Last Evenings on Earth
Roberto Bolaño is a Chilean writer who spent a significant portion of his life in exile in Catalonia, and his short stories feature dispossessed and marginal people who often seem exiled from their own lives. Quite a lot of them are writers or artists of some kind, but they are rarely successful, lacking the talent, or the drive, or the good fortune to consolidate their aspirations into a career. If this makes the stories sound dreary, then think again. Bolaño manages to inject unexpected and compelling enigma into his characters and their situations, and the way this is bound up with the business of writing proved immensely intriguing to me.
Bolaño’s short stories beg the question of what it means to be a good writer or a bad one, for there is clearly more at stake in such a judgement than the quality of words placed on paper. One story features a Frenchman, Leprince, a poor writer but a courageous hearted individual who becomes caught up in the Resistance movement during the Second World War. Although collaborating might have meant a chance to publish his work in more reputable journals, Leprince chooses the route of virtue, helping out the first rate authors in their Resistance missions. In this unusual way he gains a kind of acceptance he has never known before although the stink of his modest abilities clings to him:
‘There is something elusive, something indefinable about him that people find repellent. They know he is there to help, but deep down they simply cannot warm to him. Perhaps they sense that Leprince is tainted by the years he has spent in the underworld of sad magazines and the gutter press, from which no man or beast escapes, except the exceedingly strong, brilliant and bestial.’
After a series of adventures, Leprince ends up one night talking to a successful lady novelist with whom he unexpectedly discovers a bond; alone with her he opens his heart and confesses his longings and his disappointments in the literary sphere. In turn she advises with stringent honesty that the problem lies with his residual ‘repellent’ quality, and that if he wishes to succeed the answer is ‘to disappear, go under cover, try not to let his face show in his writing.’ Leprince is gratified to have been heard for once, but offended by the advice which he has no intention of taking. Instead he prefers to accept his lot as a bad writer, a position which he understands to be wholly necessary and useful to life’s good writers. ‘For some,’ Bolaño writes, ‘his presence, his fragility, his terrifying sovereignity serve as a spur or reminder.’
Good writers, then, if we deduce their characteristics from the shadowy contours of their opposites, have a certain tenacity and drive, that might mutate into burning ambition and arrogance but might equally put them in touch with the vital center of their existence. In another story, Bolaño recounts the changing fortunes of a woman, Anne Moore, and the friends and lovers who surround her. Most are drop outs, one way or another, but the act of creativity always holds out the potential for redemption, or provides a brief interlude in which life suddenly seems more attractive. As for example one friend, Mark, who
‘published a book of poems, which was something of a success in the Berkeley student community, and he gave readings and took part in some conferences. It seemed like the ideal moment for him to start a new relationship and share his life with someone, but after the initial buzz, he retreated to his apartment and she never heard anything more about him.’
Being ready to write is like being ready to fall in love, a state of open accessibility, a readiness for adventure and intrigue, an embrace of life in all its multicoloured variation. Giving up writing is a retreat and an abandonment, an act of self-protection that is at the same time an act of spiritual suicide.
Yet the fundamental problem with writing, Bolaño’s stories seem to suggest, is that no one ever believes that they are a good writer, no matter how the literary world treats them. One of my favourite stories features A and B, two men from similar backgrounds who find success in different ways. A is the first to become a successful writer and B somewhat jealously suspects that the accolade goes to his head and makes him pompous and self-righteous. So B then writes a book in which one chapter contains a parody of A. When it is published, A himself reviews the book, and is so enthusiastic in his account that the book becomes a minor bestseller. B’s guilt and his lack of comprehension send him into a tailspin. Did A recognize himself in the pages of B’s book or did he not? Is this a cunning strategy on A’s part, or an act of extraordinary blindness? What follows is an entertaining and complex psychodrama as B conjures up every possible fantasy to account for A’s behaviour, although he never the simple one that A actually liked it. The story concludes at the moment when the two men finally meet, and I applauded this ending as it showed how the Hydra-headed fantasies were the point, not the reality or the truth of the situation between them.
There’s a quality of heroic apathy to Bolaño’s characters that I recognize, and that probably comes from too many hours spent hoping the right words will come. There’s a superficial emptiness to them as well, that hints at a mighty capacity for absorbing what’s close by, as well as the possibility of infinite, dark depths that should never be brought to the light (except glancingly in limpid prose). Most of all I just loved a book that dared to write (and so well) about the tortures that inflict anyone who tries to be creative. Bolaño has become a bit of a cult literary figure these days, and on the strength of these stories I can certainly understand why.
Reviewed by litlove
- Array
