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The Return
As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolano story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot—and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own).
Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.
Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.
199 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
74 people are currently reading
1933 people want to read
About the author
Roberto Bolaño
148 books6,578 followersFor most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain. Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.
He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.
Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.
In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño passed away. Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."
Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.
In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.
In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.
Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.
In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño passed away. Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."
Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.
In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.
In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 183 reviews
May 13, 2013
Roberto Bolaño. I love the way your name rolls off my tongue. Roberto Bolaño.
Roberto, my dear, you have a filthy mouth. Not that I mind exactly, I like a little filth in my life from time to time. Keeps things interesting. Keeps me on my toes.
Your little collection was so thought provoking that as I read, I often found my mind going off on little tangents. Like... is the solicitation of prostitutes really as commonplace as you make it sound? Have any of my friends solicited prostitutes? My boyfriends? It's something no one talks about, yet you, Señor, make it sound as if it's as ordinary as ordering an omelet for breakfast.
And now that you find yourself in the hereafter, tell me, is there really such a thing as a soul? And does it wander around after the body dies, continuing it's pitiable existence with nothing to entertain it but it's own thoughts? Or does it observe all of our dirty little secrets? Or both?
I wonder. I wonder. What sort of life must you have lead? So much violence in your stories. So much sex and murder and mayhem. Yet there's a tenderness to it all. Or am I just making that up?
Either way, I wish you were here. I'd like to take you to dinner.
April 21, 2015
The posthumously popular, it turns out, always have scraps left in a filing cabinet, on the kitchen table, under the bed, that will eventually see the light of day. I don't say that to be critical. In fact, I'm thankful really. Wouldn't it be nice if you could spend an evening with an old friend, an old lover, someone who was once full of energy and ideas, but now gone. A parent's handwritten note. A VHS tape. The same voice, but a chat you missed the first time round. A vivid dream.
This is like watching The Beatles goofing around in a studio, before George Martin pressed it onto vinyl.
So it's uneven, this, sometimes slight. Riffs and characters appear that will bloom larger in other works. Yet, a few of the pieces really stood out.
The title story begins this way:
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.
Yes, it's dark - Bolaño definitely had some dark visions - but it's not Bataille dark.
There's a piece called "Murdering Whores" - which begs the question who is being murdered. This too is dark, yet I loved the structure of it. It looks like a short story. But it's a poem.
There are more whores, voodoo soccer players, the Russian Mafia. If you've read and liked Bolaño, you'd recognize the scribbles.
This is like watching The Beatles goofing around in a studio, before George Martin pressed it onto vinyl.
So it's uneven, this, sometimes slight. Riffs and characters appear that will bloom larger in other works. Yet, a few of the pieces really stood out.
The title story begins this way:
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.
Yes, it's dark - Bolaño definitely had some dark visions - but it's not Bataille dark.
There's a piece called "Murdering Whores" - which begs the question who is being murdered. This too is dark, yet I loved the structure of it. It looks like a short story. But it's a poem.
There are more whores, voodoo soccer players, the Russian Mafia. If you've read and liked Bolaño, you'd recognize the scribbles.
October 10, 2012
I've never read Bolaño before. I don't know anything about him, his books, his publication history. I know that he is dead and that he wrote 2666. I also know that this time next year none of the above will be true. The Return has changed me in a way I'm not sure I'm able to articulate, but I'll try. Here's a writer who has united his love of genre fiction and passion for literature in a way that makes them inseparable. I don't know how you talk about The Return without talking about political thrillers, prison flicks, porno movies, ghost stories and dreams. He's taken low-brow culture and transformed it into high art. Many have tried, but Bolaño has succeeded. For the last year or so I've been working toward an understanding of what my own writing seeks to accomplish and the best way to share it with the world. Bolaño has provided me with an answer: without compromise.
September 27, 2021
It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled.
Though Enrique Vila-Matas cautioned against the practice, I'm reasonably sure Roberto Bolaño lived as much inside literature as he did in what could be termed real life. This collection is grim. It has all the manners of noir trappings and deceit, disappointment and death appear all the norm. I kept waiting for an uneven story to clunk into view. It didn't happen. The stories didn't appear as bookish as in The Insufferable Gaucho but The Return proved completely compelling. The locations appear to largely alternate between Barcelona and Santiago with Moscow and porn shoots of Southern California thrown in for giggles. There's a sociopath and there's necrophilia.
Though Enrique Vila-Matas cautioned against the practice, I'm reasonably sure Roberto Bolaño lived as much inside literature as he did in what could be termed real life. This collection is grim. It has all the manners of noir trappings and deceit, disappointment and death appear all the norm. I kept waiting for an uneven story to clunk into view. It didn't happen. The stories didn't appear as bookish as in The Insufferable Gaucho but The Return proved completely compelling. The locations appear to largely alternate between Barcelona and Santiago with Moscow and porn shoots of Southern California thrown in for giggles. There's a sociopath and there's necrophilia.
July 28, 2020
Not quite as good as Last Evenings on Earth. 4.5 stars.
