Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

'Dance Card' provides the reader with sixty-nine reasons not to dance with Pablo Neruda. The title story tells of a journey to Acapulco that gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. In 'Sensini' an elderly South American writer instructs another younger writer, also living in exile, in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. They are characters living in the margins, on the edge, in constant flight from nightmarish threats. Imbued with 'the melancholy folklore of exile', as Roberto Bolano once put it, and set largely in the world of the Chilean diaspora in Central America and Europe, the narrators of these stories are usually writers grappling with private quests (Bolano's beloved 'failed generation'), who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. This is certainly true of the fourteen stories here, the first collection by the universally acclaimed Chilean author to be published in English. But for fans of Bolaño, who wonder what he thought about Herman Melville and Isabel Allende and his day jobs as an outdoor-camp manager and a costume-jewelry salesman (and his candidate for the most beautiful woman in the world), The Last Interview is a light pleasure, good for bus rides and waiting rooms.Ernest Hemingway once said that a good story was like an iceberg what is visible is always smaller than the part that remains hidden beneath the water, which confers intensity, mystery, power and meaning on what floats on the surface. The only explanation I could give would be to start to cry.'Īt 121 airy pages (with margin notes explaining his Latin-American literary references) and $14.95, The Last Interview isn't a general-interest volume. He talks about Borges ('there is only Borges'), his Poe-steeped adolescence (which might account for the morbidity of his stories), and how he feels about his children: 'All of the fears and terrors I experienced as an adolescent re-emerged and duplicated, multiplied themselves by 100. He knew he was dying as he gave these interviews and answers even goofy questions, which he might've mocked in his youth, with startling sincerity. For children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.īut Bolaño lived in a different world from his interlocutors. MM: Do you have hope? For what and for whom? RB: My dear Maristain, again you push me toward the land of bad taste, which is not my native land. MM: Is the world without remedy? RB: The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy.

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño