-American writers whose politics are extreme right. The entries are pithy, biographies lumped together by country of origin and era. Delivered in third person objective (the last entry is the exception), the biographies chronicle the single-mindedness of extremist writers, male and female: their moments of critical acclaim and inevitable anonymity, their romances, illusions of genius, their foibles. 

I loved the first third of it but the sardonic tone of the biographies lost some gleam with successive iteration. The biographies deliver the gossipy delight of name-dropping – Max Mirebalais as the Carribean Pessoa, the appearance of a volume of Bruno Schulz inside a Chilean coffee shop, etc. Perhaps the most unsettling factor of book is its suggestion that literature can shield writer (and reader) from the blistering truth of reality; or applied here, literature ennobles writers to become dispassionate parties to horrible crimes. Stacey D’Erasmo says it best in her New York Times review:

“…their persistence in the face of a world history that goes against them, their contrarian determination as they continue to write books that go unread, unreviewed and largely unnoticed. They’re the losers but, with incredible passion, they remain steadfastly in denial of that fact, churning away at their refutations of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre; their verses vindicating Il Duce; their novels decrying the decline of piety; their Aryan literary societies…Horribly, persistently, they have a vision that they are incapable of giving up…”

Life in letters permits single-mindedness and in Bolaño’s words, a “passport to respectability.” The charge is sharp – for readers and for writers. It’s easy to take cover in books, to invent a place for yourself in whatever world you want (Pessoa). The charge also carries for writers by attacking the professional necessity of single-mindedness, even of self-delusion. Perhaps the book also has broader, more dispiriting message: that literature is inevitably dissociating and the writer’s job is ultimately a futile, effacing one. I don't think so. Bolano’s character sketches are too sympathetic to support such a punitive final line. The whiff of the notion, though, is unsettling.

On a more affirmative note, see Bill Morris’ glowing review of John Leonard’s collected essays in The Millions (link, here) to renew faith in the positive power of fantasy, of literature in living a richer life. Leonard, a prolific book and TV critic, died in 2008. It starts: “For John Leonard, books were nothing less than an essential source of life, every bit as important as food, or oxygen, or love…” and includes glittering excerpts from writer’s oeuvre. Marked: to read.