Tales by Chilean master of malaise

By Roberto Bolaño

New Directions. 144 pp. $22.95.

By Roberto Bolaño

New Directions. 96 pp. $15.95.

By Roberto Bolaño

New Directions. 208 pp. $23.95.

By Roberto Bolaño

New Directions. 176 pp. $22.95.

This perplexing, frightening thought, in the mind of a love-smitten hypnotist as he walks the streets of late-1930s Paris, is from Monsieur Pain, a short novel written in 1982 by the Chilean (and sometimes Spanish, and sometimes Mexican) writer Roberto Bolaño. This one sentence could stand for the singular, iconoclastic, threatening, tragicomic originality of his fiction.

Bolaño died in 2003 - then carpet-bombed the English-speaking literary world twice, with two massive cultural interventions (I hesitate to call them novels), The Savage Detectives (1998; in English 2007) and 2666 (2004; 2008).

Reeling from these two monumental inoculations, we now must face his short fiction - where the invasion may be just as decisive.

New Directions is pumping out the shorter Bolaño. Of the titles considered here, Monsieur Pain (first published in Spanish in 1982) and Antwerp (1980, published in Spanish in 2002) are novels (sort of), the other two collections of tales.

I remember when the story "The Insufferable Gaucho" appeared in the New Yorker. Within days, three friends weighed in. One loved it, something about "the whole world it creates" and "how much you sort of like the main character" but "how nothing really gets figured out." The next person said something like, "The New Yorker is printing anything these days - that was just terrible, a waste of my time." The third: "Please tell me what is going on and why I should like this."

I can't do the last two things, but I can speak of why I like this story. A gritty charm invests it, an amused, unhinged comedy married with suggestions of doom. And, as Bolaño's work often is, it's woven, a plait of threads and strands, repetitions of images (rabbits) and themes. It starts, as many of his tales and novels do, conventionally, and drops you off in an insecure, unfamiliar place.