To pedal, to rock, to grow and to remember: Ruido, of Álvaro Bisama

Abstract

Alvar Bisama's Ruido (2012) is a novel that reads itself as the chronicle of a story publicly known in Chile, that of the "seer" from Villa Alemana, and as the novel of a generation, that of the young people who grew up in that place during the eighties and under Pinochet's dictatorship. Without denaying their validity, this article avoids both readings, and aproches Ruido instead as an autobiographical and poetic novel, about the coming of age of the writer and the fugacity of time, and for which the poet Enrique Lihn is the tutelary figure.