By: Roberto Bolano
Ernest Hemingway once said that a good story was like an iceberg; what is visible is always smaller than the part that remains hidden beneath the water, which confers intensity, mystery, power and meaning on what floats on the surface. This is certainly true of the fourteen stories here, the first collection by the universally acclaimed Chilean author to be published in English. Imbued with 'the melancholy folklore of exile', as Roberto Bolano once put it, and set largely in the world of the Chilean diaspora in Central America and Europe, the narrators of these stories are usually writers grappling with private quests (Bolano's beloved 'failed generation'), who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. They are characters living in the margins, on the edge, in constant flight from nightmarish threats.In 'Sensini' an elderly South American writer instructs another younger writer, also living in exile, in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes.
March 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-09-946942-1
Paperback, 277 pages, March 2008
Published by Vintage
