Roberto bolaño cause of death
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Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño has joined the immortals.
— The Washington Post
Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968. He went back to Chile in 1973 to “help build socialism” (as he wrote in his story “Dance Card”), but less than a month after his return Pinochet seized power. Bolaño was arrested and imprisoned in Concepción. After his release, he returned to Mexico before moving to Paris and then on to Barcelona. Bolaño has been acclaimed as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag), “a spellbinder” (Newsweek), and “never less than mesmerizing” (Los Angeles Times). Winner of many prizes, including the Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Bolaño wrote ten novels, two collections of short stories and five books of poetry before he died at the age of 50, on July 15, 2003.
A Little Lumpen Novelita
“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight as a teenager—“our parents d
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Bolaño, Roberto
The Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) earned international renown in the decade before his death with a series of colorful, sprawling, formally innovative novels steeped in the contemporary literary culture of Latin America.
Bolaño came of age among tumultuous political events—the student activism of Mexico in the late 1960s, and the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende by forces loyal to military leader Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Although his writings addressed those episodes only tangentially, they breathed a spirit of freedom—from political restrictions, from stereotypes perpetuated by an entrenched literary establishment, from traditional social and sexual mores. Writing frantically before he was silenced by a progressive liver disease, Bolaño did not live to witness the expansion of his international reputation as his work was translated into English and other languages. Critic Susan Sontag, quoted by Larry Rohter of the New York Times, called Bolaño “the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanishspea
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The Complicated Afterlives of
Roberto Bolaño
“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” This certain death came tragically early for the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño, writer of that lapidary sentence, who died twenty years ago this month at the age of 50.
In the years after his death, though, his literary afterlife grew into one of the most extraordinary in recent memory, especially for an artist who wrote mainly about desperate poets and obscure writers—not material usually predictive of strong sales or worldwide fame. A writer with avant-garde origins who worked in almost total obscurity for most of his career, Bolaño somehow emerged as the first global publishing phenomenon of the 21st century, leaving behind a large body of posthumous work that is still expanding and a life story shot through with mythos and confusion.
Today, what might seem almost as surprising as Bolaño’s extraordinary success, is the fact that two decades after his death no one has yet written a biography of him.
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