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A review by sam_is_wrong
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
4.0
i've realized that reading bolaño's work in chronological order, one book after the other, is a very bolaño thing to do - that is, this kind of pathological reading is typical of bolaño's narrators, and so, by use of the transitive property, typical of the man himself. he writes novels about obsessive literature fans that are, in themselves, obsessive - in their dedication to writerly ephemera, in their minute evocations of various latin american cities, in the persistent, paranoiac ways the dread hangs at the edges of each book. so, to come at these novels and collections in an obsessive manner feels like an act of knowing immersion, a way to make myself closer to the books by channeling their narrators.
anyway, last evenings on earth! this is a softer, less acute collection than anything bolaño's written previously - more tender and personal than i've come to expect, with the usual manifestations of horror located more in dreams and intuition than any specific fascist regime. makes very very strong use of the man's gift for atmosphere and feeling, and pulls a few narrative strings - an engraved knife, a city populated almost entirely with assassins - that will come to greater fruition in later books, while circling ever closer to the great void of the sonora desert
anyway, last evenings on earth! this is a softer, less acute collection than anything bolaño's written previously - more tender and personal than i've come to expect, with the usual manifestations of horror located more in dreams and intuition than any specific fascist regime. makes very very strong use of the man's gift for atmosphere and feeling, and pulls a few narrative strings - an engraved knife, a city populated almost entirely with assassins - that will come to greater fruition in later books, while circling ever closer to the great void of the sonora desert