Last Evenings on Earth

published	2006 by New Directions
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0811216349 (isbn13: 9780811216340)
pages	256
description	The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. <...more [close] 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. 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. 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. His first two novels in English, By Night in Chile and Distant Star (New Directions, 2003 and 2005) were universally acclaimed.
date added	04-10-07 edit book

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Mateo rated it:

(review of isbn 0811216888)

09/15/07

Read in August, 2007

(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...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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brian rated it:

(review of isbn 0811216888)

04/10/08

1) viva susan sontag! bolano is the 'it' writer of the moment - and my rebellious and bratty self wanted to hate him. or just not read him. then i saw sontag's seal of approval and knew i had to. holy shit, this woman might have the best taste ever. i mean ever. of anyone that's ever lived. really, susan. what's up with this? how many great movies and books has she introduced to american audiences? it's fucked up.

2) these stories aren't about all that much - but, wow, is there so much there...more

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Jim rated it:

07/10/07

bookshelves: bleakfiction

Read in July, 2006

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 o...more

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Michael rated it:

08/18/07

bookshelves: dead

recommends it for: everyone

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 cou...more

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Jeremy rated it:

(review of isbn 0811216888)

11/22/07

Read in May, 2007

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...more

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