This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flaneur – a figure who mingles with crowds and street scenes but also observes and documents the sights from a distance – captures well the early life of John Kennedy Toole and the character of Ignatius Reilly at the center of his famous novel. Ignatius is modeled upon a colleague of Toole’s at a small college in Lafayette, Louisiana, a scholar of Medieval culture and history who came from New Orleans. It also traces the novel’s publication history and extraordinary success in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as the tragic end to young novelist’s life by suicide.