Sean Kim: The Last Book I Loved, Last Evenings on Earth

It used to be that exile was unique to small, tight knit immigrant communities, but now I know it’s just a condition of living in the world.  Roberto Bolano proves it.  For him, exile is a life lived in existential crisis, only the feeling isn’t so much desperation as it is an endless, numbing ennui.  Loneliness, boredom, an eerie sense of impending violence; one flies to Paris via Buenos Aires in the same banal fog as one walks across the street to a neighbor’s.  You meet people who wonder at their situations as revolutionaries, as writers, daughters, travelers, each attempting to make some kind of connection that, in the end, disintegrates into a fine dust.  This collection is perfect, not one story falters, though some do stand apart, like “Sensini,” “Anne Moore’s Story,” “Last Evenings on Earth.”  Each one unfolds as a series of consecutive events that could be random or fated, or both; and every one of them is sad.