Writing Travel: The Work of Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer (Iberian and Latin American Studies: The Arts, Literature, and Identity)

190 Pages·2019·1.141 MB·English

by  Guadalupe Gerardi

Writing Travel
The Work of Roberto Bolaño
and Juan José Saer
Guadalupe Gerardi
Peter Lang
I B E R I A N A N D L AT I N A M E R I C A N S T U D I E S
T H E A R T S , L I T E R A T U R E A N D I D E N T I T Y
Writing Travel investigates the ways in which two major Latin American
authors, Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, engage with travel and space in
their literary work. Travel and space are structures of representation within
which cultural traditions are interrogated, reassessed and reformulated
and therefore fundamental to the understanding of the critical fabric of
the texts themselves. The book enquires into the politics of representation
in Bolaño’s and Saer’s work and the cultural and ideological implications
at stake in ‘writing travel’. Writing Travel comprises the first scholarly study
of the work of Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, with a focus on the
thematic and formal representation of travel and space in their literature.
It is an important contribution to the existing knowledge on the novels of
the two authors, examining key and understudied aspects of their work.
Dr Guadalupe Gerardi is a Lecturer in Hispanic American Literature at the
University of Oxford.
www.peterlang.com
Writing Travel
Iberian and Latin American Studies:
The Arts, Literature and Identity
10
Volume
Edited by Professor Francis Lough
Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Guadalupe Gerardi
Writing Travel
The Work of Roberto Bolaño and
Juan José Saer
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Cover image: An Aerial Panorama of Sonora, Mexico, © 2017 Derrick Neill, used
under licence from Adobe Stock.
issn 1662-1794
isbn 978-3-0343-2215-7 (print) • isbn 978-1-78874-216-0 (ePDF)
isbn 978-1-78874-217-7 (ePub) • isbn 978-1-78874-218-4 (mobi)
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2019
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
[email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the
permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
A mi familia, compañeros de viaje

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Desert Landscapes: A Travelling Dialogue with the Nation in
Juan José Saer’s Las nubes 11
Chapter 2
Stray Journeys: Travel in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes 37
Chapter 3
Juan José Saer’s El entenado and the Failures of the Conquest 67
Chapter 4
Hidden in a Desert Cave: Reading and Disclosure in
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 93
Chapter 5
The Event of Literature: A Reading of the Desert and Migration
in Juan José Saer’s La ocasión 131
Conclusion 155
Bibliography 159
Index 173