‘If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...’
A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation.
Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
‘An exemplary literary rebel’ New York Review of Books
‘A master of the short form’ Independent
‘Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own’ New York Times
A spellbinder ― Newseek
Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled ― Mariana Enríquez
We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius -- Patti Smith
Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever -- Chris Power
Roberto Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time. -- Paul Auster
About the Author
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.
