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Mateo's review

Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions Paperbook)
by Roberto Bolaño

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/537640.Last_Evenings_on_Earth?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions Paperbook)" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175626682m/537640.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/537640.Last_Evenings_on_Earth?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Last Evenings on Earth</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/72039.Roberto_Bola_o">Roberto Bolaño</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6249656?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 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--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. 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/277214?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Mateo's review
rating:

(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 to...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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message 1: by Mark

10/15/2007 04:06PM

I couldn't disagree more with your review. Meaningful ending? It's funny you mention Sebald because Bolano and he are similiar: they deal obliquely with historical events as filtered through personal and coalescing reflections and memories. It honors the mandates of great fiction to deal with first things last, and if meaning doesn't seem ready-made that's exactly the kind of ambiguity its characters are wrestling with and working through. With the late Danilo Kis, these writers are the holy trinity of modernisms' failed projects.