Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño Page B

him,
except perhaps Florencio Capó, who lived far away, and whose friendship had been
sorely tried by the cover of
Twelve
. In Cauquenes, two stationery
stores displayed the book for a month. Then they returned the copies to the
author.
    Stubbornly, González went on writing and drawing. In 1959 he sent the
manuscript of a novel to two publishers in Santiago. Both rejected it. In a
letter to Capó he refers to the novel as his scientific work, a compendium of
his scientific knowledge, which he will bequeath to posterity, although it was
no secret that he knew next to nothing about physics, astrophysics, chemistry,
biology or astronomy. When he was transferred to a village near Valdivia, his
health, which had been delicate at the best of times, deteriorated sharply. In
June 1961, he died in the Valdivia Provincial Hospital at the age of forty. He
was buried in a common grave.
    Many years later, thanks to the efforts of Ezequiel Arancibia and Juan
Herring Lazo, who had read González’s contribution to
Iron Heart
,
scholarly research into the poet’s work began in earnest. Luckily, most of his
papers had been kept, first by his widow, then by one of his daughters. And in
1976, Florencio Capó entrusted the scholars with the letters he had received
from his old friend.
    The first volume of the
Complete Poems
(350 pages), edited
and annotated by Arancibia, appeared in 1975.
    The second and final volume (480 pages) followed in 1977. It included
González’s overall plan for his works, sketched out in note form back in 1945,
and a great many drawings, which were highly original in a number of respects,
and whose function was to help the author himself to understand, as he put it,
the “avalanche of novel revelations troubling my soul.”
    In 1980,
The Advocate of Cruelty
was published, with the
strange dedication: “To my Italian friend, the unknown soldier, the laughing
victim.” The novel is 150 pages long, and elicits a certain wariness on the part
of the reader. It makes no concessions to fashion (although exiled as he was in
Maule, González can hardly have been aware of the literary fashions of his day),
or to the reader, or to the author himself. Cold, but spellbound and
spellbinding, as Arancibia writes in his preface.
    In 1982, a slim, ninety-page volume containing his entire
correspondence concluded the series of posthumous publications. It contains the
letters he wrote to his fiancée, to his friend Capó (which account for the
greater part of the book), to magazine editors, colleagues, and officials in the
Ministry of Education. The letters reveal little about his work, but a great
deal about the suffering he had to endure.
    Today, thanks to the enterprising promoters and editors of the
Southern Hemisphere Review
, two streets bear the name of Pedro
González Carrera, one in a far-flung suburb of Cauquenes, the other near a
treeless square in the northern part of Valvidia. Few people know whom they
commemorate.

A NDRÉS C EPEDA C EPEDA
known as
The Page
    Arequipa, 1940–Arequipa, 1986
    T he first literary
ventures of Andrés Cepeda Cepeda were marked by the beneficent influence of
Marcos Ricardo Alarcón Chamiso, a local poet and musician with whom he used to
spend afternoons jointly composing poems in a restaurant called La Góndola
Andina, in his hometown of Arequipa. In 1960 he published a slim volume entitled
The Destiny of Pizarro Street
, whose subtitle,
The Infinite
Doors
, suggests a series of Pizarro Streets, scattered throughout the
continent, which, once discovered (although as a rule they remain hidden) have
the power to provide a new framework for
American perception
, in which
will
and
dream
shall blend in a new vision of reality—an
American awakening
. The thirteen poems of
The Destiny of
Pizarro Street
, composed in rather uncertain hendecasyllabics, failed
to attract critical attention: only Alarcón Chamiso reviewed the book, in the
Arequipa Herald
, praising its musicality above all, the