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Last Evenings on Earth

by Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (Translator)

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 1,619 ratings · 217 reviews

"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolaño'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. Th...more

Paperback, 219 pages

Published April 30th 2007 by New Directions (first published May 1st 2006)

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Community Reviews

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May 07, 2012 Jenn(ifer) rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-shorts, gr-friends-recommend, you-should-read-this, 5-f-ing-stars, own

Hola señor. We meet again. I see you’ve cleaned up your act this time. I’m not going to lie, I missed the filth a bit in this one, but you’ve got enough grit to go around so I won’t fault you for it. Sigh.

Oh señor, why are all the good ones dead?

Bolaño gives us a glimpse into the life of the struggling artist with this collection of stories. Brilliantly, of course. “A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that’s not true: there are obvious...more

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Apr 10, 2008 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

1) viva susan sontag! bolaño is the 'it' writer of the moment - and my rebellious, contrarian, and bratty self wanted to hate him. or just not read him. then i caught sontag's seal of approval and knew i hadda dive head-first into the 'ol zeitgeist. lucky me.

2) these tales aren't about all that much, but, holyshit brother!, is there all that much there. most of 'em owe a debt to borges in their ultra-obsession with books, writers, & reading; a few actually follow the master's game of tracki...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Garima rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bolanic, short-stories, favorites

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Roberto Bolaño *sigh*

I’m always at loss of words whenever I try to explain how Bolaño’s writing makes me feel and most of the times I only manage to come up with clichés like I’m at loss of words. I read him for purely selfish purpose, whenever I just want to get lost in some unfamiliar land of story-telling by my imaginary friend ‘B’, B for Bo-la-ño.

Last Evenings on Earth is a...more

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Jul 01, 2010 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't care if Brazil beat the pants off of Chile today. The Chilean people are still winners to me!

Today I was thinking about the countries (damn them) who're still in the World Cup right now, and I realized I can't think of any Brazilian writers. The only Brazilian on my bookshelf is Paolo Friere, but he isn't a novelist.... I can't even name a single Uruguayan writer. Argentina of course has got some famous players, and is therefore an exception, but in general I think there's a trend of the...more I don't care if Brazil beat the pants off of Chile today. The Chilean people are still winners to me!

Today I was thinking about the countries (damn them) who're still in the World Cup right now, and I realized I can't think of any Brazilian writers. The only Brazilian on my bookshelf is Paolo Friere, but he isn't a novelist.... I can't even name a single Uruguayan writer. Argentina of course has got some famous players, and is therefore an exception, but in general I think there's a trend of the weaker literary traditions beating the more writerly countries in this round. I mean, can you name a Dutch writer? Maybe you can, but I can't (okay, maybe I can't name many Slovakians either, but don't let's dwell). A Ghanaian? Ha. Right. As if! Of course it makes sense if you think about it: if your nation's out playing sports, it's much less likely to be locked up in a room writing. This theory explains England's defeat, and France's implosion. Yes, yes, this is all just based on my biased familiarity/woeful ignorance of each nation's literature. Nonetheless, using this perhaps somewhat subjective criteria, I predict victory tomorrow for Paraguay and Portugal (never read Pessoa).

Anyway. I digress.

When I'm in a rut with my running, sometimes I'll read an exercise book in order to reignite an interest in what I've forgotten how to love. If I haven't been doing much in the kitchen, getting a new cookbook from the library sometimes inspires me to get back into making food again. And when I become cynical about literature, I've found that Bolaño can really help there. I know this sounds like some gnarly dialed-in blurby bookcover sputum, but this guy's just got a totally infectious hard-on for writers and writing and words and the potential and power of fiction that comes across to this bored reader like a steroid-laden bag of farmer's market groceries might for the lazy take-out munching runner. Which is to try and say, in my even more than usually ungraceful mixed-metaphored way, that reading Bolaño makes me want to do the equivalent of training for a summer half-marathon while assembling some complicated tagine with exotic ingredients and multiple steps. Like, these short stories make me want to quit my job and move to Spain and become a starving poet. Or at least, less extreme, to take fiction seriously again. It is really a relief to settle back into something you love, after a period of being estranged from it. These short stories aren't the greatest I've ever read, but they really make me remember how I love fiction. It's an excellent feeling, and now that the US has been eliminated, I've got plenty of time to read.(less)

