One thing I love about Bolaño's work that I feel is missing from most modern literary writing is the sheer amount of *texture*. He worked in Europe as a dishwasher, campground custodian, dockworker, grape picker, bellhop, and garbage collector, and was practically a vagabond for a couple of decades. And this was after being arrested in Chile for political agitation too. His books are full of a thicket of real details that compress a dense amount of experience. Same with Tolstoy (fought in a war, aristocratic / society life, etc.) or Joyce's Ulysses which is just packed full of details of Dublin life. If your whole life is just suburb -> college -> writer it's pretty hard to make something great. Taste results from a lot of hard-to-get, 'thick' inputs gathered from different contexts. This is true in lots of fields, e.g. I tend to discount statements about job loss / 'fake jobs' from people who haven't actually worked in real-world settings or who've spent their whole life in the tech industry in California. Reality is full of surprising details.

@brunellaism It doesn't mean you have to have been a drug addict or worked odd jobs or whatever. I've just read a lot of Knausgaard and much of it just boring suburban Swedish/Norwegian life which he observes very minutely. But he has experienced a lot within that -- marriage, divorce etc.

@brunellaism More generally as life gets more virtual and it becomes easier and easier to live through a screen I expect writing to get correspondingly thinner and I do believe we have seen that over the last two decades.