Bolano and Heroin?

You might not have noticed it, but many Spanish-language bloggers are arguing that there's been a certain word creeping into Anglo-American Bolano discourse: heroin. It's left them baffled and somewhat bemused: why are these gringos all convinced Bolano was a junkie?

To my knowledge, the first Spanish-language blog to make this argument widely disseminated was Puente Aereo, which writes:

Iván Thays recogió la reseña, la comentó, la enlazó en su blog. Por otro lado, el administrador chileno de la bitácora Worms Inside, Antonio Díaz Oliva, hizo notar una cosa: Lethem se refería, en algún pasaje de su reseña, a la adicción de Bolaño a la heroína.

Díaz Oliva se preguntó de qué adicción hablaba Lethem. Nadie había dicho nunca que Bolaño fuera adicto a la heroína, y esa confesión no se encuentra en las páginas del chileno.

Resident Bolano afficionado Garth Risk Hallberg picked it up over at The Millions:

It was Daniel Zalewski, writing in The New Yorker who gave the Bolaño legend its fullest and most ingenuous treatment. His article, "Vagabonds," included a particularly (one wants to say, Americanly) salacious detail: Bolaño was "addicted to heroin." This datum has since reappeared in articles written for The Nation and The New York Times, as well as the aforementioned N+1 piece, and, yes, The Millions. It has been used to explain everything from Bolaño's dental problems to the liver failure that killed him at age 50. But this month, the Spanish-language blog puente aéreo has suggested that at least this much of the Bolaño legend - the heroin - merits skepticism.

Now, Bolano's widow and the Spanish novelist (and close friend of Bolano) Enrique Vila-Matas have, independent of one another, denied it: Bolano did a wide assortment of drugs, but heroin was definitely not among them.

Vila-Matas has even gone so far as to denounce the rumor, somewhat in passing, in his El Pais column:

Dejo por unos días la lluviosa Nueva York y viajo a Saint-Nazaire, en la costa atlántica francesa, lo que me obliga a pasar primero por París y después por Nantes. Dejo un Nueva York eufórico por el triunfo de Obama, una ciudad ya con tempestades de otoño y donde empieza a despedazarse el gran gigante de 2666, la novela de Bolaño que The New York Times acoge con gran entusiasmo y con una absurda errata biográfica que podría haber sido evitada: le adjudican a Bolaño un pasado heroinómano al decir que murió en España en 2003, “de enfermedad del hígado atribuible al uso de la heroína en años anteriores”.

As far as I'm concerned, the statements from Bolano's widow and Vila-Matas are good enough to kill the rumor.