Reviews

波拉尼奥作品集·地球上最后的夜晚 by Roberto Bolaño

faulkneribarelyknowher's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

beautiful stories. the narrator is often kinda Poe-like—sometimes breaking the fourth wall—and is sometimes omniscient and sometimes forgetful. the shapes of the stories are similar: often the plot would build to a climax, the climax would occur or almost occur, and then the story would end. sometimes the climax was a death, or a meeting of two characters, or a supernatural event, but always lacked relief.

Dance Card confused me, though it entertained me. i’m not very familiar with Neruda, or any of the other authors mentioned, but i loved the semiautobiographical moments (i think every story featured a writer of some kind)…and the tongue-in-cheek 69 item-long list

i love the pseudo-recurring characters (like Arturo Bolaño, or A/B). i love the universality of the sex and travel and death and writing


thechexican's review against another edition

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4.0

The characters in Bolaños’ stories feel unsure of their place in the world, which makes sense, as their author was a political exile himself. The back of the book quotes him as describing his work as, “the melancholy folklore of exile”. There’s another quote on the back of the book that resonates, “I am addicted to the haze that floats over Bolaños fiction.”
An addictive, hazy melancholy is the best I can do to describe the reading experience.

aller23's review against another edition

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emotional lighthearted reflective relaxing fast-paced

4.0

itsmandaaa's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

rachelevolve's review against another edition

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3.0

Sensini-
Story about a young writer who enters a literary competition and through it finds an old literary colleague and later friend and mentor, Luis Antonio Sensini, who is known for his work entitled, Ugarte. They begin corresponding through mail, bonding through competitions and life stories.
Sensini later moves to Argentina with his wife (Carmela) and daughter (Miranda) from Madrid, (where he resided in exile) in search of details of his missing son who is believed to have been murdered. The young man eventually loses contact with Sensini, and later finds out through a newspaper that Sensini has passed away. A couple years later Miranda turns up at the young man's door, and they both reminisce about Sensini.
I personally enjoyed this short story because of it's simplicity. Nothing particularly sensational, but a good story nonetheless.

Henri Simone Leprince
Seems to be an uneventful story about a writer who is not taken seriously and eventually accepts his fate as a failure and ends up becoming a teacher.

Enrique Martin
One of the faster-paced stories in this collection. It's about a guy who has a friend that pretty much gets on his nerves and decides to stop writing poetry and gets into the Sci-fi genre...but that's not what the story is about, it's mostly about their non-relationship. I don't know how to explain it, but the reason I like this story a lot is because it reminds me of the kind of relationship (or non-relationship) I have with my own sister. They obliviously go on living their mysterious life while just annoying the living crap out of you. You end up giving it a lot of thought, while they continue on clueless.



Literary Adventure
This story drew me in. It's the kind of situation where there's a person that does things that you feel they do on purpose to get under your skin to get back at you, yet if you tried to explain to someone else the little things they do to aggravate you, it's you who comes off as the crazy one and you end up feeling incompetent in handling such a simple situation. B becomes totally paranoid and absorbed in finding out if A knows or does not know if the story B wrote was about A. Does that make sense? He then obsesses about it to the point of stalking. He finally is able to track A down and when they meet A is as nice as pie. So I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm guessing A was sick and was spiritually above any of the things B was mentally accusing him of. I could be totally off on that one, but I did enjoy reading it.

Phone Calls
Very peculiar story, but again, I enjoyed reading it. About two lovers who rekindle their romance after many years of being separated and. X (her) ends up dumping B (him) and then she ends up murdered by one of her other exes.


The Grub
Young kid who cuts school to watch movies and buy/steal books, befriends a vagabond who hangs out across from a bookstore. They talk about various things daily, and later vagabond disappears and moves up north.

Anne Moore's Life
This is what I expected of the biography of Cookie Mueller to be like. Except Cookie Muellers' bio sucked.
Anne Moore is a young woman who's dealing with repressed feelings of a childhood tragedy related to a romantic involvement concerning her sister. She goes through a series of failed relationships while traveling and living in different places. This was a fast-paced bio that kept me reading it the whole way through. Probably the best written one in the bunch.

The Eye
Story about a gay man who visits a brothel to discover that young boys are being castrated for sacrificial purposes. He ends up rescuing one or two boys, and raises them as his own children, but later in the village they live in the boys both die from disease, and the Eye is alone and depressed.

