Puzzle Pieces: Cowboy Graves, by Roberto Bolaño, reviewed

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. It happened again with Cowboy Graves: 3.08 a.m., and I’m re-reading the central piece, convinced there is a character and a scene in it that doesn’t exist.

In an eloquent afterword, Juan Ródenas gives a plausible reason for Bolaño’s seeming capacity to hack the subconscious. He refrains from calling these posthumous works by Bolaño ‘fragments’, referring instead to ‘puzzle pieces’ that ‘always lead us back to the larger body of his work’. In the central story, ‘French Comedy of Horrors’, the surrealist André Breton supposedly tells the aspiring artists:

It’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book, or in a back alley where a crime has been committed.

What are these texts? Drafts? Abandoned ideas? They link with Bolaño’s oeuvre of secretive aesthetic movements and criminal conspiracies, the coup against Allende, certain characters — there is, for example, a Dr (Mrs) Amilfitano, a name from two other works, a shapeshifting Belaño, one part of one story reworked as part of Last Evenings on Earth and more.

These infernal, internal references are infuriatingly tantalising, especially if, like me, you want a solution and are terrified this is a Latin American Voynich Manuscript, and the secret is that there is no secret.