"William Burns", "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura", and "Murdering Whores" are near-perfect. These stories are saturated with a particular type of mystery that I look for in all literature, but only occasionally find. They each reveal something, or numerous things, that can't be expressed directly, hence the need to construct a narrative to shed light on them (however dim, however partial, however fleeting). These are desperate and violent stories, as is par for the course for Bolaño. It's as if they reveal a portion of the night whose existence is rarely acknowledged (yet which holds a certain value, as Bolaño seemed to recognize).
"Meeting with Enrique Lihn" is very good too. And "Buba" isn't nearly as bad as some reviewers have made it out to be (I enjoyed it).
Edit: Minutes after writing this, I'm coming back to give this book five stars. It's a little uneven, but worth it for the stories that stand out.
"William Burns", "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura", and "Murdering Whores" are near-perfect. These stories are saturated with a particular type of mystery that I look for in all literature, but only occasionally find. They each reveal something, or numerous things, that can't be expressed directly, hence the need to construct a narrative to shed light on them (however dim, however partial, however fleeting). These are desperate and violent stories, as is par for the course for Bolaño. It's as if they reveal a portion of the night whose existence is rarely acknowledged (yet which holds a certain value, as Bolaño seemed to recognize).
"Meeting with Enrique Lihn" is very good too. And "Buba" isn't nearly as bad as some reviewers have made it out to be (I enjoyed it).
Edit: Minutes after writing this, I'm coming back to give this book five stars. It's a little uneven, but worth it for the stories that stand out.
October 12, 2015
A well-rounded collection of stories by one of literature's greatest sons. The title story, "The Return", was my favourite from the book. It's very strange and highly radical, it reeks of Bolaño. Other favourites include, "Snow", "Detectives", "Clara", and "Photos". (oh and yeah, skip "Buba", it's very long and very boring. Unless that's what Bolaño wanted...)
August 9, 2016
Haunting, weird, and surprisingly emotional at some points. This is one of the best short stories collection of contemporary literature. My favorite stories of this collection is The Return, Another Russian Tale, Buba.
December 20, 2024
The second book I've read by Bolaño, and I'm now convinced I will love everything he's ever written. My favourite stories in this collection were: 'Joanna Silvestri', 'Prefiguration of Lalo Cura', 'Photos', and 'Meeting With Enrique Lihn'.
March 16, 2014
For the most part, I didn't like this. Though much better than Insufferable Gaucho (which is part of the cache that the inheritors are publishing, so as to 'cache in'), it was nowhere near as good as Last Evenings on Earth -- the entire volume of which is a wonder....
...till I got to the last two stories ("Photos" and "Meeting with Enrique Lihn"), whereupon I remembered why I love Bolaño -- how his writing can be so beautiful and so sad.
Perhaps, if I went back and reread more patiently, some of the others would be more appealing. (The first story, "Snow", and the title story, "The Return", are OK -- the others seemed a bit cold.)
...till I got to the last two stories ("Photos" and "Meeting with Enrique Lihn"), whereupon I remembered why I love Bolaño -- how his writing can be so beautiful and so sad.
Perhaps, if I went back and reread more patiently, some of the others would be more appealing. (The first story, "Snow", and the title story, "The Return", are OK -- the others seemed a bit cold.)
August 11, 2021
Despite all the hoopla about a Chilean author who was NOT Isabel Allende finally gaining worldwide accolades, Roberto Bolaño had been a disappointment for me. His acerbic comments about other Chilean authors didn't win him any fans here - he asserted that, "Isabel Allende doesn't write, she scribbles" - but then in a "brilliant career move", he died at the age of 50, the world took note and the clubbish literary community hastened to claim him as one of theirs. Suddenly, the two biggest novels, "The Savage Detectives" and "2666", were available everywhere. I haven't read these but I read two other books and these left me perplexed and disappointed without a lot of enthusiam to go back in any hurry. (This despite owning those two big books, large in size as they are.) However, about ten years ago, I also found this collection of stories in a used book shop and it had sat on my shelf unread until recently I decided it had to go - but first, I'll read it. The first few stories were unimpressive but as I read on... My conclusion was that maybe the literary world is on to something... Bolaño is a wicked storyteller with a frequently morbid sense-of-humor which defies all good taste and that's why he is to be loved and admired. (Necrophiliacs get a shout out.) It's certainly worth checking out, despite the uneven quality common to collections.
August 28, 2021
The mystery of life in Latin America. Like a little bird charmed by the gaze of a snake.
Roberto Bolaño
As one reviewer summed reading The Return by Roberto Bolaño:
There’s no running from spells cast by a dead Chilean, the most haunted blessing a reader could hope for.
Roberto Bolaño
As one reviewer summed reading The Return by Roberto Bolaño:
There’s no running from spells cast by a dead Chilean, the most haunted blessing a reader could hope for.
April 6, 2022
I have a tendency to become addicted to certain writers occasionally and try to read everything that is available by them. This began over fifty years ago with Hermann Hesse and has continued up to my current infatuation, Edwidge Danticat. So, back in 2007 when I read The Savage Detectives I began to read everything I could by Bolano as they slowly came out in translation. The Return is one of the few I hadn't read yet. It's a fantastic collection of short stories. The book started out with two wonderful stories, Snow and Another Russian Tale, that reminded me of why I liked his work so much. All of the stories were great but if I were to pick a favorite it would be The Return about a man's spirit living on past his death. A great read!
