A Garden of Monsters

The current issue of The Nation (March 31, 2008) devoted their entire Books and Arts section to reviewing the work of Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean born poet and writer who died in 2003 at the age of 50. Much of his work has an undertone of violence and bad deeds, without being explicitly brutal, owing much to his experiencing the events of Pinochet's coup in 1974. For a time, he was jailed as a political dissident but then freed by chance by a prison guard who happened to be a former high-school classmate. The articles are a great introduction to this literary force, and you can read them on-line at the link above.
This illustration is for the lead article titled "A Garden of Monsters", a review of his book "Nazi Literature In the Americas". The idea was to create an image that could be dissected into smaller parts and used for the other two articles as well. So this one got fun. The section of the library at night was used for the article "Windows Into the Night", and the portrait was isolated for the last article "Un Lio Bestial" (translated: a crazy confusion). This main image refers to Bolaño's own metaphor of Chile as a kind of corridor where bad things can happen. Here, his refuge is the "garden" of his library, and it is populated by imaginary military monsters and other nasty influences. In Bolaño's words: "A real writer's only nation is his library".
Editors: John Palattella and Christine Smallwood