Tales by Chilean master of malaise

Antwerp, a very short novel, is early Bolaño, but only in age. It's a crazed, burnished gem. Strands of action run parallel, many of them to be repeated throughout his fiction: a murder and police - detectives, an investigation, institutional idiocy (his police forces are sadistic Keystone Kops). There is a kind of KOA campsite (he's fond of those) and a hunchback (he's drawn to those with physical challenges, and to misfits). There is a sick writer who may be dying and a sex tryst focusing on a single act that the man feverishly pursues and the woman just as feverishly endures.

And, very Bolaño, the act of movie-watching wraps and cinches all these strands. Snatches of unsourced dialogue float through Antwerp, like audience conversation that intrudes on the film, or movie dialogue that intrudes on memory ("The wind whips grains of sand . . . " "Without much chance . . . "). Much is beautiful, approaching poetry. Much is sad and terrifying. Much you've heard somewhere - it's how people talk.

Antwerp doesn't tell a story. It flashes glimpses that might, we feel, get to be stories, but we can't get a grasp on any. That is the heart of Bolaño. His fiction lets us know that our worlds are beyond us, elusive. His tales explode into shreds (like Monsieur Pain, which starts fairly conventionally), lead us up blind alleys, or just stop, as if to tell us, "Get lost." They don't do what you think they will or want them to.

His people are inconsistent. Desire leads them to do things they know only another person would do. And motive? His fiction sneers at it - as if we ever really know why we do what we do.

So even though his fiction seems to fling down and trample on most of what we've been trained to look for in fiction - tidy plots; consistent characters; well-explained action; nice, legible outcomes - it ends up feeling a lot like life. That's why 2666, which maddened so many reviewers, is so fearsome a triumph. Reading it is to feel as if thrown into an unforgiving, vivid truth, with no recourse and no one coming. Bolaño once said something like, "Every little thing is important - only it's an importance we'll never know." His fiction gestures to that unknowable, frightening portent, that malaise, in every detail. Yet this malaise, while often sinister, is also - his word - extraordinary.

So if you want to take Bolaño step by step, read a few stories in The Insufferable Gaucho first, then, armed against the shock, try a few in The Return. When prepared, read Monsieur Pain, involving the Peruvian poet César Vallejo in a fascinating plot. After you recover, and only then, go on to Antwerp - such a fitting closure to them all, both coda and prologue.