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Dec 11, 2012 Ned Rifle rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: recommended-by-sontag

On Bolano in general

In the endless search for genuinely palatable vaguely contemporary literature, Bolano is an almost wholly nourishing find. My first exposure was 2666, which failed to fully convince until I began to talk about it, upon which discussion I realised that my quibbles pointed to their own solution. My main problem had been the rather too neat, for my tastes, ending of the first part on the one hand; on the other was the emptiness left from the lack of resolution elsewhere - not a...more On Bolano in general

In the endless search for genuinely palatable vaguely contemporary literature, Bolano is an almost wholly nourishing find. My first exposure was 2666, which failed to fully convince until I began to talk about it, upon which discussion I realised that my quibbles pointed to their own solution. My main problem had been the rather too neat, for my tastes, ending of the first part on the one hand; on the other was the emptiness left from the lack of resolution elsewhere - not a problem I often have with books - but once clearly expressed this shows itself to be a simple act of charity on Bolano's part. The comforting conclusion of that first part is all you will be allowed but, unlike most everything else in the book, it will never be eroded - a simple token of good faith.

Bolano can lead you into obsessing over every detail he gives you, feeling convinced that with a thorough enough examination of the facts (be they physical, emotional or other such facts) you will be able to fully understand. Of course, it's a foolish task and Bolano is too kind to pretend for too long. The abiding sadness that I tend to find myself filled with after one of these books is best expressed with the ceaseless and unanswered echoing of the end of The Savage Detectives. (view spoiler)

And now, very briefly (and indistinctly), This Book

As you would expect from a man who works in fragments, these short stories are excellent. The characters are often writers, or they are shells represented by letters as if Bolano had been waiting to name them but decided against it, retaining a certain honesty. The stories are aware that they are written, with comments such as "rereading what I have just written…" and there are the blurred lines of reality and semi-autobiography that appears elsewhere in his work. This sets in motion an endless battle for primacy between life and art, each consuming and nourishing the other – all possibly born from the years of little success?
Parallels have been made between Borges and Bolano, and Bolano frequently mentions the influence, but do not go here expecting the neatness of Borges who, however much he talked about the pleasure in heterogeneous elements, always has perfectly balanced stories that are fully satisfying despite raising many possible questions. Bolano gives you the story, but he also gives you more and sometimes he gives you less; everything is forever threatening to crack, metaphysical horrors lurk – or at least things are often experienced in the shadow of a lurking metaphysical horror.
The only genuine piece of information about this book that I would impart is that the film described by B in the book is a real film (Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky, and it’s an incredible film). I would be curious to know how that story reads without having seen it: does Bolano seem an even more impressive writer or does it fail to ring (an accidental pun, if you’ve read the book or seen the film) true?

My original Bolano point is well illustrated by this excerpt, during a phone conversation with a woman he has never met: “During those seconds or minutes B imagines her face. The image is vague but haunting.”

(view spoiler)
(less)

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Dec 26, 2008 Jesse rated it 5 of 5 stars

bolano is just flat out one of the best writers of the last fifty years. these stories compare to the nick adams stories except with strange hallucinogenic thoughts that course through the protagonist's brain. the stories follow b, who is most definitely arturo belano, bolano's alter ego who also shows up in "the savage detectives". the stories find him in spain, france, belgium, and mexico, landing in odd places for odd reasons, always with a desire to read and an inability to sleep. the storie...more

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Oct 27, 2008 lisa_emily rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: micromelancholy afficionados

Recommended to lisa_emily by: Gradylove

Shelves: tales

There are many reviews already, but I will put my small cents forth. This is my first Bolano book although I have read many reviews of his work and a few stories about his life. Gradylove swears by "The Savage Detectives" and a few adherents to the Bolano cult, it is a book that is definitely on my "to read" list. I had read the title story in the New Yorker, so I was prepared to take on this short story collection.

Bolano had called this collection the "melancholy folklore of exile" which is an...more

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Sep 15, 2007 Mateo rated it 3 of 5 stars

(See also my comments on Bolaño's Distant Star.)