July 1, 2013
This collection has a lot of Bolano trademarks: noir styling, multinational settings, stories within stories. It is darker than average, but more than anything it's straight up spooky.
He has a genius way of creating tension out of nothing. The characters aren't certain, nor are the readers, but something malevolent is lurking in the mundane surroundings. Even if it doesn't amount to anything, the questioning provoked by the eeriness is almost worse. The offhanded way the stories are told, by acquaintances at the bar or via unexplained tete-a-tete, contributes to the shadowy, menacing tone. It's haunting, which, according to the back cover, is the goal of each tale.
Whether in Spain or Russia or the USA, each story could take place anywhere and have the same effect. Simultaneously, cultural and historical context is illuminated (rather than explained) by the characters and their locales in a way that seems authentic. Nationality is both highlighted and rendered irrelevant. That's why Bolano is a universal badass.
He has a genius way of creating tension out of nothing. The characters aren't certain, nor are the readers, but something malevolent is lurking in the mundane surroundings. Even if it doesn't amount to anything, the questioning provoked by the eeriness is almost worse. The offhanded way the stories are told, by acquaintances at the bar or via unexplained tete-a-tete, contributes to the shadowy, menacing tone. It's haunting, which, according to the back cover, is the goal of each tale.
Whether in Spain or Russia or the USA, each story could take place anywhere and have the same effect. Simultaneously, cultural and historical context is illuminated (rather than explained) by the characters and their locales in a way that seems authentic. Nationality is both highlighted and rendered irrelevant. That's why Bolano is a universal badass.
September 10, 2023
Finished Roberto Bolano's "The Return", a series of stories about reappearing, and reacquainting with the dead and those who have been lost and now found. It's middling Bolano at its best, (since I've read his juggernaut, 2666, and the masterpieces Last Evenings on Earth and Nazi Literature in the Americas) though it is always infused with his trademark sardonic sense of humor, and overzealous empathy towards those left behind. The best story is "Cell-Mates" and a close second is the hilarious, yet creepy title story.
April 24, 2010
the return is bolaño's second book of short stories to appear in english. culled from the same two collections (llamadas telefónicas & putas asesinas) as the stories in last evenings on earth, these thirteen tales are trademark bolaño. the return is rife with the themes that characterize his other works; sex, violence, art, poetry, and the underworld. wayward & lowlife characters abound in the usual forms of detectives, criminals, porn stars, writers, and expatriates. the semi-autobiographical arturo belano is present herein as well. amongst the strongest stories in this collection are the title work (an unforgettable, metaphysical tale of necrophilia), "murdering whores," "william burns," and "buba" (the story of a soccer player well practiced in magic). a few of these stories are reminiscent of bolano's more stylized works, and are written in the single-paragraph narrative form employed in by night in chile. the return is the third of four bolaño works to be published this year, and will undoubtedly serve to reinforce the late chilean's tremendous literary legacy.
...a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia.
...a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia.
January 31, 2019
A little more uneven than Last Evenings on Earth (which was just unimpeachably great from start to finish)—but the highs, when they come (“The Return,” “Buba,” a few others) are just incredibly high, some of the best stories I’ve ever read. On the other hand, “Detectives” just seemed embarrassingly bad and there were a few others near the end that just made no impression. I definitely got the feeling that he was trying hard for greatness here; a little less relaxed, a little more fevered with intention.
May 10, 2025
The title story has some of the best opening lines ever: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after death. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac."
February 25, 2025
Dear Roberto,
Ever since I first read you, when I picked up your books "2666" and "The Savage Detectives" in the spring of 2019, I have wondered about your fancy for poets. How different poetry is now. Now, we have Instagram poets, we have celebrity poets, and somehow it seems like every second person I meet is a poet. Writing poetry has ended up meaning writing in an indirect (or not so indirect) way about one's feelings. How different it was back then, when you were writing, how much was at stake for the poets of Mexico, the poets of Spain, the poets of Argentina and Chile. I think of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, or the "mother of Mexican poetry" Auxilio Lacouture, your hero of "Amulet", who hides in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of philosophy during a military raid of NAUM, where students had become radicals. Poetry, for them, was mixed up in revolution, in the lifestyle of the auteur, and whatever image there was in the poet was underscored by the content of their lives.
I got soaked reading "The Return" whilst walking in the rain. It was during the titular short story, where the soul of a dead body returns to the world and finds himself face to face with a necrophiliac who has rented his dead body for sex. "Classic Bolano" I thought, never one to shy away from the grotesque. It is a special moment when I cannot stop reading. So I let the rain pelt the pages, and I sat on the stoop of my front door, my hair still drenched in rain, reading to the very end of your story.
The glass floor in Enrique Lihn's apartment at the end of "The Return" was something I wished I had wrote. Same with the bathroom stall visions of Mexican children marching through an apocalyptic Mexico. Surreal bits like that; a world not just lived, but dreamed, but dreaming of an apocalypse already rooted in the present. Whatever it means to be a poet, for you it was decidedly true that to be a writer meant to write about everything, to leave no stone unturned. When else, other than in fiction, will I listen to the testimonies of Porn stars, of "murdering whores", of necrophiliacs, pimps, detectives, and Chileans exiled in Russia? Your world was one full of exotic expletives, where paintings hang on the loose ligaments of land and lust and legacy.
