Disturbed and consoled.
In ‘Dentist’, the eponymous man says to his friend (our narrator): ‘There’s no such thing as an empty building; in every so-called empty building, someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that’s the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone’, said my dentist friend, ‘even when everything indicates that you are’. The feeling of not being alone in an empty building—this is what we are given, what we are left with, by turns atrociously disturbing and infinitely consoling. To not be alone. Even when you think you are.
With the neck of a beer bottle in his fist, B defends his father in a bar-fight safe in the knowledge that, unlike the suicide surrealist Gui Rosey, he is not alone. In an empty hotel room, The Eye weeps Alice in Wonderland tears for dead and castrated children, assassinated presidents and dreams. That’s just the way it goes. Vanished lovers persist: Anne Moore, gone, but Bolaño’s lovelorn narrator still lives by her advice. And X, murdered by B, embodied by B, is a suicide-homicide; X and her lover B are one, and they are not one—alone and yet not alone, long after B hangs up the telephone on the other side of Spain.
How to make sense of this? Where’s the logic?
Last Evenings on Earth is neither a collection of stories nor a fragmented novel. It is of a peculiar unity, whose parts rise up in harmony and give us…what?…a sense of return, of spiralling repetition, and thus a sense of detachment and longing. Harmony. Perhaps this is they key to describing what Bolaño has created. Maybe the closest description we have is an album of songs. When we finish the final instalment, ‘Dance Card,’ we are left not with a series of narratives but with a certain music. Importantly, the music lies not in the stories themselves, but between them. In the high-ceilinged chambers of those blank half-pages separating one story from the next, the keynotes reverberate. It is in these empty buildings that Bolaño stalks us, accompanies us hand on shoulder. It’s true, we are often left haunted by that we do not understand—or, worse, we use the word haunted to outshadow our own ignorance. I admit to both here. I am at a loss. What is this thing? I cannot say. Music? Yes. Literature? Undoubtedly. A collection of interconnected stories? (No, that’s a cop out—a publisher’s wet dream.) Yes, they are linked; and yet unlinked. The connections available only through the stories themselves; in order for me to describe the relations to you I’d have to copy each story out verbatim and in sequence. So, a challenge to form. And when form is challenged language fails. I am lost for words. I do not wish to call them stories, for they are not stories; and of course they are not songs. But we are doomed to talk about them, and each word vanishes and clings to nothing like the zero of a life-preserver. Still, we will talk about them with what we have. Yes, we are doomed, but we will talk. And it will never be enough, mere words, mere notes…
Every story differs in melody and intensity; characters overlap as do places. The suicide rate is high (as we might expect from the title), and the rate of bizarre disappearances even higher. In all it is a song of disappearances. Disappearances and wounds. And never without malice.
An album of songs, to be considered as a whole, for it is only as a whole that its discontinuity might be appreciated. Together we are abandoned. Together we recall the heroes we abandoned: our fathers—literary, political and flesh-and-blood fathers. And in remembering them we abandon them a second time, for memory opens doors to dead rooms from which we bolt, like the ghost of Hitler down the hall, to another city, another country. With an open palm we touch tender and drive away.
The prose is simple and rushing, an adolescent breathless with excitement and fear, leaping giantly through the fiery landscape of his own story, wolf hot at heel. The prose promises nothing but exposure and never closure—we run on in anticipation of an end that is always threatened and always elsewhere—we cling to a centre that is always eccentric. The prose is simple, and simply menacing. Like a painting of a mirror’s image, we sense something sinister. And yet it never arrives: enemies meet with a handshake, lovers are recalled by rivals, fist-fights are defused. Blowjobs, naturally, occur—but, like the threatened blows of prickling brawlers, they open to a greater menace. In other words they are all, mouths and fists, part of the gathering avalanche.
The prose is simple and reminiscent—reminiscent of others and itself. Yes, there are influences and contexts, and we might cite them—Camus, Collins, Calvino, Cortazar—but they are influences boldly worn, spirits rattling chains in the unanimous night. Spiralling, Bolaño also returns to himself; the words suicide, alone, telephone, love and tomorrow appear and reappear in refrain, as does the protagonist B, as does an air of what’s been lost or squandered, as does the invariable return of the lost as gift and ghost. The prose is simple and restrained; we are not lost beneath a wave of detail; instead we are installed in big empty buildings. These are the monuments Bolaño creates and eviscerates. We haunt them, gorging ourselves on nothing but shadows. They are the abandoned warehouses and empty streets of forgotten cities. Still, somehow, the church bells clang. Still, somehow, they survive. Despite ubiquitous assassins, we roam.
All this, to speak nothing of time. The protagonist/narrator, B. Autobiographical? Perhaps. Fictitious? Perhaps. B and his father on a road trip to Acapulco in a 1970 Ford Mustang in 1975. B, a young man in Barcelona, mingling with other Chilean exiles. B, a vagabond in France and Belgium, lost in literary magazines, possessed by the spirits of dead poststructuralists. B, no longer young, making unsolicited telephone calls to X, an old flame. Throughout this thing of Bolaño’s, the telephone is everywhere. The telephone line transmits B from one side of Spain to the other—a lover’s insane dash through the night, through time. The telephone collapses time; B is at home and B is not at home; he is here and there, now and hours from now, however long the physical journey takes (the whole night, we are told in ‘Phone Calls’). Though B is old, he speaks down the line with the fire of the young. B is himself a telegraph pole, thrust into the soil of Last Evenings on Earth, concertina-ing time, narratives, journeys, all sprawling and proximate, hopeful and hopeless, connected one to the other by the music between titles. B, the autobiographical B, the invention B, is simultaneous and distanceless. From apocalyptic plains he rises through a haze of dead heroes, dead poets and dead fathers, at once here and there, everywhere and nowhere, emerging amid the wreckage, the carnage, like the haunted tower of a lost city, a clanging reminder that we are both consolingly and disturbingly not alone.
Read more from Adam in Island 135 with All That I Have is Everything and on his blog