Tres

Roberto Bolaño’s own preferred literary persona was as a poet and Tres is his most inventive and bracing collection.

As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. ‘Prose from Autumn in Gerona’, a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, ‘The Neochileans’, is a sort of On the Road in verse, which narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour traveling north from Chile to Peru and Ecuador. Finally, the collection ends with a series of short poems that take us on ‘A Stroll Through Literature’ reminding us of Bolaño’s masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.