March 25, 2021 17
Cowboy Graves : Three Novellas
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from
the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
Penguin Press, 195 pp., $24.
The Spirit of Science Fiction
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from
the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
Penguin Press, 196 pp., $24.00;
$16.00 (paper)
“The Return,” the title story of a col-
lection of Roberto Bolaño’s short fic-
tion published in English in 2010, can
be read, in light of the author’s pro-
lific and variable posthumous output,
as an ambiguous parable about los-
ing control of one’s selfhood (autho-
rial or otherwise) in death. In a tone
that hovers between abject horror
and bemused disbelief, the narrator
describes what happens to both his
body and, for lack of a better word,
his soul after his sudden death from
a heart attack in a Paris nightclub.
“The first minutes of ghosthood are
minutes of imminent knockout,” he
explains:
You’re like a punch- drunk boxer
staggering around the ring in the
drawn- out moment of the ring’s
evaporation. But then you calm
down and what generally happens
is that you follow the people who
were there when you died—your
girlfriend, your friends—or you
follow your own body.The narrator chooses the last option,
hovering near his body as it makes its
way from an ambulance to the morgue
to, with the intercession of a pair of
“hipster orderlies,” the home of the
prominent fashion designer Jean-
Claude Villeneuve, who proceeds to
enact a surprisingly tender sexual en-
counter with the narrator’s corpse.
“My reactions were contradictory,” the
deceased tells us:
I felt disgusted by what I was see-
ing, grateful for not having been
sodomized, surprised to discover
Villeneuve’s secret, angry at the
orderlies for having rented out my
body, and even flattered to have
served, unwillingly, as an object ofdesire for one of the most famous
men in France.What might, in other hands, have
been simply an exercise in shocking
bourgeois sensibilities becomes some-
thing more complex as the story de-
velops. The narrator manages (the
ghostly metaphysics are a little hazy)
to communicate with Villeneuve, first
chastising him for his actions and then
forgiving him. Once the designer is con-
vinced of his interlocutor’s existence,
he confesses to a lifetime of sexual and
emotional insecurity, and to a “morbid
dread of harming anyone which mayhave been a screen to hide his dread of
being harmed.” A connection has been
forged; when the orderlies come to take
away his body, the ghost decides to stay
behind and keep Villeneuve company.
The final image is of an unconventional
domestic arrangement, the designer fi-
nally having found someone to whom
he can speak freely, the ghost with
nothing but time to listen.
After his initial incredulity at be-
coming a postmortem sex object has
passed, the narrator strikes a pose of
flexibility, even accommodation. Why
not make the best of his situation?
As with much of Bolaño’s work, thestory resists one’s attempts to draw a
straightforward meaning from it—the
narrator is just as baffled by the choices
he makes as the reader is, struggling to
find purchase in a shifting landscape.
What seems to matter to Bolaño is the
movement of the story itself, the way its
gothic plot is made to sprawl unexpect-
edly in an ambiguous, psychologically
realistic direction.This is, in miniature, what Bolaño
does across his vast, cryptic body of
work: he opens up formal possibilities
with sheer energy and a sense of im-
provisation, creating new designs for
stories and novels through unexpected
combinations and juxtapositions. Dark-
ness is omnipresent in his writing—the
shadow of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973
coup in Chile, the country of Bolaño’s
birth, is the fulcrum on which every-
thing pivots, with past and future right-
wing violence lurking across countries
and continents—but sex, literature,
and conversation can be deployed
against it. His work tends to follow the
logic of accretion—the protagonist of
a story might inspire a novel of his or
her own, or a side character in a novel
might later appear, transformed, in sto-
ries or episodes.
As with the border between life and
death in “The Return,” or in the many
other stories in which the lives of long-
dead or missing figures from books or
photographs are sought out or recon-
structed, Bolaño troubles the boundar-
ies between discrete works. One often
turns a corner in Bolaño’s world and
ends up in a shadowy, though famil-
iar, neighborhood that one has visited
in a previous book. His methods invite
obsession, the uncanny feeling that if
one reads enough and draws enough
connections, one might arrive at some
grand revelation. “The Secret of Evil” is
promised by the title story of one of his
posthumous collections, but the story it-
self is a short fragment about a journal-
ist in Paris meeting a mysterious source
in the middle of the night to... eat fresh
croissants. If the secret of evil is hidden
in the story, it is (appropriately enough)
beyond the reader’s comprehension.
One of the signal pleasures of read-
ing Bolaño is tracing the hopscotchingDeeper into the Labyrinth
Andrew Martin
natural lust, male representative of
mindless, greedy power, insatiably
devours human flesh.Her book, a feminist classic, issued a
call for the fundamental reorganization
of society’s gender expectations, espe-
cially regarding childrearing.^5 Around
the world conditions during the pan-
demic have been especially hard on
women—who work as care givers,
housekeepers, and homeschoolers,
often unofficially and unpaid. Mean-
while, more than 2.3 million have had
to drop out of the US workforce alone
in the past year. Dinnerstein’s message
has become sadly urgent again.
The close identification of the mer-
maid with femaleness—especially
sexual femaleness—reverberates even
in Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie’s story of a
small boys’ paradise, Neverland. In
the chapter called “The Mermaids’
Lagoon,” they exist as elusive, distant
wantons, playful among themselves,
but cold and indifferent to the boys;
significantly, this is also the chapter in
which Smee asks, “What’s a mother?”
and then proposes abducting Wendy to
fulfill that role for the pirates. Mean-
while, Peter Pan has saved Tiger Lily
from Captain Hook and substituted
himself as his prisoner. Peter stands ona rock in the mermaids’ lagoon, waiting
to be drowned by the rising waters; as
he prepares to die, he hears “the mer-
maids calling to the moon.” The eerie
scene ends with Barrie’s homage, in the
midst of a boys’ adventure story, to the
fin- de- siècle conjunction of Eros and
Thanatos: “Peter was not quite like
other boys; but he was afraid at last.”
And he thinks to himself, “To die will
be an awfully big adventure.”
Unexpectedly, an echo of the plan-
gency in Barrie’s children’s story seems
to sound in T. S. Eliot’s famous early
poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”: “I have heard the mermaids
singing each to each. // I do not think
that they will sing to me.” And then, in
the closing lines, just when the narra-tor seems to have been admitted to the
delights of the mermaids’ imaginary
realm, he describes the pleasure inter-
rupted by “human voices”:We have lingered in the chambers
of the sea
By sea- girls wreathed with
seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and
we drown.By switching from the first person to
the all- embracing we, Eliot withdraws
from the binary erotics of his mermaid
vision and enfolds us, readers no longer
specifically marked by gender, into the
wider reaches of her allure—dissolu-
tion, watery obliteration. QRoberto Bolaño; illustration by Johnalynn Holland(^5) It has just been published in a new edi-
tion by Other Press, with an introduc-
tion by Gloria Steinem.