Llamadas telefónicas (1997):

This was Bolaño's first published short story collection, containing fourteen stories all dated "1995-1996". (The English-language collections Last evenings on earth and The Return mix together the stories in Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas in a different order.)

The stories are grouped in three sections. The first, Llamadas telefónicas brings together five stories which all seem to be concerned with the role of the writer and the failures of literature; Detectives is another group of five stories, this time mostly about the condition of exile; and finally Vida de Anna Moore brings together four stories with beautiful-but-tragic women as their central characters. But in fact all three of these subjects permeate each of the groups - it sometimes feels as though being female (or being the narrator's ex-girlfriend, which amounts to more or less the same thing), being a writer and being a political exile are all equally doomed and futile conditions.

Bolaño's technique seems to be focussed on keeping the narrative very sparse: the stories keep pushing into the foreground the things the narrator is conspicuously not telling us, the connections he leaves us to make for ourselves. The lives of his characters never have neat narrative arcs, they join and separate in apparently random ways, and the phrase "Nunca más volvió a verlo" (I never saw them again) keeps turning up just when the narrator has got us really interested in what happens to the character. The world in which the stories are set is mostly an almost exaggeratedly ordinary one (apart from brief excursions into the Russian mafia and pornographic film-making) and the things that happen in the stories are rarely extraordinary, except for the way so many of them accumulate haphazardly in one character's life. Very interesting.

Putas asesinas (2001)

This was Bolaño's second published short story collection, containing thirteen stories written in the late 1990s.

As in the first collection, there's a strong element of auto-fiction, with many of the stories either narrated by or focussing on a Bolaño-like character called "B.", "Arturo Belano", or just "I". Happily, there's rather less of the "women coming to a bad end" theme than there was in Llamadas telefónicas, however. And there are also several stories where the protagonist is someone we wouldn't easily mix up with the author - notably the title story, where we have to revise our ideas about what's going on several times in the space of a few pages, "Buba", where the narrator is a retired football player, and "El retorno", where the narrator is a ghost.

One theme that seems to keep coming back in these stories is the way literary reputation comes and goes. It's there very memorably in "Últimos atardeceres en la tierra" where Arturo, spending a holiday in Acapulco with his father (something both of them are a bit uncomfortable about) becomes interested in the fate of the obscure surrealist poet Gui Rosey. In "Vagabundo en Francia y Bélgica" B looks for traces of a forgotten Belgian writer, and in the last three short pieces in the collection we get the narrator's random reflections on a book of photographs of post-war French poets, and more focussed thoughts about two of his compatriots, Pablo Neruda and Enrique Lihn.

I'm still finding it hard to put my finger on what precisely it is that grabs me about Bolaño's style, but there is something quite special about the direct, unapologetic way he addresses the reader and takes it for granted that you are following him, however much he might seem to be wandering from the point.

El gaucho insufrible (2003)

Bolaño completed this third collection of short pieces shortly before his death. It contains five stories and the text of two lectures reworked as essays. As you'd expect, all the pieces stand out in one way or another: Bolaño wasn't someone who "just" wrote a short story, he had to push the boundaries of the form in one way or another. Equally, none is the sort of piece you put down thinking "I've read that, now I can move on." There's always going to be a bit more to it that occurs to you a day or two later, and a conviction that you'll get more out of it next time you read it...

Maybe the two that stick in the mind most are the title piece, which is a reworking of themes from Borges's famous story "El Sur", and "El policía de las ratas," a murder mystery that alludes to Kafka's story "Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse".

The Gaucho, Pereda, is a very urbanised, middle-class, retired lawyer from Buenos Aires who leaves the city after his pension disappears in the Argentinian financial crisis and goes to live a kind of rustic fantasy life on the family's semi-abandoned estancia in the back of beyond, wilfully ignoring the fact that he's in the late 20th century. Practically everything in the story refers to some classic of South American literature, especially to Borges and Cortazar, and Bolaño lets Pereda himself wonder how much he is taking from childhood memories of life on the Pampas and how much comes from books he has read.

Pepe, the rat-policeman, is said to be a nephew of Kafka's singer Josefine, thus someone who displays a psychological trait that is incongruous for the community he's living in. He finds himself investigating, in the best noir tradition, a series of unexplained deaths which don't seem to be compatible with the usual hazards sewer-rats face: predators, poison and traps. Naturally, his superior wants him to shut down the investigation and stop wasting police time, but it starts to look as though there might be a serial-killer within the rat community. Murder has hitherto been something unknown among rats: if true, it might have serious consequences...

I enjoyed the two lecture-essays as well: he manages to write about "literature and illness" with a sense of fun that must have been hard to achieve in his situation at the time (and does a wonderful analysis of Mallarmé's "Brise Marine"); in "Los mitos de Chtulhu" he demolishes most of the sacred cows of Spanish-language literature, using particularly heavy quantities of plastic explosives to dispose of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. He's also very funny in his comments about the Spanish writer and TV literature-pundit Fernando Sánchez Dragó. You can never be quite sure how tongue-in-cheek his remarks are, but he does clearly feel that no-one ought to have that kind of dominant position of literary authority.

Cuentos póstumos (El secreto del mal) (2007)

As the title implies, this collection brings together all Bolaño's stories that had not been published in book form at the time of his death, seventeen in all, most of them very short. The Collected Stories adds a further story, "El contorno del ojo," which won the author a prize in a story competition in Valencia at the very start of his professional career in 1983 but was not included in any of the previous collections.

The stories here are very pared-down and they leave most of the spadework as an exercise for the reader. Usually, Bolaño does little more than present us with two incongruous but overlapping sets of facts, which imply the existence of a narrative somewhere in the space between them, but don't bother to fill it in. In the title story, we never learn the secret of evil, if that is indeed what the mysterious stranger is about to tell the journalist he has summoned to a meeting on a Paris bridge in the early hours of the morning: the text is all about the anticipation of the meeting. Similarly, in "Muerte de Ulises" we learn nothing about the narrator's late friend Ulises Lima, except the unexpected discovery that he was admired by a bunch of Mexico City street-gang members who lived next-door to him.

The equally enigmatic, if slightly more expansive "El contorno del ojo" from twenty years earlier fits in with this pattern surprisingly well: a Chinese poet and army officer, convalescing in a small village after a breakdown, records a mixture of puzzling and banal events in his diary, but Bolaño doesn't allow the story to turn into the resolution of a mystery. If something odd is really going on other than in Chen's imagination, we don't get any external confirmation from the text.

While these are clearly some of his oddest and thus most interesting stories, they probably wouldn't be a good place for anyone to start. ( )