The Return
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A stunning collection of short stories - mostly dealing with the sex trade - by the late Chilean master and author of The Savage Detectives.
The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolano called “the secret story,” “the one we’ll never know.” Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolano’s tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihn:they always surprise. Consider the title story: a young partygoer collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor. Just as his soul is departing his body,it realizes strange happenings are afoot around his now dead body — and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Translator Chris Andrews deserves enormous recognition for introducing America to Bola o with Night in Chile back in 2003. Now, with the Bola o renaissance in full swing and the backlog of untranslated works narrowing, Andrews culls the short stories omitted from Last Evenings on Earth. Save perhaps the title story in which a dead man follows his body through an increasingly noxious series of abuses the stories have a subdued and sketchlike quality, from underworld confessionals like Snow and Joanna Silvestri, to tender reminiscences like Cell Mates and the heartbreaking missed romance of Clara. Devotees of Bola o will recognize the writer s merciless (and often humorous) fusion of high art and dark human nature in small flights like Meeting with Enrique Lihn and comic bloodbaths like William Burns, though mercy plays a surprising role in several of the stories, as in the incredible Prefiguration of Lalo Cura, in which the cast and crew of high-concept pornos face their late-life requiem. The initiated and dedicated have a welcome feast of small desolations.
