Book Review-Roberto Bolano-"Last Evenings on Earth"

    This collection of short stories centers around Bolano's repeated character depictions and their Odyssey journeys.  The struggling poet coming to terms with Pinochet's takeover of Chile in 1973, the overall violent culture of Latin America, sex, drugs and post-graduate discussions on literature.  The dark, brooding and deep sentences of Bolano, make him one of the most masterful narrators of the post-modern age.  This book has an autobiographical flare, as Bolano's own odyssey was leaving Chile to work in Mexico, returning briefly just before the Pinochet coup, being briefly detained and then becoming the vagabond poet with apparent accounts of drug usage, eventually settling in Spain.

     Some of Bolano's character portrayals, particularly of the vagabond poet or the female whore, border so close to cliche that they almost become terminally offensive after having read about them for several stories in a row.  How many times do we have to hear about the neurotic with their aimless night wanderings(in and out of the watering holes and cheap motels)and meaningless screws?

Unlike when reading "2666" for the first time, where Bolano analyzes modern German literature like it never has been before, within a book of dead bodies and drug intake, the brief interludes in "Last Evenings" into little-known French surrealists and Chilean poets become tiring, as the reader becomes all too aware of Bolano's arching themes.

     A lot can be forgiven, however, when it comes to Bolano's skill as a writer.  He is one of the few who has the ability to be both elegant and brief.  To cover the metaphysical within a brief sentence format.  These are a few of the quotes from "Last Evenings":

                                     "These shadows have a life of their own, says K.  At first B thinks

                                       nothing of her remark.  But then he observes his shadows, or 

                                       perhaps it is hers, and for a moment that elongated silhouette 

                                       seems to be looking askance at him.  It gives him a start.  Then 

                                       all three or four of them are swallowed up by the shapeless dark."

                                       (Days of 1978)

Or:

                                    ".....the human race suffering and laughing as it marches toward the

                                      void"

                                      (Vagabond in France and Belgium)

Finally:

                                    "Well 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 single damn thing matters!  Only we don't realize.  We just 

                                     tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives on

                                     another, and we don't realize that's a lie."

                                     (Dentist)

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