Understanding Roberto Bolano

"A great introduction to the work of a remarkable and intriguing Latin American author."—CHOICE

"Nobody understood better what we should understand in reading Roberto Bolaño than Ricardo Gutiérrez Moaut. If the Peruvian voice is moving and stoic, the Chilean accent is mundane and inquisitive. Irony is a Chilean tradition, pathos a Peruvian one. To write with that double edge to produce a version of the Modern world in the making (Vallejo in the 30s) and of the lost of the Modern dream (a Postumous-Modern) in the obituaries and farewells of Bolaño, is the daring task of this engaging book by a critic and scholar capable of reconnecting trends, styles and obsessions in a unique writer, Bolaño, capable of rewriting literature as a form in open progress. Bolaño, of course, wrote against death rewriting and overwriting its final page, not without signing (as Vallejo did in Paris) his last page as the first one. This book is not only clever and grounded, it is useful to see Bolaño not only as an informal artist but, more interesting, as a mature, complex, and sage artist of form and gusto."—Julio Ortega, Brown University

"Gutiérrez Mouat was one of the finest readers of Latin American literature. In Understanding Roberto Bolaño, his final work, we see him at the height of his critical powers, providing a map to an oeuvre that remains resistant to our cartographies. It reminds us why he will be dearly missed."—Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Washington University