Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native country five years later. In his short story 'Dance Card', which accords with the known facts of his life and does not present itself as fiction, Bolaño indicates that he hardly distinguished as a young man - if he ever did - between his politics and his love of poetry: 'I reached Chile in August 1973. I wanted to help build socialism. The first book of poems I bought was Parra's Obra Gruesa (Construction Work).' He then bought another book by Nicanor Parra, the anti-rhetorical Chilean poet whose work Bolaño preferred to that of the more celebrated Pablo Neruda - a preference, it seems clear, for Parra's plain-spokenness over Neruda's florid multiplication of metaphor - and, in his telling, this was practically all the work towards socialism Bolaño accomplished before his arrest, following Pinochet's coup of September 1973, as a 'foreign terrorist'.

LRB 6 September 2007 | PDF Download