Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

Andrews has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. As well as translating nine books by Roberto Bolano and ten books (and counting) by César Aira, he also brought the French author Kaouther Adimi’s Our Riches into English for New Directions. He also taught at the University of Western Sydney, where he was a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.Ĭhris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved 'failed generation,' the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.Īuthor of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. 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.'

They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts.

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. 'The melancholy folklore of exile,' as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano.

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño