Roberto Bolaño: Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Reading Roberto Bolaño’s book of 14 short stories helped me understand the fascination I felt when I read 2666 and Savage Detectives (see below for my comments on these books.) Even now, quite some after having read those two books, I continue to think about his writing and to compare practically ever writer I come across to Roberto Bolaño. It is a bit like being in love, only better. For someone as skeptical as I am (at least when it comes to writing) such lasting admiration for a contemporary author is unusual. That was the reason I wrote a lot on those two previous books – I was trying to understand what it is that makes him so good. His short stories helped me advance my thinking.

The core of his brilliance is simplicity. His stories exist for the sake of themselves, and not only does the author renounce trying to spice them up, but he also doesn’t even try to make the plots interesting by adding twists or turns or tension. In 2666 he has some amazing scenes and characters, and this led me to believe that he had led an eventful life that gave him this material. He did indeed have an eventful life, but that is not enough. In this collection, his characters and situations are neither interesting nor exotic, and still he is great. They are common episodes from lives of common people: son and father going on a vacation, a poet traveling to some school in the middle of nowhere to give a few classes, a writer who just sold a book and decided to travel around France for a week, a guy visiting a childhood friend. They are entirely unassuming plots written in an even less assuming style.

Characters in his stories and books are mostly writers and poets. I found this slightly annoying at first, I considered it a sign of weakness and inability to write about a milieu other than his own, but I learned that your characters profession is not that relevant. A master like that writes about life, and his writing is life – weather the characters are writers or boxers or priests by profession is a secondary issue.

What he achieved is the complete disappearance of borders between life and writing. He perfected observation of things that revolve around him, and he perfected such a simple style that it can hardly be called a style at all. Only a person to whom writing comes as natural as breathing can write like that. In this perfect style he wrote about what he lived, saw, heard, and read. Another point is that he cares about his characters. He is not arrogant towards people, he does not place them beneath him and try to explain their actions like some superior being (a common occurence with writers). He observes people with respect regardless of how little they and their problems might be in the eyes of someone else. He is sincere in doing this, and that is why we cannot stop reading his texts – because we start to care as well and we want to see what happened with these people.

He must have been a man of great patience and strength. We are lucky to have several of his books – judging by the way he led his life it was not impossible that he could have renounced publishing altogether.

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