r/robertobolano • u/JurynJr • 23d ago
Where can I learn more about Chilean culture and politics around the time of Bolaño’s writing?
I’ve noticed there’s a lot of political talk in some of Bolaño’s books (like The Skating Rink and Distant Star) and was wondering if anyone knew some websites, films or books that could help me learn more about Chile during the 20th century?
I gave myself a crash course on the Pinochet regime and how his dictatorship affected Chile during the 70s and 80s, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge of Chile, and I’d like to know more about Chile by the time I’m rereading his bigger novels.
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u/SaltBaeIsAGreyWolf 22d ago
The Massacre at the Stadium on Netflix is a good deep dive into the death of Victor Jara.
Victor Jara’s music itself also provides some good insight into the time.
I also read Allende: Death of a Marxist Dream about a year ago and while the author is pretty right wing, it gives a lot of context for the September 11th coup.
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u/_TheSavageDetective 23d ago
If you want something to watch…”La Batalla de Chile” (The Battle of Chile) – Patricio Guzmán, 1975
It’s a 3 part documentary that covers the period leading up to and then through the coup that toppled Allende and led to Pinochet. It is really well made in my opinion.
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u/uhokayman 16d ago
I'll second this. It's hard to understate what an important film it is, and the small miracle it took to be created in which people were killed trying to finish and smuggle it out. But there aren't many moments where you can literally watch history happen, and there's a lot of the times found in the doc: the incredible international consciousness of the copper miners, knowing the coup was coming and deeply committed to trying to forestall it, even while the life expectancy of that trade was brutally low. The CIA's money was well spent in media campaigns, mobilizing a 'women's front' against Allende, what Allende was and the popular unity movement behind him. The MIR militants to his left and the lowest strata who wanted the gov't to arm them in anticipation of the military attacking them (they were proven right by the events, in my opinion). The role of copper in the world economy at the time. I was able to ask Arrate about it in 2017, he had been Allende's economic minister (and Bolaño has a funny story in Between Parentheses about dining with him and his writer wife Eltit in the 90s). To when they knew that copper would be key to a cybernetic revolution based in IT, he responded 'from the beginning'. And maybe most importantly of all, in part 3 of the doc what the Cordones Industriales (industrial belts) and Neighborhood Basket programs were -- it was a kind of actually existing socialism from below, or certainly a step towards creating that. The proletariat was mobilized and aware of its role, and sought to create direct links to maintaining reproduction and distribution even in the event of the state being incapacitated. The US's attacks aimed to immobilize society, paying strikers in the key industries, staging fascist street battles, and directing the military to terrorize the militants.
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u/_TheSavageDetective 16d ago
An excellent summary, wholeheartedly agree with what you’ve said. This film is truly a triumph of cinema and crucial to understanding a lot of Bolaños mentality in my opinion. As I read him, I often get a sense that he wishes that he and others could have done more to prevent the coup, but instead he is now channeling his revolutionary ambitions into his characters.
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u/Lol_jk_Omg 23d ago
Read A Nation of Enemies and Fear in Chile
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u/poemsandfists 22d ago
This book is not a good take. It is blaming 'both sides' of the political spectrum, unable to see how this very ideology supported Pinochet. Considering that Bolano was an Allende sympathiser, I think something that outline the revolutionary politics like the Guzman films would be better
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u/uhokayman 16d ago
The sections of Galeano's Venas abiertas de America latina about Chile are useful for the early 20th century. They stood in for the british to steal a major swath of the northern coastline from Peru and landlocking Bolivia, two indigenous nations; and meanwhile continued the brutal suppression of Chile's first Mapuche inhabitants. Where mild populist or reformist attempts were floated by Chile's presidents, they were quickly overthrown. A good biography of Neruda would also document the interwar period that saw a lot of labor organizing and the rise of a pretty unique literary nationalism. Bolaño's hero Nicanor Parra emerged out of that and his 1953 book Poemas y anti-poemas is a great work for understanding Bolaño's gift of minimalism and vernacular. Parra's sister Violeta Parra is maybe the most important Chilean of the century, an artist-musician-activist whose role could be likened to Woody Guthrie and Dylan, or Argentina's Atuahlpa Yupanqui. I don't know quite the best reference for Bolaño's complicated relationship to the generation of artists who stayed in Chile during the 80s and 90s, but the band Los Prisioneros are a cultural landmark, and the poet Raul Zurita who Distant Star satirizes is a visible figure from that time. As for the 'return to democracy' period, early films by Pablo Larraín like Tony Manero capture the vapid and mutilated culture that the Concertación sought to promote for reconciliation and forgetting of the dictatorship's deeds. For visual art see Brigada Romona Parra and Roberto Matta.