Well, I don't know. I understand that Bolaño is considered one of the finest modern writers (that is, of the last quarter-century); Susan Sontag told us so. And I can see why: he's very smart, very literary, very inventive, and he does grapple with the big issues--in this case, the Pinochet years in Chile. He's also got a sly, subtle sense of humor that gets under your skin. And yet this book left me unsatisfied.

Bolaño is one of the newer writers--...more (See also my comments on Bolaño's Distant Star.)

Well, I don't know. I understand that Bolaño is considered one of the finest modern writers (that is, of the last quarter-century); Susan Sontag told us so. And I can see why: he's very smart, very literary, very inventive, and he does grapple with the big issues--in this case, the Pinochet years in Chile. He's also got a sly, subtle sense of humor that gets under your skin. And yet this book left me unsatisfied.

Bolaño is one of the newer writers--Sebald is another--who insists on writing of the ordinary; by mentioning atrocities and horrors in passing, mechanically, or, more likely, not mentioning them at all, he makes us all the more aware of them. Your neighbor has an elephant in the living room and never mentions it? You'll think a lot about that elephant. But it also means that much of the meaning of a story has to be teased out of events and facts that are otherwise insignificant or even boring, and this too often means I wind up with a story that means little to me. Bolaño is infinitely more clever and inventive than Sebald, so his narratives generally keep moving pretty well, but I don't always understand why I'm being told one fact and not another. (Besides, Hemingway perfected the trick of not talking about what he was talking about in "Big Two-Hearted River" and the Nick Adams stories, and that was about 75 years ago.)

This effect is grandly exacerbated by Bolaño's refusal to give his stories any meaningful ending. I don't mean a tidy ending that wraps up loose ends, I mean an ending that leaves the reader in some place significantly different from where he started, or even from 10 pages earlier. After a while I got tired of stories finishing with someone ordering wine or saying hello to someone else or brushing his teeth or whatever the hell it would be. I know it's very literary to leave stories dangling, and I also know that in real life stories end abruptly, without a clear resolution or movement, but this is literature. If I wanted non-fiction, I'd read non-fiction.

Finally, Bolaño seems limited stylistically; virtually everything I read of his reads the same way and concerns exiled Chilean poets obsessed with poetry. (Roberto Bolaño was an exiled Chilean poet obsessed with poetry.) Come to think of it, someone who writes almost solely about writers is someone who's going to really appeal to the literary and writing set. So this is the sort of book that you'll really like if you happen to be Susan Sontag.
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Jul 10, 2007 Jim Coughenour rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bleakfiction

Last Evenings on Earth was the first book I read by the late Roberto Bolaño, and it's still my favorite. (I really liked Distant Star, and I've started but not finished Amulet, By Night in Chile, and The Savage Detectives). Unlike those novels, Last Evenings is a collection of short stories.

For me, Bolaño's writing triggers some kind of endorphin. Reading him jazzes me up, has me floating a few inches above where I'm sitting — there's some kind of alchemy in his sentences that comes through even...more

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Aug 18, 2007 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: dead

In the title story, a father and son go on a trip to Acapulco. They eat iguana. They eat turtle eggs. The father drinks, gambles and goes after women. The son naps, swims, walks around in a daze and wonders about surrealist poet Gui Rosey, who went missing during World War II under suspicious circumstances. The story ends as the father is getting the family unit into a bar fight.

"The Eye" follows two Chilean exiles, a photographer and a writer, as their lives intersect over the course of 20 year...more

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Nov 22, 2007 jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: translation, shortstories, fiction

when he died in 2003, at the age of fifty, roberto bolaño was all but unknown anywhere north of the rio grande, yet is now acclaimed internationally and considered amongst the most eminent figures in latin american letters. chilean by birth, but living in exile throughout much of his life, bolaño had always been a dedicated writer, yet began publishing with increasing fervor in the mid-1990's. like much of his work, including the incomparable epic the savage detectives, last evenings on earth is...more

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Feb 21, 2008 Anina Ertel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction

HEY GUYS LOOK I'M WRITING A REVIEW
This was a delightful book of short stories. Someone recently turned me on to Roberto Bolano...he is good if you like Haruki Murakami and those types of Japanese authors with a spare style. Various characters get tipsy and galavant around Chile or Spain rather than Japan having awkward moments.

