ABSTRACT
In his early forties, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) used to think that he would die invisible and unknown. At the time of his death, when he was only 50, he was a respected writer in the Spanish-speaking world. His work had gained the most prestigious Spanish and Latin American literary prizes (the Herralde Prize in 1998 and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999) and he was increasingly well-known within a circle of the literary reading public. He was also becoming the object of wider international recognition, with critical acclaim for the first French translations of his works and the appearance of the English version of one of his novels, By Night in Chile, in 2003. A few years later, the sudden international success of his books would be approached in terms of ‘the construction of a myth’ and a special term would be coined to name the furore created by his literature among thousands of avid followers: bolañomania. Bolaño’s case is remarkable not only because of the speed of developments and the short span of his visible literary career, but also because of the sheer extremes upon which it is built. Literary histories written around 2000 do not even mention Bolaño in the space they dedicate to the ‘newest’ generation of Latin American writers (e.g. Williams 2003). A decade later, the reach and impact of his major novels seems comparable only to the extraordinary reception once granted to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
