Roberto Bolaño's prose is inimitable: cheeky and mordant, dancing like a firefly in the blurred spaces between history and memory, fact and imagination, fun and fear. Self-banished from his homeland of Chile for most of his life, adrift alongside expatriates and artists and activists, Bolaño became the artist in exile par excellence, merging tragedy with fantasy in head-spinning novels such as 2666 and The Savage Detectives. Cowboy Graves, a posthumous collection of three novellas compiled from unpublished texts found on Bolaño's hard drive, finds him in a playful mode, even as he sticks to his unique, twisted world view.
Cowboy Graves concerns literature-obsessed survivors: young punks who grow up to be incompetent rebels, ne'er-do-well poets co-opted by farcical underground organizations, exiles haunted by memories of loss and injustice. Throughout, situations and characters echo his previous works: the search for a missing poet, revelations of wartime atrocities, neurotic artists who delude themselves when they're not getting misled by others. But if this all rings familiar, Bolaño wouldn't have it any other way — just like his addled narrators, he forever runs circles in his own head, poring over the chaotic absurdity and melancholy of life.
Cowboy Graves' centerpiece is its titular story, which charts the misadventures of Arturro, a misfit teen with the usual obsessions: chasing girls, playing hooky from school, getting hooked on pulp movies. Each of the story's four acts centers on pivotal figures in Arturro's young life, from his Mexican father to a philosophical hobo to rambunctious fellow travelers. But underneath these affectionate memories, ominous undercurrents percolate. The simple act of visiting his father in Mexico becomes a precarious business when the Chilean authorities prevent him and his mother from leaving the country.
A wistful portrait of a time before madness, “Cowboy Graves” lingers because of what it doesn't mention: the lives lost, the terrible happenings that take place afterwards. The novella foreshadows everything that is to come with its bitterly comedic conclusion during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, as Arturro is drafted into assisting leftist rebels and finds himself in a Beckett-like impasse with a fellow conspirator, the two of them playing games even as they're perched on the edge of a terrible new era beyond their reckoning.
“French Comedy of Horrors” is a more enigmatic affair, chronicling a single evening in a charmingly ramshackle French Guiana town. A youthful, aimless poet undergoes seemingly random occurrences: espying a couple dancing under an eclipse, engaging a hee-hee bird in nonsensical conversation, and most memorably, receiving a surprise phone call from a group of clandestine French surrealists. Committed to preserving the true spirit of surrealism, the surrealists invite him to join their ranks. More reverie than plot, “French Comedy” hints at the seductive dangers of artistic solipsism.
“Fatherland” concludes the collection in self-reflexive style, told from the point of view of dissident writer “Rigoberto Belano” — never let it be said that Bolaño doesn't poke fun at himself. It begins as a love story incited, and halted, by violence, their subsequent flirtations soon overwhelmed by the rising tide of authoritarian rule. Growing more frenzied and fragmentary as it proceeds, the narrative is illuminated by images that shine like bejeweled shards: the uncanny sight of an old German Messerschmitt dueling the Chilean Air Force, seen through prison bars. In the novella's most devastating passage, Belano's girlfriend has been “disappeared” along with other activists, the only remaining evidence of her life a white-washed elegy.
As one would expect from a book compiled from unpublished writing, Cowboy Graves lacks the wild ambition and gravity of Bolaño's best work, but it's still a tasty summation of his talents, presented in miniature. In its loose, wide-ranging energy, it's a pleasing epitaph for a literary career that refused to stand still.