Roberto Bolaño - The Caracas Speech
Click the picture above to read “The first complete English translation of the Chilean novelist’s 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize”.
Via Triple Canopy.
“In 1999, four years before his death, Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño won the highly prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize for his novel The Savage Detectives. “The Caracas Speech” is his acceptance of that prize. Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) was a prominent Venezuelan novelist and politician. The prize bearing his name has been awarded by the Venezuelan government since 1964 and honors the author of the year’s best novel written in Spanish.
Doña Bárbara, Cantaclaro, Canaima, and Pobre Negro are all novels by Gallegos. Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra and Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Casa Verde are previous recipients of the prize. The “Florid Wars” of precolonial Mesoamerica were conflicts organized for the express purpose of capturing prisoners for ritual sacrifice.”