The Secret of Evil [Hardcover]

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2012

A collection that gathers everything Bolaño was working on before his untimely death.

A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory...

The various pieces in the posthumous Secret of Evil extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bolaño.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“One of those rare writers who write for a future time. We have only begun to appreciate his strange, oblique genius.” (John Banville )

“A once-in-a-blue-moon rhapsodic reading experience.” (Johnathan Lethem - The New York Times )

“Bolaño has joined the immortals.” (The Washington Post )

“Bolaño was no political pamphleteer. And yet his characters’ angst and desires play out against the canvas of history. With his raw, barely controlled emotions, and a talent for mining the pathos, beauty, and even humor amid the horror of ordinary life, his fiction soared.” (Mac Margolis - The Daily Beast )

“

Bolaño crafts characters isolated from their surroundings and compellingly observing the humanity around them.Bolaño's writing is reliably intriguing.

” (Publishers Weekly )

“It's a glimpse into the process of a totemic artistic figure.” (The A.V. Club )

“Paragraphs demand to be reread, because they give you the feeling that you’ve missed something. You did miss something, but you won’t find it in the printed words. It’s the space around the words where you’ll find the answer.” (The Coffin Factory )

“Poetry is dangerous; that's the message.” (Daily Kos )

“Bolaño succeeds in conjuring the unknowable empty spaces that an obsessive mind can imagine into the private lives of others.” (The Rumpus )

“Each of the tales boast an aspect of Bolaño’s prodigious talent: his ability to leap into a character’s skin, quickly, with compelling confidence; or his facility for making sinister personalities and surreally uncomfortable situations feel all too plausible.” (Time Out New York )

About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

The poet Chris Andrews has translated many books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; First Edition edition (April 30, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811218155
• ISBN-13: 978-0811218153
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Mesmerizing Scrapbook May 16, 2012

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, at the age of 50. The author of BY NIGHT IN CHILE, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES, and 2666 was a towering genius, no question about it. But the posthumous publications even of geniuses can be disappointing; the recent THIRD REICH, for example, while still uniquely his, lacked the sheer intensity of his greatest works. So I had limited expectations of this collection of stories and fragments garnered from his computer files.

But how wrong I was! Partly because with stories and fragments you do not expect either the range or the embrace of a masterpiece like 2666. But mainly because, despite the enormous length of his most famous books, Bolaño had been developing a style that relied increasingly on what was NOT said, breaking off the narrative abruptly at the approach of evil -- what his editor, Ignacio Etchevarría, calls his "poetics of inconclusiveness." It means that even fragments can have an ominous suggestive power, and there is no way of knowing whether such a fragment is not, in fact, complete. There are a number of short studies in noir throughout the book: a voice on the phone contacting a journalist at night, neighbors who make love only in the small hours, a shoe salesman who enters an almost deserted newspaper office and quizzes a female reporter about the sex crime she is writing about, a young woman gradually coming to terms with her brother's sexuality.... There is a hilarious description of the worst zombie movie ever made -- or what would be hilarious had the narrator had not introduced it as his virtual biography. There is a five-page run-on sentence, moving and disturbing at once, in the voice of a former heroin addict observing the other people on the beach, "a man of thirty-five who had nothing at all but who was recovering his will and his courage and who knew that he would live a while longer."

There are also two critical pieces on South American literature, mostly about writers I do not know. But even these read almost as stories, because of Bolaño's outspokenness: "Seen as a closet or a basement, [Roberto] Arlt's work is fine. Seen as the main room of the house, it's a macabre joke. Seen as the kitchen, it promises food poisoning. [...] Seen as the library, it's a guarantee of the destruction of literature." This guy pulls no punches! Sometimes it is hard to separate fact from fiction. He drafts a story about VS Naipaul visiting Buenos Aires in the 1970s, becoming increasingly aware of an oppressive atmosphere in the city, and linking it to a supposed Argentinian predilection for sodomy. I have not read the Naipaul book, THE RETURN OF EVA PERON, but I strongly suspect that this is Bolaño riffing on the Nobelist's points, expressing his own political sensibilities with an irrepressible taste for shock.

LABYRINTH, the story that impressed me most, combines literary journalism, novelistic imagination, and ribald daring all in one. It starts as the meticulous deconstruction of a photograph of eight French intellectuals, taken around 1970. The photo itself is not reproduced, but it can easily be found online by entering two or three of the names (say Sollers, Kristeva, and Devade). It is fascinating, first, how much detail Bolaño sees. Then what he deduces about the relationships between the people. Then what he speculates about possible people outside the frame. From there, he branches off into wilder and wilder speculation about their off-camera behavior and amorous entanglements, even inserting himself into the story at one point. But he keeps coming back to the picture, and suddenly his speculations (though undoubtedly libelous) do not seem so wild after all. It is a perfect example of the fictive process at work, in the hands of a writer of great intelligence and unbridled imagination. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars For Bolano obsessives only March 31, 2013

By Jesse

Format:Hardcover

If you enjoyed 2666, The Savage Detectives, or By Night in Chile, don't automatically assume you're going to find anything of interest to you in this posthumous scrap heap.

If, however, you were bowled over by the aforementioned texts, and ventured beyond them to be further bowled over by Amulet, Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, Last Evenings on Earth, Between Parentheses, et cetera, then you'll more than likely be satisfied with what the editors have dug up for us with The Secret of Evil, an insignificant but, for the Bolano obsessive, ultimately fascinating assemblage of oddities and false starts. For those of us who, having come to the end of Bolano's published novels and short story collections, still are frantic for him, this is a nifty grab bag of pieces heavily saturated with the man's tell-tale style. It is no substiture for his great works, and won't do for you what Amulet did, or Last Evenings on Earth did, but as a way of staving off the inevitable, it works well.

2.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't Measure up May 5, 2013

By philip j. mcguire

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Pales by comparison with Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela. It is lauded as a great Mexican period piece but simply doesn't measure up.

4.0 out of 5 stars Extra wry January 21, 2013

By Mark Poehner

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This has some of Bolaño's wriest writing, albeit incomplete. I prefer reading his work in Spanish, of which he is the ultimate master, but the English translations here are so good that I actually feel like I'm reading in Spanish!

4.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes the bottom of the barrel is where the meat is December 16, 2012

By rail arson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's rare that ephemera and unpublished works collected after an author dies holds up to what they put out when in control of their own affairs; this one is the exception. If you like Bolaño's work, you’ll like this. Not everything is a homerun, but even the sketches provide an interesting window into his creative processes.