The writer who showed the West there was more to South America than magic realism

Early on in this ‘Biography in Conversations’ we’re told that the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño ‘continued to see himself throughout his life as a literary character, a fictional person.’ It’s a dubious claim: we might believe that about any number of Hollywood actors, pop stars, or historical monsters, but not of the author of books that, as one editor interviewed here, Ignacio Echevarría, notes, ‘would lead to the recanonisation of Latin American literature.’

But it’s easy to see why the idea tempted Mónica Maristain, an Argentinian journalist whose lighthearted interview with Bolaño for Playboy Mexico happened to be the last before his early death and posthumous mythologisation from outside. The young Bolaño does seem to have been, even for an adolescent poet loose in 1970s Mexico City, a spectacular self-dramatiser; and in 1998 Bolaño the mature fiction-writer immortalised his younger self and the entire milieu so gloriously, in the quasi-autobiographical novel The Savage Detectives (‘even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating’), that no strictly extra-literary consideration of that period of his life is now possible.