Roberto Bolaño: Las lágrimas son el lugar de la esperanza

Abstract

Referring to a corpus which includes both novel and short story, this article begins by situating Bolano in the history of contemporary Chilean narrative. We then offer a reading that, by putting into play Don Quijote, by Cervantes, cited by Los detectives salvajes, proposes a narrative world governed by the end of the adventure, associated in turn with the end of a utopia, and given over to a present, to a here and now, as time and space, whose horizon seems nothing more than its own repetition. But even when the characters, as they run into the mutilating limits of their world, cry, the reading of Bolano that we offer points towards realizing, specifically right there, in the tears of the characters, the site of hope.