west london tales 4

Bolaño.

This is how it happened. The whole Christmas period had been a wash-out. The misery of a relationship ending. The absence of family. A nagging dwindling of funds. The near-mortal collapse of the computer. And then flu, which arrived as though recognising a body it was more than welcome to take possession of, as that body had nothing better to do than retch and shrivel and hack and gaze out at the Westway or curl up in bed.

The one consequence of all this was that he rediscovered something that had gone missing for he couldn't remember how long. This was reading. Which can become an almost perverse pleasure. Perverse because it is a process that requires no assistance from the world. Perverse in so far as the ardent reader can walk through a bookshop and sense the pleasure that lurks within the walls.

That feeling came back to him one evening as he walked back from the computer repair man and decided to stop off in Whiteleys on his way home. He walked into a clothes shop selling shirts for £5, but the label said made in Cambodia and something inside balked at whatever deal this transaction might represent, even though in another year, at another Christmas, it would not have bothered him. He went next door into the bookshop which was still open after eight and the perverse charms of literature came back to haunt him.

The books he chose were The Strange Death of David Kelly, by Norman Baker, another New Orleans thriller by James Lee Burke, following on from the Tin Roof Blowdown he'd been given for Christmas, and a book called The Nubian Prince by a Spanish writer called Juan Bonilla. There was a clear rationale behind each purchase. However, it should be noted that as he contemplated the Bonilla, a reasonably slim paperback with hints of Sudan, he'd also looked at a large hardback, out of his price range, which sat next to it, called The Savage Detectives, published by an apparently Mexican author he'd never heard of.

Five days later he'd read all the books and as much as he could manage of David Peace's GB84. In between the time spent sitting in bed coughing, sweating, reading, he'd been to Hereford and back. Before going away for New Year, he'd collected his computer which now seemed to be working.

Only it wasn't. As he realised on the morning of his return. The computer was stuck in L. Which meant the keyboard dementedly spewed out the letter L, even as it allowed the typist to try other letters. He took the laptop back late on the third evening of the new year to the Queensway computer market and as he walked homewards, he once again stopped off in the bookshop in Whiteleys.

This time he bought The Savage Detectives. He wasn't sure why the book exerted such a pull. The Nubian Prince had been something of a disappointment, and he knew he was succumbing to his Iberomania once more, but this book summoned him, demanding to be bought, and there was nothing he could do about it. The first week of the new year was another wash-out anyway. So why not spend it with a 500 page Mexican road movie epic by an author he'd never heard of.

And this is how Roberto Bolaño secured his latest victim, nailing him to the Aztec altar and nibbling at his heart over the course of four days. Saying (lying, of course) - you see, I wrote this just for you. I've painted the life you should have been leading. The one you dipped your toes in. I was out there, in Spain, the whole time, writing this stuff, whilst you were - what were you doing? Get on with it, Bolaño was saying to him. That's why you wandered into the bookshop. So that I could remind you of your responsibilities.

He googled Bolaño and learnt that this was the great dead hope of Hispanic literature. Someone he should have known about, only he lived on an island in the middle of nowhere where information seemed to be plentiful but of course it wasn't. The writer of lost poets heading towards desperate ends, or if not desperate, then forgotten, unexalted ends, barely a memory left of all the words they had spent so much care piecing together.

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