Last Evenings on Earth

"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usuallywriters grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, whotypically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, likewitnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and tonarrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constantflight 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, evenat the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the realviolence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America inthe 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when SalvadorAllende died."Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin Americaand Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," thestories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The NewYorker and Grand Street.