Stuart Kelly

Puzzle Pieces: Cowboy Graves, by Roberto Bolaño, reviewed

Three posthumous novellas may just be drafts or abandoned ideas, but they enter the subconscious as deeply as Bolaño’s larger works

Roberto Bolaño in his study in Sitges, Spain in the 1990s. Credit: Alamy 
issue 01 May 2021

This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I first read his epic masterpiece 2666 I had three nights of fractured nightmares. This happened with every other book as well — usually dreams about reading a book by Roberto Bolaño, except the words melt and shift and are land mines or tripwires on the page.

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