When in Rome...

‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime,’ begins this really very short book (assisted here, in its lumpen-ness, by the ingenious placement of two or three blank pages in between each of its 16 very short chapters). But it is not something scratched together posthumously from Roberto Bolaño’s papers, or resurrected out of early-career obscurity (as valuable as those kinds of books, appearing in English in recent years, have also been). Written near the end of his life, this was the last of his books that Bolaño saw into print — it bears, in this free-standing form, however tiny, the author’s definitive executive seal. And it offers, if far from the deepest example, probably the easiest means yet of enjoying his electromagnetic style in its fullest maturity.

The scene is Rome, at some unspecified time towards the end of the 20th century. A cry of ‘Fascism or barbarism!’ is occasionally heard from passing cars. ‘Economic conditions were deteriorating…. Something was wrong in Europe or Italy, I think. Or Rome. Or our neighbourhood.’ The narrator and her brother were suddenly orphaned as teenagers as a result of a car crash. ‘Somehow that justified everything.’ But the ‘everything’ in question, the ‘life of crime’, of course, doesn’t materialise according to expectation. The convention of the juvenile crime spree is no sooner invoked than it gives way to Bolaño’s usual mixture of anticlimax, absurd stasis, silence and psychological non sequitur, lit up by hyperbolic lightning flashes of sinister and tragic imagery. They each get menial jobs and otherwise watch TV:

TV and videos play an important role in this story. Even today, when I turn on the TV, I seem to get a glimpse of my criminal younger self, but the vision doesn’t last long, no longer than the time it takes the TV to fully come on.