peter young’s listopia

9) Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp, 2002
Antwerp is a difficult novel to summarise, given that it’s a formative work in Bolaño’s oeuvre and one that possibly bears more relation to his poetry than his later fiction. These are fifty-six vignettes that function in part like snatches of half-remembered films, concerning a possible murder on a campsite in Spain. But just who has been murdered, and is the killer perhaps a reflection of the author himself? This is not the familiar Bolaño of the long, discursive sentences that became a style he settled into and made his own; instead Antwerp possesses a different form of intensity, perhaps showing the uncertainty of a writer in the act of setting things down in order to first find his own voice to make it stand out, or at least aside, from the influences of those he was reading at the time (among them, Norman Spinrad and James Tiptree, Jr.). Having said that, Bolaño once proclaimed this is the only novel he was not embarrassed about, which hints more at the integrity of the prosaic form he chose to use than the lack of clarity given to a reader: in 1980 it was written without any expectation of publication, but today it gives us a compact insight into the set of themes that Bolaño continued to use throughout his life. Disconnected sentences shoot past you like bullets, and the reader has to almost rearrange, Burroughs-like, what he or she is told and make of it what he or she can. Antwerp is still a self-conscious book for all its merits, but in this brief work it’s easy to discern the writer Bolaño would become in the years ahead: still manically driven at the fringes of literature, but also a far more relaxed and eloquent performer in the act of getting his message across.

68) Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth, 2008
This is a combined edition of two previously released Spanish collections. These insightful stories are all anecdotal and semi-autobiographical but also mostly told in the third person, which inevitably engenders a small aura of mystery about Bolaño himself in the mind of the reader. Bolaño's subject matter is consistently literary: obscure South American poets, Chilean political exiles, Mexican or Spanish settings, reminiscences of lost friends, and left wing writers who like the narrator himself are all living at the far margins of the arts. Bolaño also speaks with consistency: he always writes as if relating the story by voice rather than written words and his story structure is such that you never know quite where he will end up, but wherever it is it's usually on the cusp of what would be another story, and the endings are often abrupt. It's impossible to pin down a favourite; they somehow blur together but are all equally very well told. A completely enchanting collection.

Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 2001
A most unusually constructed novel, one of those in which every detail purports to be fact – something that did not prevent Soldiers of Salamis from winning the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Soldiers of Salamis is centred around the story of what happened one fateful day near the end of the Spanish Civil War, a day in which fascist writer and poet Rafael Sánchez Mazas cheated death twice in one day, the first time by escaping from a firing squad, the second by a soldier who hunts him down, looks him in the eye, and then inexplicably just walks away. In researching the life of Sánchez Mazas, Cercas uncovers a man whose disproportionate influence on twentieth century Spanish history far outstretched his literary abilities or political ambition, revealing him to be little more than a persuasive protofascist and coward. But who was the unknown man on which this story hinges, the executioner who didn't pull the trigger? And might he still be alive?

Javier Cercas embeds Sánchez Mazas's story in between two episodes of his own life, first as he decides this is a story worth writing and later as he realises the story is incomplete without looking further into the identity of the unknown soldier. While the book moves along at a steady enough pace for the first two parts, the third part – in which Cercas believes, sixty years after the event, that he has actually tracked down the mysterious man – simply soars, and the story widens out to illustrate how much of history has often turned on the actions of forgotten, but extraordinary, people. Soldiers of Salamis only avoids being historical revisionism by virtue of the fact that Sánchez Mazas's reputation has previously relied on little more than myth and received opinion, and Cercas convinces you that even if this story probably may not be true down to the very last detail, he thoroughly deserves the artistic licence in the telling of an extraordinary history. Highly recommended.