Last Evenings on Earth

The melancholy folklore of exile, as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid.

In the short story Silva the Eye, Bolano writes in the opening sentence: It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died.

Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved failed generation, the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/01/2007
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 7.98h x 5.28w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9780811216883


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/15/2007 pg. 77
Kliatt 09/01/2007 pg. 31

About the Author
Bolaño, Roberto: - Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.Andrews, Chris: - The poet CHRIS ANDREWS teaches at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has translated books by Roberto Bolano and César Aira for New Directions. He has won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for his poetry and the Valle-Inclan Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations.