When the Chilean novelist, story-writer and poet Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at the age of 50, on the waiting list for a liver that never came, only one of his novels, By Night in Chile, had appeared in English. Since then another 22 volumes have followed, the latest of which, Cowboy Graves, compiles three texts written during the extraordinarily productive final decade of his life. The blurb calls them novellas, despite one of them being less than 10,000 words long. The publisher John Calder holds the crown for this kind of nonsense, once describing the 1,100-word text of Samuel Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine as “possibly the shortest novel ever published”, but the stewards of the posthumous Bolaño industry are emerging as strong challengers: like carnival barkers they have been attempting, for several years now, to persuade people that their increasingly tired act is still in great shape.
In his lifetime, Bolaño published, or made ready for posthumous publication, ten novels, three collections of short stories, a book-length prose poem and several poetry collections. They aren’t all masterpieces; Monsieur Pain, The Skating Rink, A Little Lumpen Novelita and the story collection The Insufferable Gaucho, which appeared shortly after his death, are little more than diverting. But much of the work he produced in the last decade of his life, most notably The Savage Detectives (1998), the book that made him a superstar in the Spanish-speaking world, and 2666 (2004), which made him a superstar everywhere else, are stunningly good. This network of novels and stories – the Bolañoverse – features internecine poetry feuds in Mexico City, meditations on literature’s power as a force for good and evil, the genocidal crimes of the 20th century, and critiques of the teamed depredations of neoliberalism, misogyny and sexual violence.
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