Seriously though, how do these people in these stories have all this time to be free spirits and all this money to buy sandwhices in seedy places ? Like, don't they have t...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Nick D rated it 4 of 5 stars

In "Last Evenings on Earth", Roberto Bolano takes up that most difficult of all things to convey--the life of unappreciated yet serious writers far from the spotlight, complete with their endless factionalizing, their uncertain friendships, and, most difficult of all to convey, their need to judge other obscure writers. Bolano's writers are exiles afoot, as he was, across Mexico, Spain and France, frequently Chileans who lost their country to Pinochet's coup. It's a peculiar gift, that of of Bol...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Ben Dutton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Roberto Bolaño’s reputation has, in the time since his death, rocketed. Two of his novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both previously reviewed on this blog) have been highly and justly praised. In the wake of such interest in his work, publishers have been quick to release his back catalogue, with works planned well into the next year, many of which will be translated into English for the first time, including unpublished manuscripts found in his private collections that his estate has seen...more Roberto Bolaño’s reputation has, in the time since his death, rocketed. Two of his novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both previously reviewed on this blog) have been highly and justly praised. In the wake of such interest in his work, publishers have been quick to release his back catalogue, with works planned well into the next year, many of which will be translated into English for the first time, including unpublished manuscripts found in his private collections that his estate has seen fit to release. This collection of fourteen short stories was the first of Bolaño’s works to be translated, by Chris Andrews, and as such must be seen as the beginning of the English-speaking world’s fascination with this author.

Last Evenings on Earth explore themes familiar from Bolaño’s two novels. The stories are about writers, poets mostly, who live in a strange mixture of European and South American (mostly Mexican, occasionally Chilean) milieu’s that represent something of Bolaño’s own life – his alter-ego, Arturo Belano from The Savage Detectives and probably the narrator of 2666, features in some of these stories, possibly more (some of the characters are referenced only by letters: both A and B appear). If the fascinations of his novels appears again in these stories, one should not think of them as lesser works or as first drafts of the novels to come – what we have here is an author working out his themes, hammering them, shaping them into focus, which is not to say these stories do not have the same focus of the novels, for they do, but that his work as a whole should be seen as a symphonic piece – 2666 takes its name from a story in another collection, and in its own way this collection feeds into The Savage Detectives. Bolaño’s work is inter-textual, there is richness here, richness not often found in other writers: it is no wonder Susan Sontag named Bolaño “The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.” I think with the success of this and other works, that reputation has spread to the English-speaking world.

The best of the stories in this collection revolve around encounters. The opening piece, Sensini, tells of a struggling short story writer who enters into a correspondence with a more successful and ruthless writer. The struggling writer is sent a photograph of the other, posing with his wife and daughter, and the struggling writer wonders about the daughter. Their encounter in the final pages of the story reverberates back through what has come. The title story, and a wonderful evocative piece about a teenage boy, obsessed with poets, on a road journey with his father and the sexual and spiritual awakening he experiences, an experience filtered through their encounters with a professional diver, a prostitute and each other. Some of the pieces here come across as quite conventional: Anne Moore’s Life is much too straightforward and seems too superficial in construction to control the depths that are simmering beneath its sheen; whilst others come across as more experimental, Bolaño is playing with form, as in Dance Card or A Literary Adventure, and such activity is rewarding for the reader. The first of these stories were published in 1997, just before he completed The Savage Detectives, and it is not hard to trace the lineage from these stories to that novel.

