Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.
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