Last Evenings on Earth

The decision to pick up Roberto Bolano's collection of stories Last Evenings on Earth was based entirely on how cool the cover was (green text on black, out of focus picture of men in white formal jackets back-lit by a car's headlights, full of the promise of women, wine, and violence), its prominent position on the display table of a downtown bookstore, and, of course, that they were short stories - perfect for subway reading. Having picked it up, it seems I can't avoid Bolano - see this Slate review of his novel and the companion NYT review.

Compared to most of the Norteamericano short story writers that I've come to know and love (Carver, O'Connor, Yates, Chaon, even Saunders), Bolano is cut from a different cloth. Starker, more abstract, falling much more from the overcoats of Kafka and Borges. The stories are interesting and resonant, but sketch a world in such a fundamentally different way. The language works as math or as poetry, at a level of symbol and abstraction that leaves me with the impression that the stories are less about people, real or fictional, than ideas. And those ideas are alien, too. Haunted by the political oppression of Chile, bearing the unique environmental and domestic textures of Mexico and Spain, populated by disconnected protagonists, fey, exiled, broken. The cumulative effect is disorienting, with only a handful of stories ("Anne Moore's Life," "Mauricio 'The Eye' Silva") offering clear purchase. The remaining stories offer a world, but through characters named B or X, using language that, in translation, seems to still require another act of decoding. But the world is still compelling and strange, and the stories offer transport clear into a foreign set of experiences. So, still worth a read.