Taken as a whole the stories in Last Evenings on Earth are highly successful. There is a haunting but heady content to these stories gathered here, and reveal Bolaño a writer as equally comfortable with short fiction as he is with the longer form. Bolaño is sincerely a master-craftsman and this collection of short stories is, of the uninitiated, a wonderful first introduction to the writer, and for the person already intoxicated by Bolaño and his world, Last Evenings on Earth is a potent addition. It is such a shame that his evenings are gone.(less)

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Dec 10, 2011 Ajay R rated it 3 of 5 stars

Somewhere lost/ignored in the midst of Bolano's novels is his short story collection 'Last Evenings On Earth', one of the most melancholic book titles ever. As with the novels, the collection too touches upon the major themes of Bolano's works, writers, theirs works, struggling writers waiting for the publication of their works, the pain of getting out a literary magazine that is ready by minimal amount of people, the relationship between the critic/writer, between two writers, most of all being...more Somewhere lost/ignored in the midst of Bolano's novels is his short story collection 'Last Evenings On Earth', one of the most melancholic book titles ever. As with the novels, the collection too touches upon the major themes of Bolano's works, writers, theirs works, struggling writers waiting for the publication of their works, the pain of getting out a literary magazine that is ready by minimal amount of people, the relationship between the critic/writer, between two writers, most of all being young, restless writers who are in a hurry to remake the literary landscape, with the youthful assumption that they are going to rewrite the entire literary canon and the pain that comes with the realization that maybe one is not good enough. Undercurrent to all is the state of exile of most of the characters in these stories, who are displaced from the country of their birth.

The story 'A Literary Adventure' is about the relationship that develops between a budding writer (B) and an established writer/critic (A). The budding writer detests the critic and writes a novel in which he has a character which is a spoof of the critic. To his astonishment, the critic praises the novel to high heavens and also his next works. B becomes obsessed and almost paranoid with why A is praising his works. At the end of the story he reads a novel by 'A' and finds it to be good better than his own works. (Interesting to think about why this happens). The story ends on an intriguing note with B meeting A with the prospect to both reconciliation and violence. The story in someways has the resonance of a small part in 'Savage Detectives' where a writer challenges a critic to a duel just based on the assumption that the critic will savage his works. This is a story that is universal, after all the relationship between the two is at best an uneasy kind of truce and at worst a savage all out war.

'Henri Simon Leprince' is the story of Henri, a writer whose works have all been a failure in that they have not been recognized by the literary giants of France. Set in the period just before, during and after the occupation of France during World War II, Henri joins the partisan resistance group France and does some small work in helping the resistance. He does not join with the collaborators even if it would have meant more publications and visibility. He comes into contact with the same writers who ignored him earlier. But it does not do him any good as they tend to ignore him even then, treating him as a conduit as he takes them from once place to another. In fact they tend to see his participation in the resistance as a kind of reverse revenge by him for ignoring his works earlier in that they feel that Henri is trying to make them beholden to him. The war ends and Henri goes back to his old life, living in obscurity and finally he thinks that maybe he is indeed a bad writer. The story intrigued me on two counts, one on the actual reason as to why Henri joined the resistance and the sad but essential fact of separating the person's personal life from his works. Henri though he comes across as an essentially decent man, is doomed to obscurity because apparently the quality of his works is not up to the mark. It may be cruel but it's a way of life.

'Sensini' tells the relationship that develops between a young writer and more established one (Sensini) due to a writing competition in which both win. The established writer's advice to the younger one is not to persevere with writing, but to persevere with participating in writing competitions to get as much money as possible. Sensini comes across as a bounty hunter of literary prizes. What could have become a farce becomes a rather sad tale of a writer's attempt to make a living which is impossible to do with only publishing books and so has to resort to prize-hunting. This is again a story with an universal appeal.

'Mauricio The Eye Siva' was interesting to me mainly because the Mauricio (The Eye) travels to India and a lot of the story happens there. There is a description of a practice where young buys are dedicated to a deity for one year and are treated as an incarnation of the God. At the end of one year, they lose this privilege. They cannot go back to their parents and finally end up in brothels and are castrated. Now, I have heard about young girls being dedicated to a deity, but this was new to me. Any information on this would be appreciated.

Along with the stories in this vein, there are a few stories that deal with the non-writing part of the writers life. Perhaps, not surprisingly these are not as good as the parts that deal with the writing side, as Bolano seems to revel in the latter more. 'The Grub' is a story of the relationship that forms between an old man and a teen-aged student more interesting in books and movies than studies. The title story 'Last Evenings on Earth' is sort of self explanatory from the title and the first page of the story itself, but Bolano keeps stringing you along till the end. These set of stories are good, but their trajectory is one that can be guessed beforehand by readers.

