.75 stars. i do not see the brilliance here, but did enjoy a few of the earlier stories in this. when i got to one of the middle stories - anne moore's life i almost couldn't finish reading the book. this is one of the worst short stories, with no feeling or understanding of women, that i've ever read. it makes sense that everything else in this collection is written about men. that story colored the rest of this for me, and i thought the rest was repetitive, uninteresting, and a real disappointment. i saw a few bright spots throughout but mostly feel like these autobiographical stories are not at all what i'm interested in reading. ( )

The titular story is a masterpiece. I found the other stories a bit forgettable, but as I flip through the pages of the book, intrigue flashes out at me, and maybe I’m confusing waning light with ‘forgettable.’ A writer writing writers—that would be the final evening. ( )

Funny sad short stories. ( )

there are a few low-points in here, one of which is the character of anne moore in "anne moore's life" -- maybe she seemed to familiar to me, or too without a heart, or too ... american. i don't know. i wasn't interested. i also get frustrated when bolano lists poets and authors in torrential lists that it would take me days to get through. but aside from these points, which possibly only bothered me, this book is heartbreak and hope and despair and sunshine wrapped up in some vignettes that, if you ask me, could have gone on forever.
( )

G. sits at his desk to write a review of the first Bolaño he's ever read. He thinks he liked it just fine, though it wasn't the best thing he's read. He wouldn't call Bolaño a "good writer" per se, but then again, G. isn't in a position to call anyone a "good" or a "bad" writer.

Okay, let's stop it with the imitation: I was surprised that Bolaño's style seemed so simple, like a summary of someone's life (one of the stories, Anne Moore's Life actually, is functionally a summary of a woman's life), unadorned, perhaps even--dare I say it--boring, with only rare glimmers of what I would call exciting writing.

So I don't know why I ended up being so engrossed in almost all the stories. Maybe it's because Bolaño writes great characters, all of them believable because, let's face it, almost all the stories seem like they were taken out of B's autobiof and were, therefore, real. Maybe it's because I got some voyeuristic rush out of the characters. In the end, I think it's both of those, combined with the fact that I didn't have to slog through excess verbiage and description to get to what I really look for in literature: the essence of relationships between human beings.

B really gets to the bone of such relationships. His main character interacts with a peripheral friend or someone close, and then the story ends, and the message I got out of most stories is that we really only have ourselves in the end. Nothing else.
( )