I've been saying that this is my year of Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Thomas Bernhard, and, well, you. Thank you for never disappointing.
- Braden
Ever since I first read you, when I picked up your books "2666" and "The Savage Detectives" in the spring of 2019, I have wondered about your fancy for poets. How different poetry is now. Now, we have Instagram poets, we have celebrity poets, and somehow it seems like every second person I meet is a poet. Writing poetry has ended up meaning writing in an indirect (or not so indirect) way about one's feelings. How different it was back then, when you were writing, how much was at stake for the poets of Mexico, the poets of Spain, the poets of Argentina and Chile. I think of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, or the "mother of Mexican poetry" Auxilio Lacouture, your hero of "Amulet", who hides in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of philosophy during a military raid of NAUM, where students had become radicals. Poetry, for them, was mixed up in revolution, in the lifestyle of the auteur, and whatever image there was in the poet was underscored by the content of their lives.
I got soaked reading "The Return" whilst walking in the rain. It was during the titular short story, where the soul of a dead body returns to the world and finds himself face to face with a necrophiliac who has rented his dead body for sex. "Classic Bolano" I thought, never one to shy away from the grotesque. It is a special moment when I cannot stop reading. So I let the rain pelt the pages, and I sat on the stoop of my front door, my hair still drenched in rain, reading to the very end of your story.
The glass floor in Enrique Lihn's apartment at the end of "The Return" was something I wished I had wrote. Same with the bathroom stall visions of Mexican children marching through an apocalyptic Mexico. Surreal bits like that; a world not just lived, but dreamed, but dreaming of an apocalypse already rooted in the present. Whatever it means to be a poet, for you it was decidedly true that to be a writer meant to write about everything, to leave no stone unturned. When else, other than in fiction, will I listen to the testimonies of Porn stars, of "murdering whores", of necrophiliacs, pimps, detectives, and Chileans exiled in Russia? Your world was one full of exotic expletives, where paintings hang on the loose ligaments of land and lust and legacy.
I've been saying that this is my year of Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Thomas Bernhard, and, well, you. Thank you for never disappointing.
- Braden
May 28, 2023
3.5
A collection of 13 weird, complex and haunting short stories.
A collection of 13 weird, complex and haunting short stories.
July 31, 2010
Stories that Weave Surrealism with the Raw Mundane
Roberto Bolaño is deceased, sadly, but his phenomenal talent as one of the century's greatest writers lives on, thanks in great part to the dedication of Chris Andrews as his translator. In this new collection of short stories his style continues to mesmerize - long sentences without a lot of punctuation, many pages without a paragraph break, mixing voices within a conversation, flowing poetic phrases within raw descriptions of things usually just whispered or left unsaid - all of these attributes are here in a very fine collection of stories that bear re-reading frequently.
Bolaño jumps around the globe for new locations in this collection: he begins with a story in Moscow ('Snow") about the involvement with the narrator and a female high jumper who the narrator is to court for an obese criminal but ends up....never give away Bolaño's endings, another tale from Amalfitano about a strange Andalusian in Russia whose lack of understanding of languages poses problems, to Chile and Spain, and Southern California. His characters range from misfits, to a man who dies and becomes a ghost only to observe his body transported from a morgue to the mansion of a wealthy designer who just happens to be a necrophiliac, to a porn star working in Venice, California making movies until she discovers her hero from the past -'Jack' Holmes (an obvious play on the famous mightily endowed porn star John Holmes) who is fading away from AIDS, to an encounter between an athlete and a prostitute that is rich with messages of human communication. And of course much more.
Throughout this selection of thirteen stories Bolaño (with the help of Andrews) entertains, shocks, makes us laugh, and most of all makes us marvel at his command of the art of writing. This is a magnificent collection, another great book in the legacy of Roberto Bolaño. Highly recommended.
Grady Harp
Roberto Bolaño is deceased, sadly, but his phenomenal talent as one of the century's greatest writers lives on, thanks in great part to the dedication of Chris Andrews as his translator. In this new collection of short stories his style continues to mesmerize - long sentences without a lot of punctuation, many pages without a paragraph break, mixing voices within a conversation, flowing poetic phrases within raw descriptions of things usually just whispered or left unsaid - all of these attributes are here in a very fine collection of stories that bear re-reading frequently.
Bolaño jumps around the globe for new locations in this collection: he begins with a story in Moscow ('Snow") about the involvement with the narrator and a female high jumper who the narrator is to court for an obese criminal but ends up....never give away Bolaño's endings, another tale from Amalfitano about a strange Andalusian in Russia whose lack of understanding of languages poses problems, to Chile and Spain, and Southern California. His characters range from misfits, to a man who dies and becomes a ghost only to observe his body transported from a morgue to the mansion of a wealthy designer who just happens to be a necrophiliac, to a porn star working in Venice, California making movies until she discovers her hero from the past -'Jack' Holmes (an obvious play on the famous mightily endowed porn star John Holmes) who is fading away from AIDS, to an encounter between an athlete and a prostitute that is rich with messages of human communication. And of course much more.
Throughout this selection of thirteen stories Bolaño (with the help of Andrews) entertains, shocks, makes us laugh, and most of all makes us marvel at his command of the art of writing. This is a magnificent collection, another great book in the legacy of Roberto Bolaño. Highly recommended.
