Voices From Beyond the Grave in Bolaño’s ‘Return’

Roberto Bolaño once expressed disdain for magical realism as a literary style. Yet, in the latest collection of stories published posthumously by the acclaimed Chilean writer, Bolaño creates worlds that stretch far beyond the realms of reality. Unlike the Latin American writers he criticized, however, in “The Return,” Bolaño does not attempt to weave the magical into the mundane. He explicitly announces that his characters are dreaming, or that they are speaking from beyond death. What is more, his protagonists themselves are acutely aware of the fantastical framework of the worlds in which they are living. Although this consciousness on the part of his characters can at times be disorienting, he uses these imaginary worlds as a lens through which to understand reality more clearly.

In the title story, Bolaño’s character speaks as a ghost. The story begins with the protagonist witnessing his own death on the dance floor of a Parisian club, after which he follows his body to the morgue where he begins to get used to his ghostly state. Bolaño treats this death with a kind of lightheartedness; his character declares, “I had died, which always comes as a surprise, except, I guess, in some cases of suicide.” He even allows for the ghost to speak of the entire incident as a kind of inconvenience: “I was getting more and more bored.”

Yet the boredom does not last, as the ghost watches a famous fashion designer molest his dead body. But what would normally be a disturbing turn of events is complicated by Bolaño’s unusual choice to narrate the story from beyond death. That is, Bolaño allows for his protagonist to retain control, and even authority, during the completely submissive act of necrophilia, by locating the narrative voice in death—the ghost is even able to calmly reprimand the fashion designer that he “should be ashamed.”

Indeed, all of the short stories in Bolaño’s “The Return” take a kind of disorienting form. While some are framed by the world of a dream or the world beyond death, others are more stylistically unusual: a ten page story is one sentence long, another is written entirely in dialogue. In the very beginning of “Meeting With Enrique Lihn,” the protagonist states that he is dreaming the entire sequence of events. Again, as he does in “The Return” with death, framing the story in a dream might initially suggest a relinquishing of control and responsibility on the part of the characters, yet Bolaño continually endows his characters with the understanding of the framework of the dream.

The protagonist in “Meeting With Enrique Lihn,” is acutely aware that things in his dream do not make sense, a fact that he makes quite clear in his narration: “Of course I knew that Lihn was dead, but when they offered to take me to meet him I accepted without hesitation,” he says. Even Lihn seems to be aware of the unreality of the situation, as the narrator observes: “And at that moment I knew Lihn knew he was dead.” Bolaño is continuously creating these kinds of strange details, these unusual events, and then allowing for his protagonists to become aware and comment on their peculiarity. Later the narrator observes, while studying his surroundings within the dream, “After a while I reached the conclusion that something was wrong. If the floor of Lihn’s apartment was glass and so was the roof of the bar, what about all the stories from the second to the sixth?”

Because many of the stories in this collection are set in the realm of the fantastic, Bolaño is able to create a distance from the disturbing events he depicts. However, in the few stories in which his characters are not aware that they operating in a created world, the violence takes on a strikingly tangible nature. “Murdering Whores” consists of the monologue of a woman who tortures and eventually kills a Spanish soccer player. The entire story is in quotations, emphasizing the voice of the killer—the murdered man has no voice. Because this act of torture is not contextualized within a dream or an afterlife, it becomes all the more extreme. While in other stories, any disorder can be dismissed as part of an imaginary framework, here the reader is simply a witness to unexplainable, unreasonable violence. The lack of a clear motivation for the act—“It’s not something personal,” the torturer explains—only highlights its brutality.

When the protagonist of “Photos” observes, “at some point you stop knowing what you used to know,” Bolaño seems to be drawing attention to fiction’s ability to shift reality. But at the same time, he is also pointing out that even outside of fiction, violence can still shake our perception of the world, and it does so without the fictive—and protective—framework of dreams.

—Staff writer Rachel A. Stark can be reached at rstark@fas.harvard.edu.