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Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano
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Last Evenings on Earth (edition 2007)

by Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews (Translator)

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8041927,112 (3.92)23
"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 ofLast Evenings on Earth have appeared inThe New Yorker andGrand Street.… (more)
Member:kswolff
Title:Last Evenings on Earth
Authors:Roberto Bolano
Other authors:Chris Andrews (Translator)
Info:New Directions (2007), Paperback, 224 pages
Collections:Your library, Wishlist
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Tags:None

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Last Evenings On Earth by Roberto Bolaño

  1. 00
    Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño (inaudible)
  2. 00
    By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño (parrishlantern)
    parrishlantern: Whilst reading this, a certain song refrain kept intruding into my thoughts, after a while I paid closer attention to it, and realised that it not only fitted this books subject matter, it sounded like some thing from a Bolano novel. Repent, Repent I wonder what they meant. “All your lousy little poets coming round, trying to sound like Charley Manson, see the white girl dancin” L.Cohen.… (more)
  3. 00
    The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov (lobotomy42)
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» See also 23 mentions

English (18)  Spanish (1)  All languages (19)
Showing 1-5 of 18 (next | show all)
.75 stars. i do not see the brilliance here, but did enjoy a few of the earlier stories in this. when i got to one of the middle stories - anne moore's life i almost couldn't finish reading the book. this is one of the worst short stories, with no feeling or understanding of women, that i've ever read. it makes sense that everything else in this collection is written about men. that story colored the rest of this for me, and i thought the rest was repetitive, uninteresting, and a real disappointment. i saw a few bright spots throughout but mostly feel like these autobiographical stories are not at all what i'm interested in reading. ( )
  overlycriticalelisa | Jan 5, 2024 |
The titular story is a masterpiece. I found the other stories a bit forgettable, but as I flip through the pages of the book, intrigue flashes out at me, and maybe I’m confusing waning light with ‘forgettable.’ A writer writing writers—that would be the final evening. ( )
  decadesearlier | Aug 2, 2023 |
Funny sad short stories. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
there are a few low-points in here, one of which is the character of anne moore in "anne moore's life" -- maybe she seemed to familiar to me, or too without a heart, or too ... american. i don't know. i wasn't interested. i also get frustrated when bolano lists poets and authors in torrential lists that it would take me days to get through. but aside from these points, which possibly only bothered me, this book is heartbreak and hope and despair and sunshine wrapped up in some vignettes that, if you ask me, could have gone on forever.
( )
  J.Flux | Aug 13, 2022 |
G. sits at his desk to write a review of the first Bolaño he's ever read. He thinks he liked it just fine, though it wasn't the best thing he's read. He wouldn't call Bolaño a "good writer" per se, but then again, G. isn't in a position to call anyone a "good" or a "bad" writer.

Okay, let's stop it with the imitation: I was surprised that Bolaño's style seemed so simple, like a summary of someone's life (one of the stories, Anne Moore's Life actually, is functionally a summary of a woman's life), unadorned, perhaps even--dare I say it--boring, with only rare glimmers of what I would call exciting writing.

So I don't know why I ended up being so engrossed in almost all the stories. Maybe it's because Bolaño writes great characters, all of them believable because, let's face it, almost all the stories seem like they were taken out of B's autobiof and were, therefore, real. Maybe it's because I got some voyeuristic rush out of the characters. In the end, I think it's both of those, combined with the fact that I didn't have to slog through excess verbiage and description to get to what I really look for in literature: the essence of relationships between human beings.

B really gets to the bone of such relationships. His main character interacts with a peripheral friend or someone close, and then the story ends, and the message I got out of most stories is that we really only have ourselves in the end. Nothing else.
( )
  Gadi_Cohen | Sep 22, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 18 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (3 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Roberto Bolañoprimary authorall editionscalculated
Andrews, ChrisTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Selected stories from other two collections: Llamadas telefónicas (Telephone calls) and Putas asesinas (Murdering whores). It should not be combined with either of those collections, or with The return, which consists of a different selection of stories from those same collections.
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"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 ofLast Evenings on Earth have appeared inThe New Yorker andGrand Street.

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