My experience with Roberto Bolaño’s writing was previously limited to a three to four week voyage around the holidays through his magnum opus, 2666. While I had a general idea of the book’s content, I was not familiar with Bolaño’s writing style which, to my appreciative surprise, was far looser and associative than I had been expecting. The depth though was all I had hoped for and a more formal approach would have significantly taken away from the visionary gestures Bolaño used to estabish his artistic momentum, not to mention also limiting the reader’s personal interpretation and getting in the way of Bolaño’s aversion towards all things autocratic. When Bolaño does bring in the specifics, they are only brought in to the extent to which they help to honor the fictive lives (and deaths) of characters within the stories-- never for the broader implications.

But if I were to recommend a Bolaño book, I would probably be quicker to suggest Last Evenings on Earth though (or another one of his short story collections, once I have those read). Often compelled through an unspoken anxiety that is prone towards finding ‘significance’ in a world where such hierarchical qualities aren’t to be found (what does it mean? what Does it mean? ...therein lies our rich vulnerable madness Bolaño loves to explore....), these stories contain the same nightmarish dream-scapes of 2666 but in much more compacted form. With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Bolaño writes these stories from the fragments of ‘the outside’, eschewing the point A to point B inner narrative for the seductive illusoriness of hallucinogenic atmospheres, intonations of violence that are as inevitable as they are random, the bizarre relationships we have between control and chaos, the mind's labyrinth of knowing and not-knowing.

While literature and art are common subjects in the stories, generally the types of characters to be found are so random, a reader has to look for a descriptive commonality that goes beyond the immediate of personal biography, such as the banalities of background, time period, age, locale, etc. Instead, from a larger perspective, what these characters and stories do have in common is the quality of being in a surreal state of ‘exile’, which is most appropriate considering Bolaño’s own itinerant nationalities after leaving Chile and his lack of allegiance to other Latin American writers, as well as his enjoyment of surrealistic poetry. And while these can be found in Bolaño’s books as well, his use of exile is actually a much more comprehensive quality within the characters’ lives, their existence, permeating both the internal and external worlds. It’s a notion that is even emphasized through Bolaño’s ‘deadpan’ use of language, opaque because of its flat descriptiveness but then also, via contrast, translucent with dizzying questions that may or may not have answers. Comparisons can be made with Haruki Murakami.

When you combine all this together, what you have is -------------. Meaning, its something I can’t tell you. Instead, you have to go for the raw experience yourself, wating for you once you drop all expectations on your approach to begin the adventure of a Bolaño story. I can hint though and say that what awaits is modern, unruly, grotesque, sublime, disenchanting, empowering, unforgettable, and eventually humane, because of the writing being so honestly complete.