This chapter focuses on how Bolaño’s short novel Amulet (1998) approaches the tumultuous period of Mexico 1968, with its effervescent student movement and the subsequent violent governmental repression that led to the military occupation of the country’s most important university, UNAM, as well as the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd. Through the narration of Auxilio, an Uruguayan poet who remained locked in a women’s bathroom at UNAM during the two week span of the university’s occupation, the novel reconstructs this period yet shies away from a linear, chronological narration with a transparent claim to truth. On the contrary, by intertwining historical facts with fiction, Amulet’s unreliable and anachronistic narrator works against closure, embracing political defeat as a means to propose listening as a form of continued engagement.

This chapter argues that thinking about Roberto Bolaño in the context of journalism and mass culture means recognizing how mainstays of globalized twentieth-century journalistic communication – photographic realism, reportage with a pretension of objectivity, investigative journalism – as well as discourses about literature, have circulated differently in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Explores in particular the convergences and divergences between Latin American and Spanish crónicas and North American New Journalism in Bolaño’s fiction and in his own newspaper writing, the essay argues that Bolaño’s portrayal of the daily cultural and political contexts one confronts in the newspaper reflects his suggestion that readers are always exiles, and that they produce a commentary on seeing as both a journalistic practice and a metaphor for social understanding. Bolaño draws on, but also rewrites, the history of literary journalism in a wider Atlantic world, even as he comments on the superficiality of mass media and culture. Discussing Bolaño’s engagement with cronistas such as Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Carlos Monsiváis, and Pedro Lemebel, the chapter includes discussions of 2666, Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño’s short stories, and articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines in Spain and Chile.

This chapter examines Roberto Bolaño’s relation to the Tel Quel group in Paris by offering a close reading of his short story “Labyrynth.” Though few Latin Americans participated in Tel Quel, Bolaño was fascinated by the group’s ability to create an influential literary movement. The chapter provides an overview of Tel Quel’s lack of interest in Latin American writers and explores Bolaño’s commentary on each of the members, including Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva. The chapter also discusses Bolaño’s fascination with other literary groups around the world, including Octavio Paz’s circle in Mexico City, which appears in a key scene in The Savage Detectives.

The second chapter examines heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América, 2666 and, in particular, Peres’ O Evangelho Segundo Hitler can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, in writing about Nazism, they encounter other challenges to explore such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works, there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds – the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first is explored with reference to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universals’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

This chapter focuses on the novel of the twenty-first century to suggest that we are seeing now a new way of understanding the forms in which the novel pictures the world. The chapter opens with an exploration of the terms in which climate change and advances in the medical creation of artificial life have together shifted our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. In light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the eco-crisis sees the collapse of culture into nature, the chapter suggests that the contemporary novel is involved in the picturing of a world that becomes thinkable when the opposition between nature and culture has been overcome. It then goes on to read this new kind of world picturing, as it comes to expression in twenty-first-century novels by three of the major writers of the contemporary novel – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. It is possible to see in these writers, the chapter argues, the culmination of the prosthetic imagination as I have traced it through the history of the novel, a culmination in which the capacity to picture the world is won from the novel’s intimacy with the resistance of our bodies and environments to the forms in which we seek to make them imaginable and habitable.