Review: The Insufferable Gaucho

The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I think of Bolano, whose 2666 is deservedly recognized as one of the recent world classics, I think of bulk. 2666 and The Savage Detectives find their themes – generally a kind of disintegration of culture as the bulwark between modern society and the beasts we humans are always threatening to become – over vast tomes. There’s something concussive about his best-known work, something that makes its point by slowly strangling the resistance out of you.

So, it’s strange to read Bolano’s short fiction in this collection. No one story is all that long, and few of them really talk to one another. Each is its own experiment in form and tone, and each accomplishes something different. If I had to take a stab at connecting them to one another, I’d say they deal with the beguiling limits of story-telling itself: literature gives the promise that it can reshape the world. It always breaks that promise but then, like a skilled con-man or a tormenting lover, it pledges this next time will be different.

The title story seems to me to be about the ease with which contemporary culture can melt away. The gaucho in question is a lawyer/judge in Buenos Aries who, in an economic downturn, decides to return to his family’s ranch and live as a gaucho off the land. There are some slapstick moments as he adjusts, but he eventually proves comfortable in his new role. He discovers, though, that the entire country is diminished. There’s a troublingly funny repeated detail that, as the cattle and horses have mostly gone, the place has gone to the rabbits. The opportunity for ambition is gone, and our upper-crust protagonist, by embracing some form of self-reliance, emerges as a mildly heroic figure, perhaps even a 20th century Don Quixote.

My favorite is probably “Police Rat,” a story that turns out to be a tribute to a Kafka story called “Josephine the Singer.” Where, I gather, the Kafka story imagined a mouse (or rat) who aspired to become an artist, this one features Pepe, one of her relatives, who signs up to be a detective within the rat world. He investigates a crime unthinkable to most of his neighbors, a rat who serially murders other rats. There’s a solid noir tint to the experiment, and then there’s the larger question: how are we humans any less animal than these rats, rats who cannot readily think to harm one another in ways that we take for granted as part of human reality. It may have been striking to see Kafka imagine a rat who’d dare to create art – an expression that, in us suggests a hunger for something better than what we are. Here, as we see rats unable to conceive of the violence we virtually take for granted, we’re called on to see how animal-like we really are.

The later stories become less narrative and more persona-based meditations. I find those more uneven, but the one that leaves the deepest mark is “The Myths of Cthulhu.” In it, our speaker reflects on the unhappy claim – unhappy to an aspiring ‘serious’ writer – that the public is never wrong in its tastes. That is, if the writer’s job is ultimately to entertain, then the writer who can entertain the most people is necessarily the best. All that makes the best-seller the be-all of writing. Who of us should care that our work is subtler, more original, or more nimble in its cultural critique? If most people can’t happily pick it and read it, then it’s not as good as, well, the things they can.

Our speaker names names. He admires Garcia Marquez, for instance, but thinks Isabel Allende, with her stories of Eva Luna, is as unworthy a successor as Thabo Mbeki (the South African President who denies the existence of AIDS) is to Nelson Mandela. At bottom, though, I think the story works through its irony into a position it stands behind: writing is always a mystery, always a process that will leave us short of where we’d hoped it might take us. We will always be disappointed by what we read, but we ought to be even more disappointed if we leave the writing of books only to the hacks who are determined to de-fang it, determined to give us only tame and settled dreams.


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