NP - Roberto Bolaño

[David Morris]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/17/fiction-roberto-bolano-2666-chile

Even so, he was not in good health by the time he acquired a fixed
address, a Spanish wife and a couple of infant children. Fatherhood
made him start writing prose seriously in an effort to support his
family, and after learning in the early 90s that he had a problem with
his liver, he holed up in his home on the Costa Brava and started
turning out books at an extraordinary rate. In 1995, a novel he'd
submitted caught the eye of Jorge Herralde, the founder of Anagrama,
Spain's leading publishing house. Three years later, Bolaño was
famous. (In the US and UK, similarly, his writing has made its way
from small imprints to heavyweight corporate publishing outfits.) He
had eight novels and three story collections in print when the wait
for a liver transplant finally killed him, and was known to have been
working on a colossal magnum opus, 2666, for years. In lectures,
articles and interviews, he had also laid out his combative views on
the state of world literature, saving his most withering lines for
García Márquez's imitators, who'd filled the 80s, he said, with "a
magical realism written for the consumption of zombies".