Grady Harp
May 12, 2011
"I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac."
These opening lines of the title story can be read as either knockouts or kind of smug/gimmicky. And that seems like the magic of Bolano--staking a story to a premise that may seem cute or contrived and then disarming his readers with moments of unlikely sympathy/understanding. It is literary hard drugs for me.
And this seems like a particularly good introduction to his work in that each of the 13 stories has some zip to it and in aggregate they hit most of his major themes. No one story threatens to sabotage the collection (as occurs with both DFW collections where the longer stories are intent on flattening out any sense of rising action to the point where people who might very well enjoy the other stories check out).
Oh maybe I'll finally give 2666 a shot...
These opening lines of the title story can be read as either knockouts or kind of smug/gimmicky. And that seems like the magic of Bolano--staking a story to a premise that may seem cute or contrived and then disarming his readers with moments of unlikely sympathy/understanding. It is literary hard drugs for me.
And this seems like a particularly good introduction to his work in that each of the 13 stories has some zip to it and in aggregate they hit most of his major themes. No one story threatens to sabotage the collection (as occurs with both DFW collections where the longer stories are intent on flattening out any sense of rising action to the point where people who might very well enjoy the other stories check out).
Oh maybe I'll finally give 2666 a shot...
April 21, 2012
Malam minggu lepas saya nampak Bolano, dekat gerai burger Uptown Damnsara. Saya lintas kawasan tu sapa abang kawasan di situ dan dia kata pada saya, hang kenai budak tu. Yang mana, saya tanya. Yang pakai ceghemin mata bulat, mulut belemoih dengan burger tu. Saya kata, oh, Bolano. Kenai gitu-gitu je. Dia kata dia penulih. Hang pecaya tak? Rambut panjang macam Tarzan. Ada hati nak jadi penulis. Abang kawasan tu, namanya Jim Beng Beng - yang mungkin lucu bila kita dengar hinggalah kita tau yang tiap aksara b.e.n.g. adalah penanda jumlah orang yang dia dah bunuh - Dia lambung rokok dan mancis sekaligus dan menangkapnya dengan bibir mungilnya - sudah menyala. Hang pi cakap pada dia, beliau sambung, kata pada dia, mai sini peghangai tu leklok sket. Aku angguk dan melangkah ke Arjuna. Kata orang makanan di situ sedap. Entahlah. Malam makin suram. Hilai makin hilang.
February 18, 2024
Found this at the library, new books-14 day checkout. The stories from Putas Asesinas and Llamadas Telefónicas and two new ones that didn't end up in Last Evenings on Earth.
September 6, 2023
Bolanoverse’e ait bir başka öyküler toplaması. Kitabın yarısı Türkçe’ye çevrilmeyen “Llamadas Telefonicas” kitabından, diğer yarısı muhteşem “Katil Orospular” kitabından öyküler barındırıyor. Öykülerden birini daha evvel okuduğumu düşündüm, sanırım Vahşi Hafiyeler romanında anlattığı kısa bir hikayenin aynısı... Haricinde yine otobiyografik unsurlar barındırıyor kitap, Şili darbesi sonrası işkence sırası beklerken karşılaştığı lise arkadaşının polis çıkmasını öyküleştirmiş. Güzeldi.
January 23, 2025
Finished in a bar.
Bolano feels like a ‘formative’ writer; a storyteller who is important to discover and learn from – I find myself trying all the time to trace the seams in his stories, dissecting his sentences and his pace, trying to work out exactly how he is able to do what he is able to do. Difficult. I wrote a review of this book yesterday but it was far too metaphorical. Every story is like being let in on a secret. Nothing as good as ‘Labyrinth’ here, though.
Bolano feels like a ‘formative’ writer; a storyteller who is important to discover and learn from – I find myself trying all the time to trace the seams in his stories, dissecting his sentences and his pace, trying to work out exactly how he is able to do what he is able to do. Difficult. I wrote a review of this book yesterday but it was far too metaphorical. Every story is like being let in on a secret. Nothing as good as ‘Labyrinth’ here, though.
April 24, 2024
Really only for Bolaño completionists. Mostly spare stories that feel more like drafts or half-hearted scribbles. Definitely some moments where the writer I love shows up for a paragraph or five, but wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who hadn’t read many of his other books first.
November 28, 2024
One of Bolano's best and most underappreciated works. Technically this is a selection from two of his Spanish language short story collections (Last Evenings on Earth being the other stories from those two that aren't collected here) but nonetheless... it's phenomenal. Better than Last Evenings even. Every story sans one or two is mind blowing. It covers Bolano's typical themes from imperialism, leftism, literature, mysticism, etc. More people need to read this one.
March 14, 2020
Another solid short story collection from Bolano. Just as in all his other writing, there's a sense of some deferred evil: of something ominous and violent lurking just beyond the edge of perception that never fully manifests.
The stories in 'The Return' are more sexually charged than Bolano's other work: murderous prostitutes, female porn stars, even some (gulp) casual necrophelia. There are several really stand-out pieces here, especially 'Joanna Sivestri' 'Prefiguration of Lalo Cura' and the title piece. They each showcase Bolano's ability to create poignent, warped, visions of the Spanish-speaking world built around sexual commerce. Even his minor pieces are packed full of the same expansive weariness as his big novels.
