Last Evenings on Earth

 Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño is a fine short story collection that drifts between Chile, Mexico, Spain, India, the United States, and more. Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño often writes around catastrophic events, putting the aftermath of the crisis in the forefront and only hinting at the crisis itself. For Sebald, it's the Holocaust; for Bolaño, it's the Pinochet era in Chile. Last Evenings on Earth, then, is a generally plotless collage of aimless protagonists and unexplainable happenings. The effect that begins to emerge, story by story, is one of dislocation, grief, and Hemingway's "grace under pressure." As readers we become forced to fill in the gaps in understanding--the ambiguity--with our own interpretation of that mood.  

My first attempt reading Bolaño was his most celebrated work, the novel 2666. That book also circled around a horrifying event--the murders of women in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez--until it didn't. For the first 400 pages, 2666 only hinted at the violence. After that, he plunged in and described, in clinical detail, the discovery of hundreds of bodies of sexual assaulted women. I was engaged with the first part of the text, but I was so nauseated by the second half that I had to put it down. I may or may not finish 2666, but I acknowledge that Bolaño is a tremendous talent. His work is serious, global, and insightful. His plot structures are surprising and well crafted. For me, he bridges the structural innovation of European fiction with the landscapes and romanticism of the Americas, and I'm excited to read more.