Roberto Bolano
autor
The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolano
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS POWER
Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolano's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels.
From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolano’s short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolano brought to life across his body of work.
Bringing together Last Evenings on Earth, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolano’s posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolano’s literary legacy.
Distant Star
Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile’s young poetry scene.
But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile’s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider’s dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins?
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator’s attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation.
Antwerp
Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing.
A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a nightmare.
An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolano’s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at ‘the big bang’ of Bolano’s enterprise into prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.
The Return
A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with.
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolano. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works.
Woes of the True Policeman
When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead.
More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women.
Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolano's masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature.
2666
Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex.
Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But, there is a darker side to the town. Girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate.
As a sense of conspiracy grows and an apocalyptic shadow draws closer, the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century history reveals itself in a novel of an astonishing scale and burning intensity.
The Skating Rink
Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí’s fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy – and revenge.
Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old masion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn’t tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.
Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.
Last Evenings On Earth
'This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...'
A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda.
'The melancholy folklore of exile,' as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved 'failed generation,' this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolano's immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
Nazi Literature in the Americas
Mass-murdering authors. Writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring. A pilot who crafts his poetry in the sky.
A tour de force of black humour and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of pan-American writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, this is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece which brought Bolano fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
The Spirit of Science Fiction
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City.
Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions.
Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city's labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses.
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER
The Insufferable Gaucho
A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation.
Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolano's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolano's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word.
The Third Reich
War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday.
Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace.
Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this 'game' are much more serious than he ever imagined.
dostupné aj ako:
The Savage Detectives
New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala.
Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe. Told, shared and mythologised by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, their testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of all time.
By Night in Chile
Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the 'wizened youth' who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.
Distant Star
Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile's young poetry scene. But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile's leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider's dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins?
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator's attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation.
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
Amulet
Román Amulet navazuje na Divoké detektivy, podobně jako Vzdálená hvězda navazovala na Nacistickou literaturu v Americe. Vypravěčkou je Auxilio Lacouture, uruguayská básnířka a matka všech mexických básníků, která se v září roku 1968 při policejním zásahu na mexické univerzitě schovala na záchodě, kde přečkala několik dnů. Čas strávený na záchodě filozofické fakulty se stane tunelem času, který ji přenáší do minulých let v Mexiku i do těch, která má ještě před sebou. Ve strhujícím toku vyprávění, které sám Bolano přirovnává k partituře pro jediný nástroj, kdežto Divocí detektivové a 2666 jsou skladba pro orchestr, se objevují slavní skuteční i smyšlení básníci, malíři a další umělci včetně Artura Belana, a vypráví se také o cestování, o severním pólu a zapomenutých vraždách. Amulet je Bolanovým šestým románem, vydaným poprvé roku 1999 v nakladatelství Anagrama.