The stories in 'The Return' are more sexually charged than Bolano's other work: murderous prostitutes, female porn stars, even some (gulp) casual necrophelia. There are several really stand-out pieces here, especially 'Joanna Sivestri' 'Prefiguration of Lalo Cura' and the title piece. They each showcase Bolano's ability to create poignent, warped, visions of the Spanish-speaking world built around sexual commerce. Even his minor pieces are packed full of the same expansive weariness as his big novels.
September 18, 2020
A series of person tragedies punctuated by a book I was looking forward to but ended up hating led me to take a sabbatical from reading. Its been difficult, the long road back to myself. Luckily, Bolano was there waiting. I don't know what will happen when I finish all his works. I try to save and sprinkle them throughout my reading stack. Maybe the world will end. It feels like that sometimes.
I read but didn't review The Romantic Dogs because I am not comfortable enough to have any specific views on poetry. Though I also try to stay away from short story collections, I owe it to Bolano to speak up. So, without beating around the bush anymore, here are my thoughts on The Return.
Snow - A story is told by a man whose family fled Chile due to them being Communist. They end up in Russia and he becomes a procurer for a Russian Mobster. One of the girls that the mobster wants is a gymnast who ends up in a side relationship with the narrator. Its kept hidden until one day the girl reveals the truth to the mobster who ends up beating the narrator but lets him live. It turns out to be a bad decision because our speaker then kills the mobster and leaves Russia. This isn't a favorite of mine from this collection but I've noticed other people refer to it among theirs. It IS a very easily identifiable Bolano story.
Another Russian Tale - A quick little story about a WW2 Soldier in a Spanish Division who is wounded, discharged, and accidentally sent to the wrong division. While it's being sorted out, the German division he is with gets captured and he is discovered by Russians. They torture him but the language barrier is proving difficult to confess his innocence. Eventually, they try to pull his tongue with pliers and he shouts the word "Cunt" but to their ears, it is "Kunst" which means Artist. Thinking he is an Artist, they end up letting him live, and eventually when the war ends he goes on with his life.
William Burns - An American is hired to look after two women who insist they are being stalked by a serial killer. He believes he found the guy per the instructions given to him by the women and ends up kidnapping the man's dog. The guy comes to the house and is murdered by the American. Later on, the American is killed. It's unclear, at least to me, if the man was a stalker, to begin with. The American doesn't seem to believe so at the end. He thinks it was a case of mistaken identity. I had the feeling that maybe the women intentionally misled him. Maybe the man was an ex-lover. They were very quick to start disposing of the body. I don't think a man looking for his dog would break into a house the way he does. Maybe this is all obvious to everybody else.
Detectives- A conversation between two detectives which ends with one of them recounting a story about Arturo Belano in jail. We've seen the other side of this story in another form, in another work. The back and forth between the detectives take a while to get us to the actual story here.
Cell Mates - The story of a man who begins an open relationship with a woman who is crazy. Both of them are former prisoners. I didn't take notes but I believe in this one the woman and one of her boyfriends try to murder a friend of the narrator.
Clara - Another relationship story. The girl develops cancer. In the end, she disappears.
Joanna Sivestri - A Porn Star does a shoot in Los Angelos. She visits an old friend, a former porn star, who is dying. It's clear he has AIDS but Joanna sleeps with him anyway which, knowing how the crisis was responded to in the early '90s, pulls me out of the story for lack of believability. Unless the point was she just doesn't care.
Prefiguration of Lalo Cura – Lalo Cura makes many appearances in Bolano's work. This story is about his mother being a porn star while pregnant with him.
Murdering Whores - A whore narrates. She kidnaps a man she's seen on TV and is about to murder him. If you notice at this point the stories tend to have a narrative running through them all.
The Return – The best story in the collection and one of the strangest and funniest Bolano ever wrote. A man has a heart attack while out dancing and dies. He recounts how he hated the movie Ghosts, especially the scene when Swayze first leaves his body, but that is exactly what happens to him. He follows his body to the morgue and is hanging around without direction until two workers take his body with them. The body is sent to the home of a famous Fashion Designer who doesn't sodomize it but gets off on it. Then our Ghost speaks and the Designer hears. After proving that he is the ghost of the deceased and not a hidden speaker, he decides to stick around with the designer even when his body is retrieved by the workers. An unlikely friendship has developed.
Buba - The story of a Soccer Team with bad luck. The narrator is a player who is injured in or before his first game. He ends up rooming with Buba who is an African. One night, Buba tells our narrator and another man on the team if they give blood to him he can guarantee a win. This starts a cycle that lasts all season and beyond. Buba always scores two goals, with the remaining going to them. Eventually, Buba is traded to another team and they end up beating the team the narrator was on. The book ends with the team, sans Buba, reuniting for a documentary. Buba had died in a car crash earlier on.
Photos - Arturo Belano looks at photos of poets and thinks about who he wants to have sex with.
Meeting with Enrique Lihn - Bolano, as himself and not Belano, has a dream he meets the very much dead Enrique Lihn who tells Bolano he admires him. There's also a case of double mistaken identity on the steps of Lihn's building which is an amusing step away from the main story.
