Peter Orner is in Chile for the Cátedra Abierta en Homenaje a Roberto Bolaño con Peter Orner—a lecture honoring Roberto Bolaño sponsored by the Universidad Diego Portales.
So though we didn’t want to impose on Peter while he was away, it also seemed a good time to pay tribute to Roberto Bolaño in one more way—here on "The Lonely Voice with Peter Orner."
Bolaño was born in Chile—and though he lived in Mexico with his family for a time and then in Spain, he is generally considered a Chilean writer.
Maybe we’ve all seen the images of Bolaño. There is something ineffable in his attractiveness, something very hard to name. We admire the long curly hair, the large glasses, the ubiquitous cigarette. Perhaps he wears a leather jacket. Maybe a t-shirt and blazer.
There’s something ineffable in his writing too that makes it difficult to describe or define. We just know it’s great.
Often people tell me they avoid Bolaño thinking—just by his own outward appearance—that his work is too challenging and inaccessible.
Those who are not deterred by the superficial, find soon enough that he is someone who appreciated clarity—a story you can tell without a lot of pyrotechnics. His stories have characters we feel we knew once or characters that resonate—even when they are quite enigmatic, even troubling.
Bolaño published novels and stories. Many still consider him to be primarily a poet. He was also a reader—and reading about his reading life is almost as enjoyable as reading something by the author.
In the story “Clara” we see something of the economy of poetry. But this is a story—a great one. It involves a man dragging the past behind him over three decades worth of a sort of an itinerant relationship with a woman named Clara.
When they were young, she was beautiful to the man. And for whatever else elements that attraction, he seems unable to disconnect from her completely over long years—even when she is making her own life away from him.
He's the narrator. He tells his version of things. And whether he is truthful or not, kind in the telling or not, what we have here is a love story that a lot of us might recognize with characters that are likely familiar.
The passage of time, a kind of regret, and loneliness— I mean, what is not to love?
