Julien Sorel
France (fictional)
- Where in Bolaño
- Between Parentheses, the closing Mónica Maristain interview — "Julien Sorel, our father"; the Proust questionnaire, where he is named favorite fictional hero; The Savage Detectives II, a witness likening Belano to him
- Why read them
- Stendhal's carpenter's son with Napoleon hidden under the mattress (Le Rouge et le Noir, 1830): provincial ambition, borrowed seminary Latin, a pistol shot in church, the guillotine. Bolaño named him his favorite hero in fiction and, only half-joking, the father of his whole generation — which tells you most of what Belano is doing in Barcelona.