How Bolano writes humans is what makes his work special. I can't think of one American author who captures our essence in quite the same way. How Bolano tells stories, and how he has his characters tell each other stories, is so distinct. There is a deeper emotional richness. Even lighthearted conversations have heavy undertones and that's what sticks out to me. Bolano is like an English Teacher's wet dream in that regard.
What did I think of The Return?
As with any Short Story collection, I like some more than others. My favorites would have to be The Return and Buba. The other stories were more commonly fitting with Bolano's style and that worked against them here. The Return and Buba were uniquely different and showed a side of the author I wish we got to explore more of. I have a mental block of Cell Mates and Clara beyond them being two very similar stories. The non-romantic in me could be the catalyst behind that one. Bolano is at his best when he writes these lost or broken people. As a collection, I like how the themes flow from one story to the next but the stories about porn stars and whores disengaged me. I'm not a prude. Trust me on that one. The first porn-related story was ok. I'm not interested in these people but moving past the sex there's a poignant story. Then the Lalo Cura story came. I think out of all Bolano's characters, Lalo Cura is someone I'm never big on. The Murderous Whores story was better, in a different sort of way, but if it had been a touch longer I think it would have been more interesting. So there are a few misses for me here. Is it enough to pull me out of my reading slump? Absolutely. Check it out for the title story.
I read but didn't review The Romantic Dogs because I am not comfortable enough to have any specific views on poetry. Though I also try to stay away from short story collections, I owe it to Bolano to speak up. So, without beating around the bush anymore, here are my thoughts on The Return.
Snow - A story is told by a man whose family fled Chile due to them being Communist. They end up in Russia and he becomes a procurer for a Russian Mobster. One of the girls that the mobster wants is a gymnast who ends up in a side relationship with the narrator. Its kept hidden until one day the girl reveals the truth to the mobster who ends up beating the narrator but lets him live. It turns out to be a bad decision because our speaker then kills the mobster and leaves Russia. This isn't a favorite of mine from this collection but I've noticed other people refer to it among theirs. It IS a very easily identifiable Bolano story.
Another Russian Tale - A quick little story about a WW2 Soldier in a Spanish Division who is wounded, discharged, and accidentally sent to the wrong division. While it's being sorted out, the German division he is with gets captured and he is discovered by Russians. They torture him but the language barrier is proving difficult to confess his innocence. Eventually, they try to pull his tongue with pliers and he shouts the word "Cunt" but to their ears, it is "Kunst" which means Artist. Thinking he is an Artist, they end up letting him live, and eventually when the war ends he goes on with his life.
William Burns - An American is hired to look after two women who insist they are being stalked by a serial killer. He believes he found the guy per the instructions given to him by the women and ends up kidnapping the man's dog. The guy comes to the house and is murdered by the American. Later on, the American is killed. It's unclear, at least to me, if the man was a stalker, to begin with. The American doesn't seem to believe so at the end. He thinks it was a case of mistaken identity. I had the feeling that maybe the women intentionally misled him. Maybe the man was an ex-lover. They were very quick to start disposing of the body. I don't think a man looking for his dog would break into a house the way he does. Maybe this is all obvious to everybody else.
Detectives- A conversation between two detectives which ends with one of them recounting a story about Arturo Belano in jail. We've seen the other side of this story in another form, in another work. The back and forth between the detectives take a while to get us to the actual story here.
Cell Mates - The story of a man who begins an open relationship with a woman who is crazy. Both of them are former prisoners. I didn't take notes but I believe in this one the woman and one of her boyfriends try to murder a friend of the narrator.
Clara - Another relationship story. The girl develops cancer. In the end, she disappears.
Joanna Sivestri - A Porn Star does a shoot in Los Angelos. She visits an old friend, a former porn star, who is dying. It's clear he has AIDS but Joanna sleeps with him anyway which, knowing how the crisis was responded to in the early '90s, pulls me out of the story for lack of believability. Unless the point was she just doesn't care.
Prefiguration of Lalo Cura – Lalo Cura makes many appearances in Bolano's work. This story is about his mother being a porn star while pregnant with him.
Murdering Whores - A whore narrates. She kidnaps a man she's seen on TV and is about to murder him. If you notice at this point the stories tend to have a narrative running through them all.
The Return – The best story in the collection and one of the strangest and funniest Bolano ever wrote. A man has a heart attack while out dancing and dies. He recounts how he hated the movie Ghosts, especially the scene when Swayze first leaves his body, but that is exactly what happens to him. He follows his body to the morgue and is hanging around without direction until two workers take his body with them. The body is sent to the home of a famous Fashion Designer who doesn't sodomize it but gets off on it. Then our Ghost speaks and the Designer hears. After proving that he is the ghost of the deceased and not a hidden speaker, he decides to stick around with the designer even when his body is retrieved by the workers. An unlikely friendship has developed.
Buba - The story of a Soccer Team with bad luck. The narrator is a player who is injured in or before his first game. He ends up rooming with Buba who is an African. One night, Buba tells our narrator and another man on the team if they give blood to him he can guarantee a win. This starts a cycle that lasts all season and beyond. Buba always scores two goals, with the remaining going to them. Eventually, Buba is traded to another team and they end up beating the team the narrator was on. The book ends with the team, sans Buba, reuniting for a documentary. Buba had died in a car crash earlier on.
