The Bolaño Boys Present… Short Stories

Quick, there go The Bolaño Boys! Oh, you missed them. Again. When will these enigmatic beasts reveal themselves? What will turn out to be their goals? Are they political animals, or simply mischief makers? Either way, they have this month selected the finest short story collections to have on your person if you’ve been arrested for breach of the peace, or simply to have ready at hand to quote from at stallholders, as you browse the organic produce at the local farmer’s market. They love that, apparently.

The great man is best known for his ‘torrential’ masterworks, as he called them. But his short stories were masterpieces of their own, rich and layered, and peopled by characters most novelists would spend hundreds of pages trying to make convincing and still fail.

Poking fun at his own work, Bolaño said, playfully, in 2666: “He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

The mischievous little bastard.