This was the year of the dead novelist, with twoposthumous bestsellersIn the delightful Spanish novel Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, a hunchbacked clerk ponders on the writers who have put down their pens, who have just refused to publish — the J.D. Salingers of the world who have retreated to a home in Cornish with a No Trespassing sign put up on the lawns. But then there are writers who refuse to stop publishing, who leave manuscripts — like wills — to be retrieved from their desks after their deaths to be turned into bestsellers. And the year 2008 saw two novelists rising from the dead in a trail of publishing glory — Vila-Mates’ close friend and the maverick Chilean Roberto Bolano, and the librarian from West Virginia Mary Ann Shaffer. They are not content to rest in peace, but the fervour around bestsellers will most certainly do.His novel, a 900-odd-page ambitious work that critics say gleams in its darkness, is the toast of the literati, with Time calling it the book of the year and Bolanomania infecting the English-speaking world; hers, a poignant debut novel on World War II in old-fashioned, epistolary form, is the surprise hit, the tome of the month in book clubs. And the titles of these posthumous bestsellers are as different as they come: if the Latin American eschews letters in 2666; Shaffer, who wrote her novel goaded by her book club, packs it all in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. That would have been enough to make Bolano suck on his cigar in mild amusement. Five years ago, at the age of 50, Bolano died while waiting for a liver transplant, but Latin Americans know something about resurrection, know how to haunt, and he knowingly left his life to be bookended by 2666. Death infests that book, as it talks about the serial murders in the fictitious city of Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border. The five-part book, published in Spanish in 2004, has been translated into English by Natasha Wimmer — and will hit Indian stores early next year. Shaffer’s is not the apocalyptic world of Bolano’s. And her wish was modest: to write a book that someone would like enough to publish. The American, who flew to Guernsey on a visit to London in the 1970s, got stranded in the fog and reportedly ended up reading all the books on the shop at the Guernsey airport. Her website says how her health failed during the last stages of writing the book on the German occupation of the islands and asked her niece Annie Barrows to help her finish it. Shaffer died in February 2008, aged 74, after completing the book and sending it to publishers — but before seeing it hit the bestseller list, week after week after week.After Bolano died, Isabel Allende tartly commented, “Death does not make you a nicer person.” Bolano, who infamously called her a scribbler, might have guffawed from the grave, but these days even death cannot stop the sales figures.
