In the Basement

In 2002, shortly before his death, Roberto Bolaño – always sentimental – surveyed the three central tendencies of Argentine literature after Borges. One was commercial and frankly bad: this was the ‘fiefdom of Osvaldo Soriano’ who wrote nostalgic, high sales pabulum about men in bars discussing football. Another current began with Roberto Arlt, self-taught and ambitious, but paranoid and dark: ‘the literature of doom has to exist, but if nothing else exists, it’s the end of literature’. Then there was a ‘secret current’. In the great house of Argentine literature, Bolaño insisted, there was ‘a little box on a shelf in the basement. A little cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you find inside is hell.’ The high priest of this infernal tradition was Osvaldo Lamborghini, who was born in Necochea, near Buenos Aires, in 1940, and died of a heart attack in exile aged 45.