Por el Olvido

Por el olvido is a labyrinth. A labyrinth where friendship, death and love intersect. It is also a story about lost children searching for the way home – or heading in the opposite direction – following the trail of breadcrumbs left for them by literature. And it is the unwritten book about one of those authors they devour, Roberto Bolaño, and about how his poetry and novels take us to a place far beyond our starting point. A place from which we will surely never return, because there are paths which, once taken, cannot be retraced: the death of a friend, a visit to hell, tracking down some missing poets, or searching, as Bolaño himself put it, for lost youth and love.

‘It was inevitable that I’d end up doing something with Paula Bonet; it was just a matter of time. When I say “something”, it’s because it could have been anything: moving to Chile, leaving everything behind and devoting ourselves solely to painting pictures that nobody would ever buy, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the night and never being found. But in the end we’ve written a book, a book that I started and then never wanted to finish; how naive of me: my intuition knew better than I did that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to finish it, I was just waiting for my travelling companion to do so. Then Paula turned up. It all happened very quickly: poets, postcards, trips, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, bottles of wine, a remote spot on the Catalan coast, more poets, more bottles of wine, new boyfriends, old boyfriends, lovers and, in between, almost without realising it, Por el olvido. But, as I was saying, we put this book together just as we might have done anything else: adopting a child (no, better still, a girl), reading the complete works of Borges, catching a train that’s about to leave, or finding love in the most unexpected place and at the most unexpected moment.”

Aitor Saraiba