Author(s): BOLANO ROBERTO

Interior Design

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bola o s short stories is that they can do the work of a novel. The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bola o story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bola o s own). Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bola o s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.