Portrait of an Unknown Artist
Reviews
By Robert Rea
Ricardo Funes, the fiery protagonist of Javier Serena’s Last Words on Earth, looks a lot like Roberto Bolaño. The story of a hellraising poet turned famous novelist will be familiar to those in the know, but the novel is more than mere fan service. What’s great about this book is that it gets behind the myth without destroying the legend.
Serena tells a fairly traditional story: that of a Künstlerroman based loosely on Bolaño’s struggles as an artist. The writer in this case is a character marked by failure and rejection, unlike the law-defying lit-bro you meet in The Savage Detectives. In that book, Bolaño casts himself as an epic hero, only to vanish inside his own myth. Serena takes a more modest, though no less inventive, approach.
To say that Serena reveals the man behind the myth would be a cliché, but the novel succeeds largely because it refuses to glorify its subject. When the story begins, Funes is leading a quiet family life on the coast of Spain. His days are spent toiling in obscurity and submitting work, with little hope of seeing it published.
Serena uses three points of view to examine the growth of an artist for whom recognition is elusive. The first chapter is narrated by Fernando Vallés, a close friend of Funes and an established writer on the Spanish literary scene. Vallés listens as Funes reflects on his years in Mexico fronting a group of guerilla poets, as well as the many setbacks he suffers as an aspiring author. The second narrator is Funes’s wife, Guadalupe Mora, who, when younger, was wooed by his gift for suffusing the ordinary with a romantic glow. Funes captivates as an obsessive dreamer of heroic dreams, and half the joy comes from seeing experience spun into yarns by his wildly quixotic mind.
Funes narrates the final section himself, and in its best passages, the prose lights up the page as he deals with sudden fame and terminal illness. Consider this thumbnail sketch of the books that would make him famous: “I wanted to write books about characters who raised themselves up as heroes, like statues on horseback, sabers drawn and pointing in life’s true direction.” Then, as the publishing biz starts to take notice, he’s diagnosed with lung disease. Narrating from the grave, he declares, “In death, one speaks with a thin thread of a voice that comes from the distance and filters through the cracks in the void like an inexplicable disaster, smoke slipping through earth shaken by a slumbering volcano.” Voicing the Bolaño sensibility, without impersonating the style—this is a shrewd move by Serena. As is teaming up with Katie Whittemore, whose translation catches the splendor of the original Spanish.
As a whole the novel doubles as commentary on the porous borders of the Bolaño universe. Serena imagines an unknown chapter in the storied life of a shameless self-mythologizer. “Don’t try to figure out what deserves an encyclopedia entry and what doesn’t,” one character explains. “He talks about what he writes as if it had really happened, and he writes what actually happened as if it were made up: he stirs it all together until there’s not an uncontaminated ingredient in the pot.” All of which only adds to the legend.
One of the drawbacks of fictionalizing a great artist is that it assumes you know something about his work and bio. Serena runs the risk that some readers will dismiss Funes as an insufferable romantic and fail to see what all the fuss is about. But even then, the book should win over anyone who has obsessively pursued an interest and wondered if it was worth it. And to Serena’s credit, the answer, at least from Funes’s point of view, is less obvious than you think.
Given how it all plays out, Last Words on Earth brings to mind the premature death of Kurt Cobain, as depicted in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. There’s an eloquent sadness to the film that depends entirely on the subtlety of the director’s observation. Seeing a star in this light makes him seem human, sure, but in a way that looks on with a respectful awe. Serena summons that same spirit, rendering an all-too-brief, meteoric life before it burns out forever.
Robert Rea is the deputy editor and web editor for SwR.
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