It's a dicey thing to read a writers work when one is sort of obsessed with his entire body of works as it could give a distorted impression to the reader. You tend to feel that everything is good. Reading it after sometime could give a different picture. But it didn't happen to me with this work when I re-read it now after 3 years. Then as now, this is a book that I would readily recommend, but there is no single story which I would recommend separately. This is not a negative reaction, but I was not sure why I felt that way when I first read it, but now with the hindsight of reading some more of his works (particularly 'Nazi Literature in the Americas'), I have a thought as to why I feel so. When you read Bolano's novels (even his shorter ones) you can notice that the narration is driven by polyphonic voices which narrate various aspects of the novel and which in the end forms the 'Bolañoverse' as it is being referred to. This works perfectly well in novels, but the short story by its very nature and form is probably not suited to it. That's why I like the collection as a whole instead of any single story. Like 'Nazi Literature in the Americas' which is a collection about Nazi sympathizers/writers in Latin America where no single story stands out (it doesn't need to actually, the impact of the entire book is the whole point), this book too could be looked as vignettes from any writers life and much as I like it's title, some other thing like 'The Writers Lot - A Manual', or 'The exiled Life' could actually be better suited to it (after removing some stories which may not fall in this category). It is being said that if Borges had written novels, it would be like Bolono's which is fair enough considering the base material both handle and since we do not have any reference point for novels of Borges. But we cannot say the Bolano's short stories are like Borges outside of the fact that both reference real/imaginary books/writers. This is not a critique, but just an observation that Bolono's natural inclination seems to have been towards the novel always (as Borges was probably inclined towards the shorter stuff) and the short story was an afterthought, maybe when he could not fit these ideas into his novels.

Readers who are reading Bolano for the first time with this book may wonder about the fuss on his works, think of this book as an appetizer for the main course that are his novels. For those who have read his novels already, this collection is a dessert where you can assimilate his novels.(less)

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Apr 07, 2010 Graham rated it 3 of 5 stars

It kinda bums me out to only give this one three stars because I love everything else I've read by Bolano (though I've only gotten around to reviewing one). This collection of earlier short stories is fairly pedestrian by his standards though. The style is extremely dry and didactic, with many of the stories relying on a "____ did this. Then ____ did another thing in response. _____ felt sad" sort of feel. Far more telling than showing, which is a criticism based on my personal taste, but noneth...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Grady rated it 5 of 5 stars

'The little world of letters is terrible as well as ridiculous.'

What we know about the tremendous gifts of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (April 28, 1953 - July 15, 2003) is in many ways due to the excellent translations by Chris Andrews. Andrews began translating Bolaño into English before the word understood the importance of this much mourned novelist and poet. This particular work LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH is a series of short stories that are delivered in conversational style (the narrator is...more 'The little world of letters is terrible as well as ridiculous.'

What we know about the tremendous gifts of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (April 28, 1953 - July 15, 2003) is in many ways due to the excellent translations by Chris Andrews. Andrews began translating Bolaño into English before the word understood the importance of this much mourned novelist and poet. This particular work LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH is a series of short stories that are delivered in conversational style (the narrator is always in the first person), a technique that enhances the common line of dealing with exile - from country, from hopes, from dreams, from immortality - that is the common thread throughout these fourteen stories.

Though each of the stories is well written, capturing our attention and concern for each of the characters, each one of the stories seem to be insights into the man we now recognize as a master writer and political activist. For this reader the most disturbing story is 'Dance Card', a story in numbered sentences that closes the collection. Some background as described in Wikipedia: 'He was dyslexic, and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider. In 1968 he moved with his family to Mexico City, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes. A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Allende, Bolaño was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards.' Translate these realities into a short story format and the reader is treated to 'Dance Card'.

In another story 'Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva' the author reveals much of the turmoil of his life in the opening sentences: 'Mauricio Silva, also known as "the Eye', always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who ere born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death. That's just the way it goes.'

For those readers involved in reading '2666' or even 'The Savage Detectives' this collection may not have the power of these novels. But as for getting to know Roberto Bolaño and understanding his too brief career, these fourteen stories are excellent windows.

