The Insufferable Gaucho

By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator

“Reading Roberto Bolaño is like . . . watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times

“We savor all he has written, as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius.” —Patti Smith

An aging judge retires from Buenos Aires to the family ranch in the Pampas to battle feral rabbits and reclaim the dignity of the gaucho life. An obscure Argentinian writer journeys to Paris to face down the filmmaker who has made a career out of plagiarizing his novels. An intrepid detective investigates a series of grisly murders—among his fellow sewer rats. Riffing on Borges and Kafka, yet utterly and inimitably Roberto Bolaño, these stories testify to his mastery of the short form. Rounding out the collection are two of his most provocative and piercing essays, “Literature + Illness = Illness” and “The Myths of Cthulhu,” each crackling with his signature black humor and incomparable powers of perception and critique. The Insufferable Gaucho is an essential part of the Bolaño oeuvre.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Critic reviews

“Brilliant . . . A superb introduction—a kind of tasting menu—to a writer of distinction and range.”
—Michael Gorra, The Times Literary Supplement

“[‘The Insufferable Gaucho’] is one of Bolaño’s most powerful fictions . . . These stories confirm Bolaño’s ideal of literature as a voyage to the zero degree of human existence . . . where we lose the self in order to find it again.”
—Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

“His stories . . . have a cinéma verité quality, are delivered as fragments of life that are at once resonant and baffling, fascinating and open-ended, beyond clear interpretation or final resolution . . . Bolaño is compendious and expansive, as rich in detail as Dickens or Balzac.”
—Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books

“An ideal introduction to the Bolaño imaginaire.”
—Harper’s Magazine