Tres
Roberto Bolano
New Direction 2011
861 on order
TRES, by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Laura Healy. 173 pages. New Directions. $24.95. Since his death in 2003 at 50, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been best known in the United States for labyrinthine novels like “The Savage Detectives” and “2666,” even though he always thought of himself as a poet first. “Tres” is Mr. Bolaño’s second collection translated into English, after “The Romantic Dogs,” and it’s made up of three dreamy sequences.
“Prose From Autumn in Gerona” consists of poems that describe stills from an imaginary film: “Two in the morning and a blank screen. My protagonist is sitting in an armchair, in one hand a cigarette and in the other a cup of cognac.” It’s another skewed Bolaño love story, laced with faint traces of noir menace evinced in references to “two assassins,” “the night in the hotel,” “a secret agent.” While “Gerona” echoes with loss and shadows, “The Neochileans” is a fable of youth and inexperience that follows a rock band on tour in small-town Chile: “With a resigned gesture we boarded/The van our manager/Had given us in a fit/Of madness/And set off for the north.”
“Tres” closes with “A Stroll Through Literature,” a phantasmagoria in which Mr. Bolaño communes with writers like Georges Perec and Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain and Carson McCullers, Kafka and Stendhal. He treats these writers like postmodern ruins meant solely for his exploration. And on the very last page of “Stroll” he, in a sense, tells us what he’s been up to in the volume: “I dreamt that a man was looking back over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and his gaze, though hard as steel, splintered into multiple gazes, each more innocent, each more defenseless.” -Dana Jennings, NY Times
Bolano in the catalog