Last Evenings on Earth

Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0811216888 ISBN13: 9780811216883 Release Date: April 2007 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Length: 256 Pages Weight: 0.50 lbs. Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0" "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bola o once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bola o writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the re