There’s an apocryphal tale that on the day jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus died at 56 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, 56 gray whales beached themselves on the local shores in tribute. True or not, the story makes a kind of cosmic sense. Mingus’s art and life seemed governed by a set of rules no one but he understood: We could only intuit their design by letting his music wash over us. One wonders whether when the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, in 2003, anyone thought to check the beaches.