While two of my favourite authors only received wide readership after their deaths, Philip K Dick and Roberto Bolano’s fiction couldn’t be more different, and, I believe, they deserve all the acclaim they have received.
I have long been a fan of these men and believe that while their lives were very different, they mirror one another in a number of ways.
Bolano was born on April 28, 1953, in Santiago, Chile, to a truck driver and a teacher.
His family moved to Mexico City when he was still a child.
While living in Mexico as a young adult, Bolano became involved in left-wing politics and started writing poetry.
He briefly returned to Chile to join the Democratic Socialist Government of Salvador Allende.
After Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973, Bolano was considered a terrorist and served eight days in prison.
His fiction centres around couch-hopping poets who possess a vision and belief of poetry that borders on the religious.
They are revolutionaries, drifters, outcasts and bibliophiles whose unwavering commitment to poetry and art comes back to destroy them in the end.
He was widely admired as a poet in his native Chile during his lifetime, but had to start writing novels in order to support his family.
Bolano’s novels never quite found an audience during his lifetime and he lived in poverty.
His first novel, By Night in Chile, which is my favourite, is considered by many to be a classic.
This was followed by a number of slim novels.
He is best known for The Savage Detectives and 2 666, two massive novels now considered contemporary masterpieces.
He died in 2003 of liver failure and, at the time, was racing against time to finish 2 666 which, although it clocks in at over 1 100 pages, remains unfinished according to him.
He is widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist of his lifetime.
In many ways, Bolano’s fiction and its characters were a reflection of his life – one fraught with poverty, a yearning for something greater than himself, drifting from place to place looking to fit in, and most importantly, the pursuit of great art.
Dick was a writer of strange science fiction about parallel worlds and hallucinatory drugs that lifted the veil of reality.
His fiction questioned reality and our perception of it.
His worlds were often Orwellian, where every aspect of our lives are being monitored, our every movement and word spoken recorded by either the government or divine beings.
Like the characters in Bolano’s novels, Dick’s stories centre around fringe characters, delinquents and junkies who are thrown into circumstances where their lives are thrown upside down and they are forced to take drastic actions to save themselves, their friends and loved ones.
Dick wrote over 50 novels and more than 200 short stories in his lifetime.
He was also arrested many times in his life and was, according to him, constantly monitored by the US government.
During his lifetime he was considered a second rate writer and struggled to make ends meet, but now he seems fiercely contemporary and more important than ever.
His novels have been made into films, including Blade Runner, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly.
Although they wrote very different fiction, they wrote with great heart about the importance of love and life and I believe it is our duty to cherish and spread the word of their great works.