Grady Harp(less)

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Jul 22, 2009 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended stories: "Sensini", title story, "Dentist"

I'm going to try once more and a little harder to get at why I think he's great, though I know it's not exactly a minority opinion these days.

Take Borges, the reason you probably love him, if you do-- that he continuously tries to speak to the reason you're reading a book, his book or any book, the searching for another part of the self through the labyrinth of culture. Borges gets at it most successfully through metafictional tricks and myth...more Recommended stories: "Sensini", title story, "Dentist"

I'm going to try once more and a little harder to get at why I think he's great, though I know it's not exactly a minority opinion these days.

Take Borges, the reason you probably love him, if you do-- that he continuously tries to speak to the reason you're reading a book, his book or any book, the searching for another part of the self through the labyrinth of culture. Borges gets at it most successfully through metafictional tricks and mythologies of the book, the artist, or the intellectual. In one essay Borges tries to create a lineage for Kafka, and thus for himself, through a handful of heterogeneous source materials going back to ancient Greece. In the end, he's most interested in the fact that none of the predecessors resemble each other at all and are in fact only related through Kafka. Bolano moves forward from Borges with a style that does not remind one of Borges at all. Only the overriding concern is the same, and their shared, highly-developed ability to step back from what seems like a vital struggle between oneself and culture (where to stop and look around for a minute would mean giving an all-important inch) and simply record those dynamics with pathos and present that as worthy art, the limits of our understanding of ourselves. Most interesting, I imagine, for most of the recent American Bolano fans (myself included) is his marriage of Borges's vanguardism with the sort of conventional personal narrative (often in the first person) that writing workshops are famous for. This book convinces us that the methods we've been honing--maybe with a commercial advantage in mind, maybe because it's what we know, maybe because we sense that it would be idiotic to imitate the inimitable-- are actually capable of treating all themes, that a story doesn't have to look "postmodern" to take on the most definitionally postmodern scenario: the attempt to mature as a person through reading and thinking about modern literature.

I keep thinking about the story "Dentist," a narrative of visiting an old college friend, a dentist in a small Mexican town, who has just had a woman die on him (dentists become dentists so that they won't have to be responsible for death!), and, possibly in reaction, becomes obsessed with an Indian boy, a (he insists, non-sexual) Rimbaud type who writes amazing stories in his father's shack on the outskirts of Iraputo. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of the book, but Bolano didn't have to do more than that, they didn't have to make the kid a publishing success or reveal him as a fraud or apologize for being kind of racist in what they need from him, the whole thing is just sort of awful and extremely true and there's enough in it for them both to hold on to at particularly trying points in their lives and that's enough.(less)

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Nov 12, 2012 Pete Young rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a combined edition of two previously released Spanish collections. These insightful stories are all anecdotal and semi-autobiographical but also mostly told in the third person, which inevitably engenders a small aura of mystery about Bolaño himself in the mind of the reader. Bolaño’s subject matter is, as usual, mostly literary: obscure South American poets, Chilean political exiles, Mexican or Spanish settings, reminiscences of lost friends, and left wing writers who like the narrator...more

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Nov 24, 2008 Powells.com rated it 5 of 5 stars

When he died in 2003, at the age of 50, Roberto Bolaño was all but unknown anywhere north of the Rio Grande, yet he is now acclaimed internationally and considered among the most eminent figures in Latin American letters. Chilean by birth, but living in exile throughout much of his life, Bolaño had always been a dedicated writer, yet began publishing with increasing fervor in the mid-1990s. Like much of his work, including the incomparable epic The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth is a...more

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May 29, 2009 Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Amazing. Simply amazing. A must-read. Bolaño makes me feel happy to be alive, and how can a book be anything other than amazing if it makes you feel that way? Bolaño's characters fuck, drink, swear, travel, smoke, and above all else readreadread and writewritewrite. Standout stories include the title one (a retelling of Borges' "El sur"), "Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva" (which reminded me of "The Ministry of Special Cases," in the way it serves as a eulogy for the victims of the "disappearences" in...more

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Mar 23, 2009 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

With still one story to go, I'll go out on a very sturdy limb and call this my favorite of Bolano's works that I've read to date. (While admitting that I have yet to take on 2666 - thankfully, perhaps, since the last section has been found(?).) I enjoyed the Savage Detectives and read it at the right time while traveling around Honduras and the Mosquito Coast, but it lost some of its narrative force about 1/3 of the way in. It is a sprawling novel, the kind that an author has to be unafraid to w...more

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Nov 26, 2009 El rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: late20th-centurylit

When reading short stories, I like the characters I'm reading about to be the people you see in the background of movies, or in the shadows of buildings when you're on a walk. They're just regular people, but are often ignored because they're not central to a plot, either visually, thematically, or personally.

