INTERVIEW BY CARMEN BOULLOSA, TRANSLATED BY MARGARET CARSON FIRST PUBLISHED IN BOMB, BROOKLYN, WINTER 2002 Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the Seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel The Savage Detectives, for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize. A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: He is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors.
