Tres (Bilingual Edition)

October 15, 2011

This second translated volume of the late Chilean writer's poetry (after 2008's The Romantic Dogs) contains three long pieces--two sequences of prose vignettes and one spare, narrative poem--that move through the harrowing registers of despair and alienation characteristic of his fiction. Written in 1981, "Prose from Autumn in Gerona" documents a young screenwriter's repeated, doomed attempts to frame and clarify his innermost romantic aspirations amid the external world's kaleidoscopic chaos. "The neochileans," from 1993, reconstructs a rock band's road trip through "godforsaken/ provinces" of a Latin America "Positioned within the geometry/ Of impossible crimes," while 1994's "A stroll through literature" is a dream diary in which literary figures make cryptic cameo appearances ("I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka"). The original, Spanish-language versions are included. VERDICT For all its surreal moments, Bolano's bitter vision of life, like Charles Bukowski's, is rendered with a candid, unmagical realism that springs from painful experiences and a militant refusal to seek comfort in the familiar conventions of literary genre. For all readers of contemporary poetry.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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