Right now I’m halfway finished with Roberto Bolaño’s book of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth. I started reading this book solely because it was on the 2006 NYT Notable List and because I needed another foreign language (I’m committed to 10) for my Reading Across Borders Challenge. Bolaño is a Chilean author, and his stories were originally published in Spanish.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I started this book, but I’m finding Bolaño’s stories very readable. In fact, some of his stories seem to have no point at all, and yet I’m still enjoying them. I find myself gravitating toward this book when I need to be finishing up some other challenge books as well. Maybe it’s the international settings–I’m a sucker for that. Many of his characters are literary types. Another thumbs up. He also writes in first person, which makes the stories seem all the more real; reading them seems almost voyeuristic.
I’ll give the final verdict on Bolaño when I finish the book, but here, hopefully, is a small glimpse into a relatively unknown (at least to me) author.
thanks for writing a short story Monday. This sounds interesting, but when you start to realize there are great authors you’ve never even heard of, let alone all the ones that you know about, the reading thing becomes crazy – How will I ever read all I want?
It’s impossible, isn’t it? Sometimes I actually get discouraged about it, but then I just realize a person only has so many hours in a day and just read what I can.
I’m always interested in authors that don’t get a lot of press in North America. This sounds like a good find.