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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - French Connections

  • from Part II - Shaping Events and Literary History
  • Edited by Jonathan B. Monroe, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    Roberto Bolaño In Context
    Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023, pp 142-157

  • Summary

    This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.