Bolano's Meditations on Short-term friendships

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	• Last Evenings on Earth Roberto Bolano Harvill Secker, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a literary stud

nobody writes likes this guy. the prose is delicious, hypnotic. Bolano makes you glad you can read. check out his work, including the two presently translated novels (they're both incredible); savor the language; be thankful for Chris Andrews, his amazing translator.

Atmospheric and melancholy stories of exile

This is an evocative and haunting collection of short stories. Overall, the mood is bleak and melancholy and the world is rather pointless -- all of which is understandable given Bolano's life as an exile from Chile. Indeed, most of the stories are set in "exile", in the sense that they occur in countries (for example, Spain or Mexico) other than the narrator's own. Many are told in the first-person and the reader is encouraged in various ways to think of the first-person narrator as Bolano himself. Perhaps because the world of politics was foreclosed to them, Bolano's narrator(s) and characters busy themselves with their literary or cultural reputation(s) and careful and at times exasperatingly tedious examination of interpersonal relationships. There is little action and much discussion or introspection.

Several of the stories left me hanging, wishing for some sort of resolution. But that's life. It is also true that life continues beyond the point where a story would end; as Bolano remarks in one of the stories, "Days of 1978", "life is not as kind as literature." That is just one of the terse apercus or aphorisms sprinkled here and there. Another: "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." More generally, Bolano's writing is exceedingly simple and straightforward, yet whatever he depicts is fuzzy, slightly out of focus, and hence uncertain.

I have not read much modern Latin American fiction beyond Borges and Garcia Marquez, so I can't begin to place Bolano within that category. He does remind me somewhat of Borges, but not of Garcia Marquez. Other modern story-tellers of whom I am reminded, however, include Camus, Kafka, and Fellini, in that a certain mystery and unease pervades everything. I hesitate to stamp this collection "great literature", but it certainly is worth reading and for me it is good enough to seek out and read one of Bolano's novels.

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Bolano's Meditations on Short-term friendships

Sensini, the literary mentor in this collection's first story, warns Arturo Belano (the novelist's anti-mainstream alter-go) that "The little world of letters is terrible as well as ridiculous." Roberto Bolano's life story, with its sudden headhrush of fame and recognition, proves this point. Neglected for most of life, heralded as a supreme genius in his dying days, the fickle sensibilities of aestheticians are now claiming a son whom they, for so long, orphaned.

The positive effect of all this is that non-Spanish readers can now enjoy a wide selection of Bolano's writings. _The Savage Detectives_ has certainly now gotten its fair take . . . but what of Bolano's other writings, his short fiction, which also work with his technique of 'infrarealism': memoir combined surrealism, or something like that.

This collection, while perhaps not giving the fullest single view of Bolano's stylistics, none the less pleases throughout for many reasons. Far sparser, and far more restrained than 'The Savage Detectives', this book might be called 'ode to marginalia'. A recurrent figure is the unsuccessful writer, no doubt a reflection of Bolano's own years of rejection. Dark, witty, but always earnest, this collection provides character vignettes which do not depend on high phrases or intricate psychoanalysis for their texture. Bolano reveals tensions, contradictions, and regret through understatement, rather than exposure, and these stories thrill by disappointing . . . conclusions are never conclusive, and discoveries are never certain. The successive tales all float about in a fog of open-ended indecision, which is as charming as it is maddening. In doing so, Bolano brings a uniquely felt point of view to the ways in which people try, and fail, to ensure their own immortality.

This collection does not attempt the cosmological anarchy of '2666' or 'The Savage Detectives', but its brevity and incisions of calm fury make for very provocative reading. There's really not much like this to be found in English language writing.

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bolano wrote great stories

The title of this review sums it up fairly succinctly. There are no two ways about it; Roberto Bolano wrote really compelling short stories. Familiar elements crop up in each story: poor, unsuccessful, mostly exiled writers, looking for something--sometimes old friends, other writers, family--generally being haunted by the violence which defined their lives. Despite the seeming homogeneity of subject matter, each story manages to compel. I suppose one must credit Bolano's poetic sensibility as well as Chris Andrews's translations which have helped us to experience the poetry in English.

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Very good

The common theme of this apparently autobiographical collection of short stories is exile. The narrator and many of the other characters are exiles from South America, particularly Chileans who fled after the fall of the Allende regime. The varied locations - Mexico, France, Spain - mirror Bolano's peripatectic life. The theme of exile extends beyond exile from country to a sense of alienation from others and general failure to form lasting and meaningful human bonds. Bolano's unornamented but precise prose and eye for telling detail prevents these stories from seeming overwrought or self-pitying. I would not read this book cover to cover quickly. The cumulative effect is likely to be dispiriting.

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