This was the year of the dead novelist, with two

posthumous bestsellers
In the delightful Spanish novel Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, a hunchbacked clerk ponders on the writers who have put down their pens, who have just refused to publish — the J.D. Salingers of the world who have retreated to a home in Cornish with a No Trespassing sign put up on the lawns. But then there are writers who refuse to stop publishing, who leave manuscripts — like wills — to be retrieved from their desks after their deaths to be turned into bestsellers. And the year 2008 saw two novelists rising from the dead in a trail of publishing glory — Vila-Mates’ close friend and the maverick Chilean Roberto Bolano, and the librarian from West Virginia Mary Ann Shaffer. They are not content to rest in peace, but the fervour around bestsellers will most certainly do.

His novel, a 900-odd-page ambitious work that critics say gleams in its darkness, is the toast of the literati, with Time calling it the book of the year and Bolanomania infecting the English-speaking world; hers, a poignant debut novel on World War II in old-fashioned, epistolary form, is the surprise hit, the tome of the month in book clubs. And the titles of these posthumous bestsellers are as different as they come: if the Latin American eschews letters in 2666; Shaffer, who wrote her novel goaded by her book club, packs it all in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. That would have been enough to make Bolano suck on his cigar in mild amusement.

... contd.