Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth, 2008

This is a combined edition of two previously released Spanish collections. These insightful stories are all anecdotal and semi-autobiographical but also mostly told in the third person, which inevitably engenders a small aura of mystery about Bolaño himself in the mind of the reader. Bolaño’s subject matter is, as usual, mostly literary: obscure South American poets, Chilean political exiles, Mexican or Spanish settings, reminiscences of lost friends, and left wing writers who like the narrator himself are all living at the far margins of the arts. Bolaño also speaks with consistency: he always writes as if relating the story by voice rather than written words and his story structure is such that you never know quite where he will end up, but wherever it is it’s usually on the cusp of what would be another story, and the endings are often abrupt. It’s impossible to pin down a favourite; they somehow blur together but are all equally very well told. A completely enchanting collection.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, 1988

This was, after not much internal debate, easily my best read of 2009. It concerns the life and elusive identity of a dashing Chilean Air Force pilot, skywriter and poet, twisted lothario and secret hitman for the Pinochet regime. The story will be familiar to readers of Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas which featured as its final chapter a telescoped version of what was to become this novel. The straightforward structure is that of an attempt by a former acquaintance to identify him as the unlikely man responsible for the murders of some opposition sympathisers; the detective work quickly gets bogged down in endless possible leads that go nowhere as the pilot disappears and then very likely reappears in different guises as a guerilla and underground poet, hiding out elsewhere in Latin America as well as France and Spain. This is the literary territory Bolaño has claimed as his own, but he touches on areas I didn’t expect: American cult literature, fanzines and Philip K. Dick to name three. In political exile in Spain, this is probably not a book Bolaño could have written while in Chile: he is too specific about certain identifiable people, places and events such that Distant Star would not have received much widespread credibility there, perhaps before being accepted as a legitimate work by people who would be less inclined to discredit Bolaño’s believable journalistic style and instead embrace his invention. It’s a complex text, often by turns chilling and bizarrely funny, with a translation by Chris Andrews that once again preserves Bolaño’s infectious energy. Highly recommended.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, 2000

My first encounter with Bolaño was a few years ago with his heroic cameo appearance in Javier Cercas’s marvellous Soldiers of Salamis, something which brought him fame in his adopted Spain, and since his passing there’s been a bit of a worldwide Bolaño-fest culminating in the posthumously released magnum opus 2666. A year ago Jonathan Lethem said “Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story”, and that’s exactly right. By Night in Chile is basically a dying rant from a mad Chilean priest and poetry critic, endlessly digressive and enormous intellectual fun, and as a first encounter with Bolaño’s actual books it matched the word-of-mouth and was a good place to start. I was taken not only with what Bolaño amusingly alludes to, that an obsession with poetry probably indicates a wasted life, but also with Bolaño’s style: I grew to like his long, rambling sentences that allow him to fill the page with all kinds of loosely connected thoughts into what is essentially one book-length paragraph. This must have been hard stuff to translate and yet also keep Bolaño’s nervous energy going throughout, but it’s an admirable accomplishment. Bolaño has been a very satisfying discovery, and at his best is someone who has can open one’s eyes to what literature can be in a way that few authors can do.  PY

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Antonio Skármeta, Il Postino, 1985

Formerly a journalist, Skármeta originally called his novel Ardiente Paciencia, then El Cartero de Neruda, then after the success of the 1994 film (actually the second film of the book) simply Il Postino. He recounts a Chilean postman’s friendship with the world’s greatest love poet, Pablo Neruda, and how Neruda unlocked the teenage postman’s own romantic creativity in his pursuit of the beautiful Beatriz González. The story was drawn from personal experience after Skármeta was asked by his newspaper editor to dig up some scandal on Neruda, the end result being a whole different story. I was rather pleased that the book goes a lot further than the film, which was heavy on sweetness yet decisive about what kind of film it was actually meant to be, and by the film’s relocation of the story to Capri in the Mediterranean (where Neruda sat out his exile from Chile for his communism in the 1950s) it was able to omit the book’s strong undercurrent of bitterness caused by the rise of Pinochet. The romantic and the political don’t make good bedfellows in this book and sadly the political wins out, a sweet fantasy killed off by a bitter, fascist political reality. Well written and entertaining for the most part, with surprisingly darker tones than the film.   PY