Parallels: Roberto Bolaño's novel Nocturno de Chile (2000) and Hermann Broch's novel the Death of Virgil (1945)

• Autores: Gabriele Eckart
• Localización: Romance notes, ISSN 0035-7995, Vol. 60, Nº. 2, 2020, págs. 243-251
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study proposes to examine Roberto Bolaño's creative reception of Hermann Broch's novel. A parallel reading of both texts leaves no doubt that Bolaño was acquainted with the Austrian novel and reworked it creatively when writing his own novel Nocturno de Chile. The strongest similarities are the structure (on his deathbed, a writer looks back at his life, arguing with the imaginary figure of a boy who represents the writer himself when he was young) and the very critical discussion of the issue of aestheticism. However, while Broch takes his first-person narrator, Virgil, seriously, Bolaño parodies his first-person narrator, Urrutia Lacroix.