Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño wrote like he knew he was going to die, even before that was the case, before his liver gave up at the age of fifty. He wrote as if he were on fire. He wrote like he wanted everyone else to write, as if he were in an abyss - sometimes hellish, sometimes beautiful, sometimes a void - and had no inclination to get out. There is no-one in the English language who can write like Bolaño, but then again there is no-one in the English language who can write like any Latin American. This isn't a criticism. The things English-language writers haved lived through are different to the things Latin writers have lived through.

Bolaño was known as a novelist who would rather be known as a poet. The first collection of his non-fiction to be translated into English, Between Parentheses (Picador, 2012) confirms what UK readers had always suspected: that he was also a consumate, idiosyncratic and above all honest essayist. It also confirms that he was a reader the like of which no longer seems to exist in this country, where reading is considered something that writers do to relax between periods of work. Many of the essays in Between Parentheses are about authors, and these exhibit no snobbery - only an anger, a trademark distaste at bad writing. James Ellroy's autobiography sits comfortably in Bolaño's bookshelves alongside such obscure works as Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of the Iconoclasts. Thomas Harris garners almost as much acclaim as Julio Cortázar or Juan Rulfo. Many of these essays read like short stories - albeit very Bolañian, very disconcerting short stories. They echo with truth, opinion and the space of dreams. More than anything else, the writing is alive in a way that indicates that the writer knows a thing or two about death. About life too, of course, and about the need to experience.

In the Bolañian fictive universe everything is linked, and the same goes for his essays - in this garden of forking paths we can begin with, for example, the Spanish civil war and trace our way, through and across texts, to the more recent bloodshed in Guatemala. We can begin in Geneva with Borges and end in Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin. The link is literature: the burning, amorphous literature that can hardly be distinguised from life.

If nothing else, this excellent, provocative volume is a reading list, and for Bolaño a reading list is a pretty good substitute for a manifesto or a pedagogical religious text. British and North American readers may be put off by the rapid stream of names, many of them untranslated Latin American or Spanish writers. That is because British and North American readers are, by and large, lazy and ignorant. Again, this is not a criticism. If our knowledge of Latin American writing stops at Marquez or, at a push, Allende (and it is easy to see how reading Isabel Allende could curtail anyone's interest) then why should we make the jump to Bolaño, Cercas, Piglia or Onetti? But research is easy these days. Books are cheap. Or you can steal them as Bolaño suggests. And to read Bolaño's essays you dont need to know about these other authors, not to begin with, because he introduces them like the characters in a vast unfinished novel, in the vast Latin American novel, which is what they are.

Roberto Bolaño was, for a while, a keeper of the flame, the precious or worthless Latin American literary flame - not because he wanted to be, but because he lived a life covered in petrol, playing with matches.