Quote by Roberto Bolaño: “Evil is not banal. Evil requires effort. Most people just look away.”

Hannah Arendt argued that evil is ordinary. Bolaño disagrees: active cruelty takes real commitment. But the far more common failure is simply choosing not to see what is happening in front of you. Passivity and averted eyes are the most common forms of moral failure.

Bolaño published The Savage Detectives in 1998, a novel saturated with the trauma of Latin America's political violence and the fate of young poets and intellectuals caught up in revolutionary movements that failed or turned repressive. He wrote from Spain, having lived through Chile's military coup as a young man.

Chilean novelist and poet whose novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 made him one of the most celebrated and discussed writers of the late twentieth century. He lived most of his life in exile in Mexico and Spain, and his work is preoccupied with violence, failure, and the fate of writers under political repression.