The Pastiche of Roberto Bolaño, Author of Fictions

Abstract

After reading the fictional biography of “Ramírez Hoffman, o infame”, belonging to the work A literatura nazista na América (2019), we examined the presence of similar copies of this text in the pastiche rewriting of Estrela distante (2009). Bolaño, upon resuming the last chapter of his third book, he ends up doing, in the manner of Pierre Menard, autor de Quixote, by Borges (2007), a pamlipsest based on the appropriation of Hoffman’s biographical narrative. Through the repetition of similarities, which highlights the singularities of unique historical events, in Estrela distante, in our view, the pastiche highlights repetitions through differences by creating a supplement to Derridean writing. Finally, Bolaño’s pastiche is full of references to “ghosts” and imaginary books by authors who, together with the author/narrator, they remember traumas from the most violent dictatorship in the Southern Cone of the 1970s.