His forms are sui generis, there is no emulating them, but his form-making is exemplary. At a time when the novel, at least in this country, has retreated into caution, he demonstrates again what is possible in fiction-which is to say, anything.
His myriad-minded fiction adumbrates no theory and swears allegiance to no school, embodying instead an unending search for new aesthetic and moral questions. In his art as in his life, he left a record of headlong daring that will become a rallying point for young writers for years to come. I said I thought the keyboard player had really been taking chances, and he said, “No, he wasn’t taking chances, he was doing whatever the fuck he wanted.” In every sentence he wrote, every image he conceived, every compositional choice he made, Bolano did whatever the fuck he wanted. The audacity of Bolano’s fiction, its disregard for convention and even probability, puts me in mind of a remark a friend once made after a jazz concert. This was Roberto Bolano’s story, and beyond his works’ particular merits-which are indeed great, though not quite as great as generally claimed-their value is just this: the tremendous courage that they bespeak.
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