Gomez Palacio
Was hard for me to grasp. I think it was the story of a young man who writes poetry but takes a teaching job and starts having an affair with a married woman.

Last Evenings on Earth
This is one of my favorite ones in this collection of short stories because it brought me back to the couple times I visited Acapulco myself and stayed in the very same hotel the father and son stayed in called "Las Brisas". They even visited the diver's restaurant I dined at. I was able to visualize this novel much more easier than any of his others. It has a calm dream-like quality and pace. At the end the father gets in trouble gambling and I assume they both end up killed.

Days of 1978
I love how Bolano uses letters as characters. It simplifies the story and forces you to focus solely on the story without the complications of names. This particular story reminded me of the earlier "Literary Adventure".

Vagabond in France and Belgium
This story was a bit of a blur to me because in the midst of it my cat had a stroke. He's ok though.

Dentist
The dialogue in this short was one of the best so far. I thought the dentist had something mysterious up his sleeve when he didn't show up on time to meet his friend, but in the end, true to Bolano's style, they just hung out and nothing crazy happened. The stories all end rather sudden, but I think he tries to present real lives moving in real time that are continuing still in this moment. I'm not use to that, but I can appreciate it.

Dance Card
This short was a great reference to Latin writers. I feel like whenever I'm in the mood to find writers of substance i can leaf through this story and find one. I've never read Neruda's work, but I have read about him. These are the little gentle pushes that help guide me to discover new writers.







Over-all I enjoyed Bolano's work enough to want to read the Savage Detective. All his stories have an obscure undertone.
Bolano's novels all end a little abruptly, however, that style seems to work for him for the most part. I wonder if his full-length novels end suddenly too, or if it's just his short stories style..

very good. Thank you Fawz.

kyanitecosmonaut's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective relaxing sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

rmaxwell33's review against another edition

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4.0

Last Evenings served as my first real foray into Bolaño —having only a hazy imprint of the vague vignettes in Antwerp to serve as previous exposure — and these stories do what the best literature can do in the sense that they paint a world so vivid and clear that you have no choice but to dive in head first. (An aside: I’m about 20 pages into By Night in Chile and so sound the trumpets, the Bolaño plunge has commenced.) I’m a sucker for the “biography as fiction” type of writing and these stories are certainly that: the majority featuring protagonist “B” who is a stand in for Bolaño himself. Most feature a writer, or writers, of mediocre talent (self prescribed), with next to no renown, often on some sort of detective like quest, who offer up honest portrayals of the not so sparkly aspects of our character (at least for someone who is always reading himself into characters i.e. this reader right here, hello!) and end right at the fever pitch, where in you let out a gasp of air, and sink into some sort of reflective thought. They are a bit dark, but hey that’s what we’re here for right? All I can say is I’m in and cannot wait to read more of Bolaño’s work.

jelundberg's review against another edition

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4.0

Naturalistic and slightly surreal stories of Latin America and Spain. Very often, the narrator ("B" or "Arturo Belano") stands in for Bolaño himself, and stories revolve around writers and books. It's incredible how many craft rules are broken here (telling instead of showing, ending right before the climax, denoting characters by letters rather than names), and somehow the stories are pulled off brilliantly. My favorite was the closer, "Dance Card," a postmodern life story of pain, revolution, and poetry (which can be read in full here: http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1289/prmID/1409 ).

menniemenace's review against another edition

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3.0

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain”


I finally finished it, and I'm so happy I did. I've been meaning to read this for over a year because of a quote, and now I did.

I started reading this while I was reading another collection of stories by the same author translated to Arabic named "Phone Calls" and it turns out they're both sort of the same book. I was pretty excited when I knew that since I'll get to cross two books off my TBR list at the same time, but after a couple of stories they turned out to have only about 4 stories in common. The Arabic one didn't even have the one which the book is named after, but it had some cool stories about war. The English one had more emotional stories and some random stuff.
I liked "literary advance" and "Mauricio -the eye- Silva" and "Last evenings on Earth". Some parts of certain stories were pretty haunting but I didn't like the whole package.

Short stories are my least favorite form of writing, and this book didn't change that.

innocentvision's review against another edition

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3.0

Favoriter: "Sensini", "Enrique Martín" och "Anne Moore's Life"