BROWSE Columns
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Last summer, posing as a reporter researching the afterlife of famous authors, I wrote to the Roberto Bolaño Estate. I wished to get a better understanding of the processes involved in the posthumous publication of Bolaño’s books, I explained. Were the texts that have been published since he died – Tres, The Third Reich, Cowboy Graves, etc – discovered extant or were they pieced together from various notebooks or manuscripts, or was it the case that they were assembled in some way but unfinished at the time of his death – like Georges Perec’s 53 Days – and had to be as it were “topped and tailed” in order to produce the semblance of a completed text.
I didn’t hear back from the Estate but a year or so later an intern who had since left the organisation wrote to me and asked if I was serious. I said I was and he wrote to ask if we could speak on the phone. He said it would be easier that way. It must have been the first or second week of July (Wimbledon was on the television) when my telephone rang and I first spoke to Raymond Castells. He was calling from Barcelona. His voice was difficult to make out due to the background noise, and I wondered if he was calling from a bar, or a crowded street, or a football match. He asked if I could call him back the following day at 9pm London time and gave me a number. Over the course of the next ten days, Raymond and I spoke on the phone for an hour every night.
Raymond Castells had worked as a receptionist at the Bolaño Estate. He welcomed agents, and took telephone calls. Occasionally, other writers showed up and he passed the time with them at the coffee machine. Once, he told me, Paul Auster was there. They talked about the differences between baseball and softball, which was popular in Spain at the time. Auster looked like the ghost of Franz Kafka, Castells said and for a moment I thought he was making fun of me. Other highlights included the appearance of the New York agent Andrew Wylie. He had large teeth, Castells said, and I wondered if that was why they called him The Jackal. So you didn’t have anything to do with the publication of the dead writer’s books, I said, with how they were assembled? Did he know if others had had a hand in writing the texts, adding lines, finishing paragraphs, reordering words? No, Castells said. He wasn’t involved in editorial decisions or negotiations with publishers. I told him I was tired and needed to go to bed. Castells said he understood, but if I was interested, he did know what the company was planning to publish next. He had been told of a forgotten text. Part memoir, part science fiction, it was a novel set in the year 2043, when Bolaño would have been 90 years old. The date is significant, Castells told me.
The next day it sounded like Castells had a cold. He apologised and explained he had overdone it the night before. Then he asked if I would like to know more about the novel. I said I would. The first thing to note, he said was that the novel was written in diary form. Castells’ theory was that each of the dates in the novel coincided with the final year of Bolaño’s life. The novel “begins” on July 16th and “ends” on July 15th (the date of Bolaño’s death). From what I understand, the diary, or its remains, is fractured, said Castells. But perhaps that is only natural for a diary. I heard it described as Kaleidoscopic, decentred, contradictory (it was both linear and non-linear for instance (it had a chronology that was also a non-chronology). The temporal structure of the diary was one that seemed to outrun itself. Timings are off, locations are out of joint. There is no clear narrative, no resolution, only a sense of foreboding and disappointment, of anti-climax.) The entries form a cluster of related stories whose form of assembly appears to be collapse, Castells said. The only consistent element is the precise recording of each day’s weather. The point being, that he had no idea how it begins (except at a certain date in time or rainstorm) or how it would end (although he has a strong idea). For my benefit he could recall a few images, or a set of blanknesses, one that was all but too terrible to face. I almost put down the phone. What was the novel called, I asked? The Castle, said Castells.
The next day Castells explained that the diary entries record two parallel narratives. The first is Bolaño’s daily life, his visits to hospital, conversations with doctors, his companionship with other patients, the testimonies of nurses and orderlies – a kind of ethnography of sickness and death, Castells said.
The second narrative is made up of notes towards a novel he is working on with his (entirely fictional) assistant and enthusiast, Arturo Belano. The Estate kept this part of the text pretty secret, Castells told me. I know it is based on a series of failed government experiments that culminate in the crisis of 2043, the year the earth’s orbit is suddenly altered by an invasive computer intelligence and the planet is set on a crash course with the sun. I also know that Belano has returned from the revolutionary wars of Africa and is working as a foreign correspondent in the Americas. A kind of time agent providing Bolaño in 2003 with reports from events in 2043 – dispatching memories of the (not too distant) future, you might say.
The following night Castells explained that his knowledge of the text was based on the few extracts he had read on the fax machine and snippets of conversation overheard in reception (near the coffee machine). On one evening however, he had ended up in a bar on Las Ramblas with the chief editor, who instantly recognised Castells and bought him a drink. The editor was intimidating, said Castells, but after a few drinks they found a way to speak freely enough. She had been editing a passage in the new (old) novel that she did not entirely like. Bolaño and Belano meet in the Barcelona zoo, she explains. The two men are birdlike. Imagine two old crows with coloured wings. They look at the wolves, which Bolaño wants to see. Then they look at the lions and the elephants, which remind Belano of Africa although none of the captive animals compare to the specimens he confronted in the river deltas of Botswana and The Congo. Looking for somewhere quiet to talk, they find themselves in the Nocturama, of all places, said the editor, rolling her eyes. In that dark space, time is in reverse, the day is dissolved, and the nocturnal lives of bush babies, owls and tree scorpions, bats, opossums and limas continue in ceaseless night. Belano reflects on the distortion of nature inflicted on these animals. Bolaño says, they seem happy enough. Belano laughs. Exactly, he says. Perhaps that is the point. We think we are here to look at them. In fact we have been sent as entertainment for the albino anteaters and adolescent night monkeys. Again the editor rolled her eyes. Then she ordered a round of drinks. If what I’ve seen is correct, says Belano. It is the world outside that is in reverse not the world in here. The editor snorts.
