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laurd 's review for:
The Secret of Evil
by Roberto Bolaño
I picked up three Bolaño books from the library to escape Virginia Woolf’s The Waves for the time being. But I found myself in a similar land, “here for a rhythm, not a plot.” The preliminary note at the beginning of the posthumous collection of Bolaño’s writings describes them as a “poetics of inconclusiveness,” given that they are largely unfinished pieces. Much like Woolf’s wavelets, the short story ‘Labyrinth’ links a group of people in a shared photograph and streams their collective experiences together in one tightly twined rope. Labyrinth is a word repeated again and again throughout these stories, a concept also introduced literally in the zombie tale of navigating underground sewage systems. Many of these stories are also linked by referencing or focusing on a fabled piece of media, be it a photograph or film, which reminds me of House of Leaves. In its inconclusiveness, many stories end on an unsettling note before a drop off conclusion, edging toward horror without climactic scare. A lot is unsaid.