terrific Marcela Valdes on Bolaño as Critic:--

"Brave" may well be the adjective that recurs most often in Between Parentheses, and bravery was indeed something of an obsession for Bolaño. "The figure of bravery is multiple and changing," he wrote in the starkly titled "Bravery." "For my generation bravery is linked with Billy the Kid, who risked his life for money, and with Che Guevara, who risked his for generosity, with Rimbaud, who walked alone at night, and with Violeta Parra, who opened windows into the night." Soldiers and poets, he liked to believe, were the bravest people on earth. He once joked that if he had to rob a bank, he'd choose five "true poets" as his accomplices.

Of course, courage is hardly an unusual fascination for an author. Writers love to glorify the difficulties of their line of work. They speak of wrestling with ideas and facing down blank pages, of battling with ham-fisted editors and triumphing over tin-eared readers. What makes Bolaño's preoccupation rare is that he associated bravery with failure, not triumph. Why choose to rob a bank with five poets? "No one else in the world," he explained, "faces disaster with greater dignity and clarity..."