The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño: Posthumous Fragments That Rival His Lifetime Masterpieces

Roberto Bolaño left us too early, in 2003, at fifty.

Yet his work keeps arriving, as if his computer held a second life he never quite finished living.

The Secret of Evil, published in Spanish in 2007 and in English translation by Chris Andrews in 2012, collects nineteen pieces—some complete short stories, most sketches or fragments—rescued from his hard drive.

I have read every story collection Bolaño released during his lifetime: Last Evenings on Earth, The Insufferable Gaucho, the scattered pieces in The Return.

These posthumous texts do not feel like scraps.

They are little gems, sharp and strange, often matching the intensity of his official books.

The title itself, taken from the final story in the volume, is one of those editorial choices that feels inevitable once you read it.

It promises darkness without theatrics, the kind of understated menace Bolaño perfected.

The Pull of the Unfinished

Bolaño once wrote about a “poetics of inconclusiveness.”

Here, that poetics becomes the organizing principle.

Many pieces end mid-sentence, mid-thought.

Some begin with a declaration that sounds like the start of a longer work that never arrived.

But the abruptness rarely feels accidental.

It mirrors the way lives cut off—by illness, exile, violence, or simple disappearance.

Reading these fragments, you sense Bolaño circling themes he never fully exhausted: the porous border between autobiography and invention, the quiet horror lurking in everyday gestures, the literary world as both refuge and cage.

The Title Story: A Disappearance in Plain Sight

The collection closes with the piece that gives it its name.

“The Secret of Evil” is brief, almost a whisper. It begins with a phone call or a casual remark—versions vary slightly in memory, but the core is this: someone tells the narrator about a man who, during a dinner in Paris, excused himself to go to the bathroom and never returned.

That’s it.

No body, no explanation, no dramatic chase. Just absence.

The narrator lingers on the moment, turning it over.

And then comes the line that haunts: the secret of evil, he suggests, is that certain people can simply step into it, the way one steps out for air, and vanish.

Short paragraph for impact.

The banality of the gesture—the bathroom excuse—recalls Hannah Arendt’s phrase about evil, but Bolaño twists it.

Here, evil is not bureaucratic; it is intimate, almost polite.

It waits at the table, smokes a cigarette, and then walks away.

Labyrinth: The Longest Piece and the Most Rewarding

“Labyrinth” is the longest story in the book and, for me, the most memorable.

It starts innocently enough: someone is looking at a photograph taken in a Parisian café, probably in the late 1970s.

A group of French intellectuals—members of the Tel Quel circle—are seated around a table, smoking, gesturing, lost in conversation.

The narrator begins identifying them one by one.

There’s Philippe Sollers, leaning back with that knowing half-smile.

Julia Kristeva beside him, perhaps touching someone’s arm.

Other figures: Jacques Henric, Maria Pourchet, maybe Denis Roche.

Some faces remain unidentified, their hands or knees suggesting hidden intimacies.

The first few pages demand patience.

You track positions, glances, possible affairs.

Who is the young man in the background with the haunted look?

Whose hand rests on whose thigh under the table?

I admit: I grew tired at first, flipping back to keep the names straight.

But Bolaño knows what he’s doing.

If you stay with it, the photograph becomes a labyrinth in the Borgesian sense—passages multiplying, lives branching into speculation.

Suddenly the descriptions open up.

We learn fragments of biographies: lovers who betrayed each other, writers who fell into obscurity, ideological shifts, addictions, exiles.

The frozen image starts to move.

Relationships fracture and reform in the narrator’s conjectures.

And everything loops back to the photograph itself, that single arrested moment containing entire destinies.

By the end, the photo feels alive, almost breathing.

The unidentified figures gain weight; their anonymity becomes the point.

They could be anyone—failed poets, forgotten revolutionaries, or simply people who sat at the wrong table one afternoon.

Bolaño turns a static object into a portal.

It’s one of his finest tricks, reminiscent of the archival obsessions in 2666, where documents and lists conceal unspeakable crimes.

(If you’ve read my earlier thoughts on 2666, you’ll recognize the echo: the compulsion to catalogue, to map the unmappable.)

Crimes and Other Hooks

Bolaño’s openings are merciless.

They rarely ease you in.

Take “Crimes.”

The narrator begins with a confession—or is it?

He lists acts he has committed, but the nature of the crimes stays slippery.

Are they literal murders, metaphorical betrayals, or the everyday cruelties we inflict on those closest to us?

The story drifts toward a woman, a house, a sense of suffocation.

It ends unfinished, yet the final lines linger: something about the inevitability of transgression, the way guilt settles like dust.

Another piece, “I Can’t Read,” starts with a single devastating sentence that refuses to explain itself.

“Beach” drops you into a surreal landscape where a man wanders among addicts and ghosts.

“Muscles” begins with a seemingly mundane observation that quickly tilts into the grotesque.

These hooks work because Bolaño trusts the reader to follow him into uncertainty.

He doesn’t underline the strangeness; he inhabits it.

Why These Fragments Stand with His Best Work

Skeptics might argue that posthumous collections dilute an author’s legacy.

Not here.

The unfinished quality amplifies Bolaño’s recurring concerns: the fragility of exile, the seductive poison of literary ambition, the way history’s violence seeps into private lives.

Some pieces feel like outtakes from larger novels.

Others read like private notes Bolaño never intended for publication—their rawness gives them power.

There’s less polish, more nerve.

Compare them to the polished stories in Last Evenings on Earth.

Those are exquisite, controlled.

These are jagged, urgent.

Both modes serve him equally well.

And the intertextual web remains intact.

Characters and motifs drift across his oeuvre: the wandering Latin American writer, the detective searching for a vanished poet, the sense that literature might be the only defense against chaos—and also its accomplice.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men—a labyrinthine quest for a lost writer—owes an obvious debt to Bolaño’s methods.

The same endless deferral, the same seductive dead ends.

Closing the Circle

Reading The Secret of Evil feels like eavesdropping on Bolaño thinking aloud in his final years.

The pieces are uneven, yes—some barely sketches—but the strongest ones burn with the same intensity that made him indispensable.

You finish the book unsettled, turning back to certain pages, wondering what might have come next.

That lingering unease is the point.

Bolaño never resolved the mysteries he raised; he multiplied them.

The secret of evil, perhaps, is not that it exists, but that we keep looking for it in photographs, in fragments, in the spaces between sentences.

And in Bolaño’s case, we keep finding it—long after he’s gone.