Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at age 50, bringing to an apparent end his astonishing career as a novelist and a poet.  I say “apparent” because it is simply amazing how prolific the author has been <i>since</i> his premature passing!  With <i>Cowboy Graves</i>, we get another of his (mostly) original works, this time almost two decades after his death.  Packaged as a collection of three separate novellas—although one is really more of a longish short story—the volume reads like a collection of unfinished sketches of characters who have been placed in extraordinary circumstances.  If there is a common theme connecting the three parts, it would involve living during a time of revolution or social upheaval.  However, looking for such connections risks missing the point; as always, the real joy in reading Bolaño’s fiction lies is savoring the stories-within-the-story that he created.

The first novella, which gives the book its title, is divided into four lengthy vignettes and tells the story of Arturo Belano, who will become one of the Visceral Realist poets at the center of the author’s great <i>The Savage Detectives</i>.  Loosely autobiographical, the story covers Arturo’s boyhood in southern Chile before moving to Mexico, where he drops out of school to pursue left-wing causes which, in turn, takes him back to Santiago around the time of the Pinochet coup.  According to the very informative Afterword written by Spanish literary critic Juan Masoliver Ródenas, the story was written less than ten years before the author’s passing.

‘French Comedy of Horrors’ is the second work and it comes the closest to being a traditional linear narrative.  The story involves a young college student in French Guiana who, after watching a solar eclipse with his mentor and some colleagues, takes a long walk home by an unfamiliar route.  Along the way he answers a ringing phone at a public booth and gets a strange request from an unknown man asking him to come to Paris to join an underground surrealist group that operates out of the city’s sewer system.  The tale of how the Clandestine Surrealist Group was formed is itself a tribute to the French surrealist movement, which influenced Bolaño’s own work.  Masoliver Ródenas dates this novella, which has no real ending to speak of, as one of the last things the author wrote in 2002-03.

‘Fatherland’ is the final novella in the book.  It is also set in Chile at the time of the coup and it is told from the perspective of a 20-year old Rigoberto Belano, who seems for the most part to be identical to the Arturo Belano character that appears in ‘Cowboy Graves’ (and some of the author’s other work).  The story is laid out in about twenty brief sections that vary considerably in style—they involve police reports, a funeral oration, recollected dreams, as well as straightforward storytelling—and jump around quite a bit in both time and location.  At the heart of the tale is the heart-breaking loss of one of the protagonist’s first loves.  The novella, which also ends with no real resolution, was written in the early-to-mid 1990s.

I enjoyed reading this volume, mainly for the electric way that Bolaño had in a telling a story, especially those “interior” tales that seem to come out of nowhere within a larger narrative arc.  However, reading <i>Cowboy Graves</i> was also something of a nostalgia trip for this fan, given the frequent embedded allusions to some of the author’s more celebrated works (e.g., <i>2666</i>, <i>By Night in Chile</i>, <i>Last Evenings on Earth</i>).  Also, the very fragmentary and disjoint nature of the fiction it contains—“puzzle pieces”, to quote Masoliver Ródenas—make it a book that you might have to be a Bolaño completionist to really appreciate.  Readers new to this remarkable writer should begin their journey elsewhere.