Photos - Arturo Belano looks at photos of poets and thinks about who he wants to have sex with.
Meeting with Enrique Lihn - Bolano, as himself and not Belano, has a dream he meets the very much dead Enrique Lihn who tells Bolano he admires him. There's also a case of double mistaken identity on the steps of Lihn's building which is an amusing step away from the main story.
How Bolano writes humans is what makes his work special. I can't think of one American author who captures our essence in quite the same way. How Bolano tells stories, and how he has his characters tell each other stories, is so distinct. There is a deeper emotional richness. Even lighthearted conversations have heavy undertones and that's what sticks out to me. Bolano is like an English Teacher's wet dream in that regard.
What did I think of The Return?
As with any Short Story collection, I like some more than others. My favorites would have to be The Return and Buba. The other stories were more commonly fitting with Bolano's style and that worked against them here. The Return and Buba were uniquely different and showed a side of the author I wish we got to explore more of. I have a mental block of Cell Mates and Clara beyond them being two very similar stories. The non-romantic in me could be the catalyst behind that one. Bolano is at his best when he writes these lost or broken people. As a collection, I like how the themes flow from one story to the next but the stories about porn stars and whores disengaged me. I'm not a prude. Trust me on that one. The first porn-related story was ok. I'm not interested in these people but moving past the sex there's a poignant story. Then the Lalo Cura story came. I think out of all Bolano's characters, Lalo Cura is someone I'm never big on. The Murderous Whores story was better, in a different sort of way, but if it had been a touch longer I think it would have been more interesting. So there are a few misses for me here. Is it enough to pull me out of my reading slump? Absolutely. Check it out for the title story.
July 15, 2010
A mixed collection of stories from the dead master. The first few stories are forgettable, and I read from one to the next with a blank feeling of disappointment, but naturally – even a genius slumps.
Halfway through my head started to turn like Linda Blair's in the Exorcist. "Joanna Silvestri" is a monologue by a porn actress, detailing her affectionate relationship with Jack Holmes (obviously John Holmes, aka Johnny Wadd, he of the python penis) as he's slowly dying from AIDS: "in the end, we both lay on our sides, and he put his long, thick, flaccid cock between my legs, kissed me sweetly and fell asleep, but I stayed awake for ages, with the strangest ideas passing through my mind..." Classic Bolaño - the story is poignant without a trace of sentimentality, funny without being parodic, and haunted.
Next comes "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," about a company of porn actors. The narrator comes from a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled – which we learn only a page or two before learning that his mother had performed on film while he was in the womb. Again, not even a fillet of farce, which it would seem impossible to avoid. Only Bolaño would begin an eerie, desolate mise en scène with "The sadness of the phallus was something Bittrich understood better than anyone," immediately preceded by a litany of the dead (all porn actors) that is dark, comic, almost obscene – a passage of pure bravura.
After 2666 I expected "Murdering Whores" to feature dead prostitutes. Instead it's told from the whore's perspective, a female version of Dennis Cooper's erotic serial killers.
And then there's the title story – which (fresh from reading it) strikes me as a masterpiece. It starts off with a marvelous bit of black humor:
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.
And yes, that's the plot of the story in a nutshell, but what a story! Even though I've marked this review as "contains spoilers" I won't spoil this one, worth the price of the book alone. It's Bolaño at his most brilliant.
There's one more good story ("Buba") then the book peters out with a couple duds. So my rating averages 3½ stars, but "The Return" is worth six or seven. Do your own math.
Halfway through my head started to turn like Linda Blair's in the Exorcist. "Joanna Silvestri" is a monologue by a porn actress, detailing her affectionate relationship with Jack Holmes (obviously John Holmes, aka Johnny Wadd, he of the python penis) as he's slowly dying from AIDS: "in the end, we both lay on our sides, and he put his long, thick, flaccid cock between my legs, kissed me sweetly and fell asleep, but I stayed awake for ages, with the strangest ideas passing through my mind..." Classic Bolaño - the story is poignant without a trace of sentimentality, funny without being parodic, and haunted.
Next comes "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," about a company of porn actors. The narrator comes from a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled – which we learn only a page or two before learning that his mother had performed on film while he was in the womb. Again, not even a fillet of farce, which it would seem impossible to avoid. Only Bolaño would begin an eerie, desolate mise en scène with "The sadness of the phallus was something Bittrich understood better than anyone," immediately preceded by a litany of the dead (all porn actors) that is dark, comic, almost obscene – a passage of pure bravura.
After 2666 I expected "Murdering Whores" to feature dead prostitutes. Instead it's told from the whore's perspective, a female version of Dennis Cooper's erotic serial killers.
And then there's the title story – which (fresh from reading it) strikes me as a masterpiece. It starts off with a marvelous bit of black humor:
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.
And yes, that's the plot of the story in a nutshell, but what a story! Even though I've marked this review as "contains spoilers" I won't spoil this one, worth the price of the book alone. It's Bolaño at his most brilliant.
There's one more good story ("Buba") then the book peters out with a couple duds. So my rating averages 3½ stars, but "The Return" is worth six or seven. Do your own math.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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