Everybody that I speak to knows I live and die by Roberto Bolano. So of course I bought the spectacular book Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other Conversations and ravenously devoured it in a less-than-48-hr. period. While the interviews contain various "Bolano Bombs" as I like to call them, my favorite moment occurs in "The Last Interview" conducted by Monica Maristain for Playboy Mexico in July, 2003. After asking Bolano a series of questions in which he must pick one of three choices given, Maristain queries, "John Lennon, Lady Di, or Elvis Presley?"
Bolano smartly answers, "The Pogues. Or Suicide. Or Bob Dylan. Well, but let's not be pretentious: Elvis forever. Elvis and his golden voice, with a sheriff's badge, driving a Mustang and stuffing himself full of pills."
This response encapsulates what I love best about Bolano's writing and what it evokes. The Romanticization of Elvis as the ultimate, aging, drug-addicted rock star (poet) iconizes Bolano's own position, or at least the one held by his alter-ego Arturo Belano, in his oeurve. In The Savage Detectives, aka the best novel of all time, Belano and his partner in crime Ulises Lima run the Mexican Visceral Realists and appear and disappear at random and mysteriously throughout the course of the book, mythologizing themselves in the process. It doesn't hurt that the entire middle section of the novel consists of first-hand accounts of what Belano and Lima are like and the affect they have on the other poets rambling through Mexico, and probably the most succinct description states that they were like two Dennis Hoppers running around... In any case Bolano never fears proximity to the lowliest and most disgusting and most fearsome aspects of life, that sueno, that pesadilla.
Bolano devoted his art to marginal groups, to giving voice to whom he calls in Amulet "the kids who lived in a lonely world of love and slang" because he once was one of those kids himself.
And like Elvis "The King" slowly and compulsively killing himself with his glamorous pills in his shiny black car and his slicked-back pompadour, moving ever closer to the abyss, Bolano understands and thrives on these "sadomasochistic" aspects and urges that construct this modern life which he lists as: "That's the way love is, and slang, and the streets, and sonnets. And the sky at five in the morning."
