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, Amulet, 1999

Picador picked up a total of eleven Bolaño titles in 2009, and this was the first to be released in English after publication of his posthumous magnum opus 2666. There is a link between the two books: the year 2666 gets a mention here, included among the many other ramblings of Bolaño’s wonderful creation Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan immigrant and the self-declared ‘mother of Mexican poetry’. She’s holed up in a Mexico City university washroom, hiding from the military as they try to quell student demonstrations in 1968; her rather prolonged stay there results in an increasingly hallucinatory excursion backwards and forwards in time as she recalls meeting people she could never have met, plus some far-flung predictions of which authors will be popular in, say, 2059 or 2017 – there’s a surprise in store here for fans of science fiction as Bolaño indulges a penchant for name-dropping outside his own genre. He also gives himself plenty of space to let his words breathe with his familiar long rambling sentences, and it’s often difficult to see where fact separates from fiction or where he is taking the story until the very last page, although the thrill, as with By Night in Chile, is in Auxilio’s mad journey itself. Simply, a lovely book.  PY

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Jack Kerouac, Tristessa, 1960

Two trips into the junkie houses of Mexico City in pursuit of Tristessa, a beautiful Mexican morphine addict, make this one of Kerouac’s most uncomfortable and tragic short books. The “kickwriting” occasionally goes into overdrive and Kerouac often risks losing the reader if you don’t keep up with the pace. It’s a long meditation on a slow loss, and one (as usual) fuelled by plenty of drink and drugs.  PY

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Jennifer Clement, A True Story Based on Lies, 2001

This book is not as difficult to pin down as its title suggests, so simple is its structure of dual narratives and yet so beguiling and engrossing is the nature of the poetic language Clement uses. A True Story Based on Lies explores the consequences of a brief sexual relationship between Leonora, a fifteen year-old native servant in a wealthy modern household in Mexico City, and Mr. O’Conner, her master. But when a child is born from this union she is raised as an adopted daughter of the house, while Leonora is expected to abandon any hope of true motherhood and merely remain the servant to the manipulations of Mrs. O’Conner, all pointing to one, possibly inevitable and tragic, conclusion.

Leonora is an innocent victim of adult games several times over, but this is not a mysogynist piece of fiction, indeed all the women of the house maintain this deception not only for the sake of their masters’ saving face, but because the alternative is Leonora returning to poverty and her child begging on the streets. The narratives contain plenty of native Indian ‘knowledge’ and other quirky strangeness, plus the right amount of pathos that imbues the Mexican servants of the house with as much dignity as innocence. Further, it describes a situation that must be common the whole world over, not just to Latin America. Certainly one of the best – and in the story’s very clever and economical telling, most original – books I’ve read this year.   PY