In his heart, Leprince has finally accepted his lot as a bad writer, but he has also come to understand and accept that good writers need bad writers if only to serve as readers and stewards.
–This sentence comes from “Henri Simon Leprince,” the second of fourteen short stories in the collection Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano. Leprince is himself a bad poet and writer who saves the lives of many other literati in France during World War II.
Bolano is obsessed with people who want to make it as great poets and writers but end up failing spectacularly. There are some exceptions in his work, but none of those happen to be characters with their own voices. Many go from the hopefulness of youth to the melancholy of middle age, especially in his novel The Savage Detectives.
And yet I can sympathize with the statement above in that, as someone who would also like to try his hand at creative writing some time in the future, I feel capable of critiquing the work of those authors whose works I read for the simple fact that I care enough to do so, because I see literature as something to which I can contribute if not as a writer, then at least as a discerning reader. So the reading continues, if not written words on a page from a pen in my hand.
