The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño

Though one of the most esteemed Latin American writers of his generation, Roberto Bolaño's reputation in the English-speaking world is sustained by translations that appeared mostly after his death in 2003. The Insufferable Gaucho was among the last works he prepared for publication in Spanish, but received its first English translation only recently.

It wasn't quite worth the wait. A collection of five stories and two essays, it's enjoyable enough, but it highlights Bolaño's relative weakness with short forms. He's more suited to the sprawling novel: when it comes to concision, he can't approach his master, Borges, who needed only a few pages to birth worlds.

Admittedly, the collection's most overtly Borgesian stories – Álvaro Rousselot's Journey, in which a writer searches for an enigmatic director who's been filming his books without acknowledgment, and the title story, in which a lawyer attempts to live like a gaucho – are also its strongest, achieving a fullness that belies their brevity.

The essays, though, are disappointing: unlike Borges, Bolaño isn't much of a thinker. The Myths of Cthulhu is an invective against vulgarity in Latin American literature that is itself a model of vulgarity; and Literature + Illness = Illness, written during Bolaño's final stages of liver failure, ought to be affecting but is instead flashy and cold. [Kristian Doyle]