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3.5
Last Evenings on Earth
ByPublisher Description
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid.In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolaño writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died."
Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.
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3.5
“The more I read of Bolaño, the more. I’m starting to love his style. It’s quite straightforward and doesn’t strain the cranial vessels, but still feels rewarding to read. I liked every story in Last Evenings on Earth, hard to stay my favorite though, The Grub and Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva are probably the first ones I’d go back to. Each story doesn’t quite have much of a resoluteness ending, they all end flat, which I actually do like about them. Often, I was left wondering what type of meaning should I draw from them? Which, in reality, I probably shouldn’t be thinking, while reading most of them. Bolaño gives these short stories a personal touched to them. They all feel like they could be from some Journal entry, each possessing the human flaw of our imperfect memory, my inserting, missing details or admitting to bits of forgetfulness, as if they are beening told by an old friend of yours.”
About Roberto Bolaño
Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
Other books by Roberto Bolaño
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