Roberto Bolaño's Secret of Evil

Robert Bolaño writes as though describing a parallel world. If Stendhal walked the streets with a mirror on his back, Bolaño dropped the mirror from an aeroplane over a faraway place that only he could understand.

Anyone who has ever turned to writing will know the feeling of invalidity that comes from penning even a single sentence of fiction. Bolaño’s best short stories and greatest novels were composed with such utter simplicity they achieve nothing and everything.

Ignacio Echevarría, in his introduction to the latest collection of translations, The Secret of Evil, calls this phenomenon Bolaño’s “poetics of inconclusiveness”.

The second story in this collection is brief and describes a journalist meeting an anonymous source in the streets of Paris in the middle of the night. Bolaño addresses the reader directly, like he would a future self.

This story is very simple, although it would have been very complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an ending.

It opens thus, with structural awareness, apparently confronting the reality of his impending death. What the reader should take away is unclear, inconclusive. The remainder of the story offers little explanation.

The Parisian journalist was “a watcher with no one to watch him in turn” and had something “sad about his smile”. Paradox and cyclicality, so often traits of Bolaño’s stories, cavort with implosion and oxymoron whether through character or metaphor.

The Old Man of the Mountain reflects on the author’s lifelong friendship with Ulises Lima. Expressed vicariously through Bolaño’s alter-ego, Arturo Belano, the reader learns of “two young men sentenced to life”, somehow cursed to exist. In response they “both try in vain to find happiness or get themselves killed”; life propels them onward, yet their relationship has the circularity of a Beckett play.

In Scholars of Sodom Bolaño walks the tiles of Buenos Aires in the shoes of V.S. Naipul, who finds the practice of anal sex exasperating. In Argentina sodomy has become a byword for ownership.

If you haven’t fucked your lover or your girlfriend up the ass, you haven’t really taken possession of her.

Cultural insecurities are manifest in the act of violation thinly veiled by this superficial display of machismo. The author beats the drum of paradox to end the story by describing a lover as “queen and slave” to perfectly diagnose the problem in three words.

As the volume draws into its second half the stories are less complete. Besides contradiction and circularity, Bolaño introduces themes typical to his canon: sex, violence, and identity.

Perhaps his most autobiographical story, I Can’t Read portrays the author’s children and their dreams. His son, Lautoro is a dreamer who has developed a method of approaching automatic doors undetected. Bolaño, perpetually battling the loss of youthful idealism, tries in vain to mimic the boy by crawling up to doors only to be recognized, identified, exposed.

Sevilla Kills Me, the penultimate story of the collection continues Bolaño’s exploration of literature as an entity in itself. He once wrote that “poetry is braver than anyone”, and here he claims that “writing that plumbs the depths with open eyes doesn’t sell” while lamenting the readiness of young writers to sell and sell themselves.

No other has ever shown such determined commitment to the power of words. From his works we may conclude almost nothing, only that one’s idealism must never falter, nor the war for literature be ever lost.