The Insufferable Gaucho
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.
The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho — unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire — might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seven tales by the amazingly prolific-in-death Bola o (2666) explore themes of self-exile and illness. The two best stories concern conflicted Argentinean protagonists; in the title story, Hector Pereda, "an irreproachable lawyer with a record of honesty," leaves Buenos Aires after the death of his wife and the collapse of the country's economy to make a go as a gaucho on the pampas. Inhabiting a ruined ranch, with only the languid locals and predatory rabbits as company, Hector finds a welcome, near-poetic restoration of a society where self-reliance and egalitarianism reign. In "Alvaro Rousselot's Journey," an acclaimed Argentinean novelist sets out for Paris to confront a filmmaker who has blatantly plagiarized his books, though what really eats at the novelist is that the filmmaker has ignored the writer's recent works, leaving him with the sense that "he had lost his best reader." "Rat Police" reflects Bola o's interest in fantasy and noirish crime fiction, while "Literature + Illness = Illness" is essentially an essay about terminal illness. Andrews is an excellent translator, and even if these are somewhat lesser works in the Bola o pantheon, completists will snap this up.