It turns out, Castells told me the following night, that these distortions of so-called natural processes are key to the plot (if there is one) of, The Castle. In the fake moonlight of the nocturama, where racoons scrubbed at their fruit hoping to find a way out of that hell, Belano, the editor tells Castells, describes a government experiment to create perpetual sunlight using satellites and giant space mirrors. The technology was first trialled in the far north and the far south of the planet where few people live and where the additional hour of sunlight at the height of summer might not be immediately perceived. Once proved possible, initial impetus was to provide illumination for resource extraction in remote geographical areas with long polar nights such as Siberia and Western Russia, allowing outdoor work to proceed round the clock (here the editor was quoting verbatim, rolling her eyes). The plan was to roll the experiment out to cities, beginning with Las Vegas, Cancún and Sun City (near Johannesburg) where twenty-four-hour street life was already part of the economy. The reduction in energy costs outweighing any environmental concerns. The overall objective of wall-to-wall sunlight, of course, the editor told Castells through gritted teeth, was to cancel sleep, to evacuate the world of dreams, to convert every waking moment into a productive unit of human expenditure. It was first trialled in 2000, with disastrous results and was quickly scrapped. However in 2030 a new version of the programme was launched. This time, instead of redirecting the sun’s rays from one side of the earth to the other, in order to eliminate night, a vast network of shields or screens was set up to do the opposite: to cancel out the day. Under what pretext? Bolaño wanted to know. Good question, said Belano. Any rational argument for doing such a thing would have to have a pretext, no? Well what was it, Castells wanted to know. To regenerate the earth’s ice, said the editor, crossing her eyes.
For ten years a secret shadow-land was maintained close to the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, Castells told me the following night. The shadow was fifty miles in diameter. It had some success in slowing the rate of ice-cap-decline but there were, as you might expect, the agent told Castells, certain side effects. For one thing nocturnal predators (not polar bears) began to use the shadow as an extended hunting ground. So bountiful were the dark fields filled with disoriented rodents and fish that the local ice-foxes, owls and orca began to fight among themselves accelerating certain evolutionary mutations, said the editor her eyes quite wide. There were reports for instance of killer wales developing articulated abdomens allowing them to thrust themselves across the penumbra consuming anything that stood in their way. At this point in our conversation I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the speaker. For several months, the satellites misalign without anyone noticing and the shadow is sent out of Antarctica and into the Magellan Strait where it falls over Dawson Island an ex-concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. The intensity of the darkness combined with chemical agents buried at the site spawns a troop of Nazi Zombies, or ex-detention camp guards, who ravage and then commandeer the killer-land-whales who had followed the darkness as it travelled north for over three hundred miles. That night I did put down the phone.
The following evening, hesitating before making the call, I apologised to Raymond Castells. He said he understood. It was a lot to take in. He said he wasn’t sure what order events take place in The Castle, and of course, he has only read passages found here and there but there is a second government experiment that overlaps, unintentionally, with the perverse probations of the Night Shield. This is the international protocol for landing decommissioned satellites and spacecraft in the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, or Point Nemo, he said. As the coordinates furthest from land in the Southern Pacific, Nemo was routinely used as a site for dumping spent satellites and other spacecraft. In a recent newspaper article (2024) Nemo was described as a spaceship cemetery. In 2031 the International Space Station was decommissioned as planned and crashed into Point Nemo. Unfortunately, the spacecraft contained a “light virus” – an intelligence or extra-terrestrial operating system that had travelled through data received by the space station’s telescopes and camera systems. This light virus was carried in particles of oxygen via oceanic currents to the Chilean archipelago close to Tierra del Fuego where Dawson Island is found. The virus passed into the mutant killer whales, which were then consumed in various ways by the Nazi Zombies. Worsening cosmic mutations take place with dire consequences for the rest of humanity. I’m not sure what else Raymond Castells had to say. I dropped the phone into a drawer and walked out into the rain.
I discovered today (July 4th 2024, sunshine, clear skies) after writing these notes (July 3rd 2024, grey, light rain) that a journalist had already contacted the Bolaño estate to enquire after the anxious afterlife (as he calls it) of Roberto Bolaño. The report was published on a website on July 17th 2023 (the date is significant, although the website doesn’t say so). The journalist had far greater success in tracking down the facts, corresponding with experts and joining the dots. Yet the reality, as always, remains unknown. One of the journalist’s correspondents tells him to read, Amulet (a novel by Bolaño). There you will find this passage:
Vladimir Mayakovksy shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101… For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033… Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045. Vicente Huidobro shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.
I added to the list (July 5th 2024, heavy rain): Roberto Bolaño will return as an airplane pilot in, Lightning Strike, a movie-download in 2099. The movie has no plot, and an infinite cast of characters. It is downloaded directly to the nervous system on the day you are born. Lightning Strike is programmed to run for a single human lifetime. Like seeing, hearing, feeling and touch, things come to us in a roundabout way. The next time I spoke to Raymond Castells I realised, with some horror, just how right I was.
Duncan White is the author of A Certain Slant of Light. White’s work has appeared in Hotel, Black Box Manifold, ETZ and the Journal of Visual Culture. He co-edited and co-authored the publication Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film (Tate Publishing, 2011). His recent work, ‘The Experimental Cinema of Georges Perec, or, A History of Dreams’ was included in The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024). ‘O-O-O or Interviews with the Dead’ appeared in Malarkey. ‘A Visit to Berlin – An essayistic aside on the work of Birgit and Wilhelm Hein’ was published in (Rehearsal https://tenementpress.com/Duncan-White). ‘Raymond Castells’ is extracted from a longer work called ‘Nowhere in Time.’