Bolano's short stories in this collection bring those folks out into their own light. More appropriately, perhaps, is that Bolano actually takes you, the reader, into their shadows. These a...more

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Jun 26, 2009 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Roberto Bolano's 14 short stories in this collection are beautiful, concise, poetic ("When it was starting to look as if we had wasted the night, a curious night in the course of which we had hardly exchanged a word, we saw him, or thought we did, walking down a dimly lit street. My friend honked the horn and executed a reckless U-turn. Ramirez was waiting for us quietly on a corner. I rolled down the window and said hello. My friend leaned over in front of me and invited him to get in. The boy...more

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Aug 07, 2010 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Roberto Bolaño is a writer's writer. Even in a book of short stories he's able to construct a world in which nothing is more noble or important than literature, and yet he does so without presumption. In fact, you almost feel sorry for the guy and all the loneliness that seeps through his prose.

I enjoyed the book. Almost four starts. It was a welcome escape from all the white papers and reports I've been reading about civil society and political analysis. Each night, for about thirty minutes be...more

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Apr 20, 2010 Pollopicu rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sensini-
Story about a young writer who enters a literary competition and through it finds an old literary colleague and later friend and mentor, Luis Antonio Sensini, who is known for his work entitled, Ugarte. They begin corresponding through mail, bonding through competitions and life stories.
Sensini later moves to Argentina with his wife (Carmela) and daughter (Miranda) from Madrid, (where he resided in exile) in search of details of his missing son who is believed to have been murdered. The...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Albert rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have only read the nihilistic, Monsieur Pain, -- which was depressing -- but this collection was full of shock after shock. The narrators, characteristically, were exiles who hung out with other exiles. With how matter of fact the characters were, I expected something sordid or ugly to happen in each story, just so there'd be a jolt. This was the main tension in the stories.
The style pulled me in like a Disney riverboat ride: it was slow, I knew I was safe (because the characters didn't seem t...more

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Nov 11, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

Last Evenings on Earth is the first book by Roberto Bolano that I've ever read, and I am deeply impressed. Even in translation, Bolano comes across as a sort of poet laureate of vaguely dissatisfied intellectuals, delivering these wonderful short stories with a wry humor and an eye for detail. Most impressive is Bolano's skillful use of fast-flowing language that really does sweep the reader along in a journey that is simultaneously thrilling, confusing, and never subject to obvious interpretati...more

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Jan 22, 2009 Bill Delaney rated it 5 of 5 stars

...beautiful short stories by this great writer - more often than in 'the savage detectives' he embeds a plot which often springs on the reader, gently pounces, though many of the stories also simply meander, with his patented genius for speaking to us in a conversational tone thick with events recounted in a single line which could amount to a whole story in themselves...the simple power of telling a story with so little (seeming) artifice...'and then this happened, and then this, and then this...more

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Aug 02, 2010 George rated it 3 of 5 stars

While Bolaño has received a rather sizable amount of posthumous acclaim here in the U.S. for his novels, the first book of his that fell into my hands was this collection of short stories. Many deal with writers, although not necessarily writing, and their plots cross 3 different continents. There are plenty of late nights, prostitutes, faded and forgotten people, and ended love affairs. For the most part, I appreciated Bolaño's writing style -- fairly spare in places, but straightforward, which...more

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About Roberto Bolaño

For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

H...more For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.

Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.

In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño died. It has been suggested that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question. It is true that he suffered from liver failure and was close to the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.

Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."

Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.

In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.

In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.(less)

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Quotes from Last Evenings on Earth

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain” — 38 people liked it

“That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie.” — 11 people liked it

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