Roberto Bolaño died in 2003. But his work is only just beginning to revolutionise fiction
Of all the literary genres, the one that the centrifugal form of the novel resembles the most is the epic. Now, Jorge Luis Borges didn’t write a single novel. But he believed that the epic would make a return, and bring back the god-like poet who would sing his story, so much so that we won’t be able to tell the singer from the song.

Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño, who died in Spain in 2003, of liver failure at the age of 50, has a layered pedigree. He placed himself against the “Boom” — whose brightest stars were Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes. A realist, but not a disciple of Llosa, Bolaño is the inheritor of the spirit, if not the art, of Borges. And his last, posthumous novel, 2666, was as much his memento mori, as it is an early “epic” of the 21st century. Its geographical and cultural embrace is vast. The book spans 1,100 pages in the original Spanish, almost 900 in the English translation. It has five parts, each of which Bolaño had willed to be published separately as a novel over five years, the sales providing for his children. But Bolaño’s heirs overturned the dead man’s will and published the whole of it realising the “literary value” of the work; a work which “speaks to the Americas”, in the Latin American fashion, but retrieves for itself the European High Modernist tradition.  

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