The Secret of Evil
by Roberto Bolano
Staff Pick
As the pool of Roberto Bolaño's as yet untranslated (or unpublished) work draws ever shallower, fans of the late Chilean novelist and poet are left hungering for whatever wayward morsels still remain. While those eager to devour something as bountiful as The Savage Detectives or 2666 are likely to be left unsated, Bolaño's residual writings nonetheless offer a complementary (if not integral) glimpse into his towering and singular body of work. So it is with The Secret of Evil, a collection of 19 mostly unfinished pieces found amongst the files on Bolaño's computer following his death in 2003.
Ignacio Echevarría, Spanish critic and Bolaño's literary executor, penned a preliminary note to The Secret of Evil that outlines the provenance of the book's contents. Despite the undated nature of these orphaned pieces, it appears that Bolaño was working on them in the months preceding his death. Echevarría offers insight into the often problematic charge of determining which of Bolaño's stories or items had, in fact, already been completed:
The inconclusive nature of Bolaño's novels and stories makes it difficult to decide which of the unpublished narrative texts should be regarded as finished and which are simply sketches. The task is further complicated by Bolaño's progressive radicalization of what I have called his poetics of inconclusiveness. And to make the distinction more difficult still, Bolaño rarely began to write a story without giving it a title and immediately establishing a definite tone and atmosphere; his writing, which is always captivating, virtually never stumbles or hesitates.
Despite the arduousness of Echevarría's attempts to clarify a particular piece's state of completion, the writing in The Secret of Evil never reads as if it were hastily constructed, but rather, at times, simply unfinished. Some of the included stories may well have an ambiguous ending, while others leave off in a way that seemingly indicates that they were abandoned pending resumption at a later date.
Of the 19 pieces that compose The Secret of Evil, three have appeared previously in English translation. "Vagaries on the Literature of Doom" (a speech about the state of post-Borgesian Argentine literature), "Sevilla Kills Me" (an unfinished, if somewhat similarly themed, address), and "Beach" (progenitor of the " Bolaño was once a heroin junkie" speculations since debunked by his wife, as well as by friend and fellow author Enrique Vila-Matas) were all published in Between Parentheses. As with much of Bolaño's writing, the line between fictional creation and autobiographical sketch blur easily, as is evident in "I Can't Read," a "story" about his son Lautaro's humorous antics during Bolaño's first return trip to his native Chile in nearly two and a half decades. "I Can't Read" demonstrates a lighter, more playful (and ever self-effacing) Bolaño, and is one of the book's stronger pieces, despite remaining, sadly, forever unfinished.
Three of the stories in The Secret of Evil, "The Old Man of the Mountain," "Death of Ulises," and "The Days of Chaos," feature recurrent Bolaño character (and autobiographical alter ego) Arturo Belano, two of which portray him well beyond his heady, itinerant Savage Detectives years. Daniela de Montecristo (of Nazi Literature and 2666 fame) makes a brief appearance in her namesake story, "Daniela," wherein she recalls the loss of her virginity at age 13. "Scholars of Sodom" (in two versions) imagines V. S. Naipaul upon a visit to Buenos Aires. "Labyrinth" is vaguely evocative of the first part of 2666, "The Part about the Critics." "Muscles," Echevarría surmises, is "probably the beginning of an unfinished novel, perhaps an early version of Una Novelita Lumpen" (a 2002 novella yet to be rendered into English). The collection's title story is amongst the best (despite its brevity) of those selected for inclusion, and offers a seedy, nocturnal milieu that Bolaño was so adept at creating. The most surprising of the stories is "The Colonel's Son," a nightmarish tale wherein the narrator recounts a chilling zombie movie he viewed on television the night before.
The Secret of Evil will appeal most greatly to those already won over by Bolaño's extraordinary body of work. Neophytes may well find this a difficult collection to make sense of, as the nature of the book lends itself to those long since familiar with the style and themes that characterize the Chilean's masterful fiction. This is most certainly not the place for a newcomer to start, but for the devotee, a subterranean expanse of narrative possibilities and literary what-ifs await.
Recommended by Jeremy, Powells.com
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