The Return (1997,2001)
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (2010)
200 pages
Ghosts inhabit the thirteen short stories in The Return, a collection from the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. Though in the title story an actual ghost reports back from his first, surprising days of the afterlife, in the others the ghosts are very much alive, but are people who remain mostly invisible to us, living outside of our daily experience. Petty criminals or prostitutes narrate several of these stories, while others are told by porn stars or private detectives, which though legal professions, operate somehow outside the bounds of our normal lives. Bolaño tells stories here that poke around in the dark underbelly of society, exploring our fear that the world maybe not as rational a place as we desperately hope it to be.
The opening story in the collection, Snow, sets the tone. The narrator recalls a fellow Chilean he had met in Barcelona several years before. Visiting his friend’s apartment, he sees among the few decorations a framed picture of a pretty girl. His friend takes the picture from the shelf it’s on, and begins telling his story, a dark recollection of an unfocused life, drifting into involvement with a gangster, and beginning a dangerous but irresistible relationship with the girl. The story is one of survival, of someone accepting what life presents him and, when it is lost, moving forward carrying the loss with him but at the same time accepting it as yet one more inexplicable event in this confused and mysterious life.
In what is the most taut story of the set, Murdering Whores, a prostitute in an unnamed town in Spain has seen a young man on television celebrating the victory of his out-of-town soccer team with his friends on the steps coming out of the stadium. As he later struggles for breath before her, she tells him that “some of you raise your arms and give the Roman salute. Do you know what it means, that salute? … Under my city’s night sky you salute in the direction of the television cameras, and watching at home I see you and decide to offer you my salute, in response to yours.” Making use of the anonymity she has when she moves through the world, the objectification that means no one pays attention to her as a distinct individual, she goes to the stadium and finds this young man who she has seen on TV, luring him back to her place to carry out her avenging “salute”. Though the easy interpretation may be the revenge of the downtrodden, an alternative and deeper meaning offers itself with the reference to the “Roman salute”: though the city is not identified, several of the other stories take place in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalonia region in Spain; connecting the legendary rivalry between Madrid and Barcelona on the soccer field with the oppression of Catalan independence from Madrid during the fascist dictatorship, and a darker and more allegorical meaning emerges.
As these two examples show, the stories in this book are a mix of styles. A few, such as Murdering Whores have tight, fast-paced plots that build to a clear and dramatic climax. Many others though, like Snow, develop more slowly, often wandering for a time in one direction before gradually turning into what becomes the true narrative. In a world focused on the instant pleasure of action and adventure, it can take time to warm up to these more deliberately told stories in the collection, which form the majority actually. The effort pays off, however, as Bolaño provides us as readers with touching, if sometimes also disturbing, commentaries on the vagaries of life as the characters struggle to make sense of their passage through the world.
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