Roberto Bolaño

Cardinal and fixed take five of his ten planets each, and not one of the ten sits in a mutable sign. Fire and earth take three apiece, with two each in air and water. The Sun, Mars and Jupiter spread across twenty degrees of Taurus. The record is one line: Bolano was a Chilean novelist whose 2666 was published after his death.

No mutable planets at all is the fact to take from this chart. Mutable is the mode that revises, adapts and changes tack, and a chart holding five cardinal planets and five fixed ones with nothing mutable between them starts things and then holds them, with no middle setting. Mars sits conjunct Jupiter at three quarters of a degree, which is enormous energy: enterprise, physical confidence and an appetite for the large attempt, with the standing caution that judgement lags behind enthusiasm.

Saturn sits conjunct Neptune at four fifths of a degree, and that pairing is realistic idealism or else its collapse: giving form to something imagined, and equally the point at which an illusion meets the cost of maintaining it. Giving form to something imagined is a fair description of what a novelist does for a living, and it is also a slow contact shared by everybody born across those two years, so it describes a generation rather than a man. Mercury sits in hard contact with Uranus at under four fifths of a degree, thought jumping the rails: nervous tension, changing position abruptly, and being right in a way nobody has the context to follow. A writer whose book found its readers after he died is a tempting fit for that last phrase, and it is about reception rather than about him.

Venus sits in hard contact with the same Uranus at under two thirds of a degree, closeness and freedom colliding, and Venus itself was retrograde on the sixteenth degree of Aries. His Moon sits on the second degree of Scorpio at noon with Libra still possible, so it is left out, which costs this chart one of its six closest contacts and the tightest transit on the day he died. Venus, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Barcelona on 15 July 2003, at fifty. The transiting Sun stood in hard contact with his natal Saturn at just over a third of a degree that day and with his natal Neptune at four tenths, which is both halves of that fused pair at once. The Moon was full and ninety seven per cent lit.