The novella climaxes with Belano’s return to Chile in 1973, to defend Salvador Allende’s socialist government from Pinochet’s military coup. The Grub, a short story from Last Evenings on Earth, reappears here as a chapter. A characteristically nostalgic portrait of Belano’s youth in Chile and Mexico, it offers familiar depictions of the pleasures of buying (or stealing) books, vague attractions to elusive, poetry-loving women and friends who one day disappear, never to be seen again. In fact, Cowboy Graves may be the most plainly autobiographical fiction Bolaño ever wrote. A characteristically nostalgic portrait of Belano’s youth, it offers familiar depictions of the pleasures of books Taken on its own, the first, titular story would feel rather slight the fact that it’s narrated by Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s alter ego from The Savage Detectives and elsewhere, significantly warms up the atmosphere. To an extent, the value and interest of Cowboy Graves depend on a prior familiarity with the sprawling, hyperlinked metaverse of Bolaño’s fiction. Once addicted, they can rummage deep in the barrel like the rest of us. In lieu of a colour-coded schema marking out the canonical from the supplementary, we ought to diligently steer the Bolaño-curious towards the two masterworks, 2666and The Savage Detectives, or the short story collections, or the better non-posthumous short novels such as Nazi Literature in the Americasor Distant Star. One drawback to the continued publication of posthumous works, some of them in a clearly unfinished state, is that the newcomer might take them as a starting point and, not seeing what the fuss is about, thereafter steer clear of Bolaño. Like virtually everything the incomparable Chilean wrote, a newly excavated trio of unarguably minor novellas, Cowboy Graves, is companionable, exotic, witty and glamorously suggestive. Not that this scraping of the seemingly bottomless barrel is unwelcome. It mightn’t be long before we’re presented with Bolaño: The Complete Shopping Lists or Gauchos at the Forgotten Library: Selected Email Drafts. Like pushers who know we’re hooked enough to keep buying product of diminishing quality, every couple of years they staple together something new from the notebooks, loose papers and computer files Bolaño left behind when he died in 2003 and tack it to the end of his oeuvre. T he executors of the Roberto Bolaño archive have us right where they want us.

Roberto bolano 2666 review