What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 11 reviews

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer

What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 11 reviews

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer

Rave
Rob Doyle,
The Guardian (UK)
Like virtually everything the incomparable Chilean wrote, a newly excavated trio of unarguably minor novellas, Cowboy Graves, is companionable, exotic, witty and glamorously suggestive.
Positive
Garth Risk Hallberg,
The New York Times Book Review
In effect, the novels are a prelude, the stories an aftermath, each gesturing urgently at the scale of the biographical explosion that must lie in between. It would seem almost a violation of the 'poetics of inconclusiveness' to fill in that missing space. But this is precisely where the novella succeeds.
Rave
IAN J. BATTAGLIA,
The Chicago Review of Books
... contains writing completed over a period of 10 years, and features many of the touchstones Bolaño was known for: semi-autobiographical narration; a humorous, fragmentary style; and the sort of intrigue that grabs hold of you and never lets go, despite offering no easy answers.
Positive
M.A. Orthofer,
The Complete Review
... these are more than fragments, and while not complete works of fiction in and of themselves, they are polished short works (offering tantalizing suggestions of what they might have become). Bolaño did use some of this material in his other work, but these are not simply cast-offs, with each showing considerable potential of being worked into a larger work but also standing quite well as is, on their own.
Positive
Richard M. Cho,
Los Angeles Review of Books
The three novellas in Cowboy Graves seem like a functional draft of his masterpieces such as The Savage Detectives, 2666, Distant Star, and Nazi Literature in the Americas. The prose is not quite Bolañoesque yet. However, it must be said, the blueprint of a masterwork is always worth reading. Cowboy Graves shouldn’t serve as an introduction to Bolaño’s oeuvre; rather, the experienced Bolaño readers can survey it to glimpse into his artistic process, into the fountain of his creativity. Bolaño simply didn’t need any muse besides his readings and his recollections.
Rave
Grace Byron,
Observer
... despite the twilight horror, Bolaño writes beautifully. His maze is full of terror and fear, focusing on the experience of young men and their driving anger. If Murakami is seeking a cure to the loneliness of globalization, Bolaño is more worried about the violence of globalization. Often his characters witness tremendous trauma inflicted by the Pinochet regime’s coup. His characters continually reckon with the use of poetry in a war-torn world.
Mixed
J. Oliver Conroy,
The Washington Examiner
... an example in equal measure of Bolano’s brilliance and his ability to madden and tax the reader.
Positive
Ho Lin,
The New York Journal of Books
Bolaño’s prose is inimitable: cheeky and mordant, dancing like a firefly in the blurred spaces between history and memory, fact and imagination, fun and fea...finds him in a playful mode, even as he sticks to his unique, twisted world view.
Rave
Diego Báez,
Booklist
Bolaño’s brilliant oeuvre expands with another bright starburst, this one comprising three separate yet thematically connected novellas.
Positive
Publishers Weekly
An appealing if inchoate episodic collection.
Mixed
Kirkus
The science fictional, Jesuit-twitting story within the story is vintage Bolaño while Fatherland, the third novella, is especially fragmentary and inconclusive.