Posthumous Stories by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer, Picador, 2026
When Roberto Bolaño died at age fifty of liver disease, he left behind more than fourteen thousand pages of unpublished material; in the two decades since, his posthumous career in English translation has become as prolific as his final living years were urgent. Posthumous Stories, published in Spanish as El secreto del mal in 2007 and first appearing in Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer’s English translation in 2012, represents neither the first nor the last excavation of those folders on his hard drive. The collection arrives with no apology, no editorial disclaimer. Some pieces may be finished. Some may not. It becomes impossible to tell.
This ambiguity extends beyond the individual stories to encompass Bolaño’s entire English-language afterlife—for Anglophone readers have almost entirely encountered him only since his death: 2666 appeared in Spanish in 2004 but reached English readers only in 2008, while The Skating Rink (2009), The Third Reich (2011), Woes of the True Policeman (2012), The Spirit of Science Fiction (2014), and Cowboy Graves (2021) all arrived in English translation years after their Spanish publication. Even The Savage Detectives—the novel that finally brought him international recognition after originally being published in 1998—only appeared in Natasha Wimmer’s translation in 2007, four years after his death. For most American and British readers, Bolaño exists exclusively as a legacy author, his work arriving piecemeal, assembled by editors and translators working from files named BAIRES and STORIX, making educated guesses about intention and completion.
What does it mean to encounter a writer through his unfinished work? Posthumous Stories offers nineteen pieces that range from fully realized narratives to what might be early drafts or abandoned experiments—but the interpretive key to the volume might be “Beach,” a single-paragraph story of approximately one thousand words that operates simultaneously as autobiography, addiction narrative, and revelation.
“Beach” opens with the narrator describing his methadone treatment in a Catalan coastal town: “I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn’t have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest. . .” The remainder of this opening sentence unspools over five pages, spiraling forward in Bolaño’s characteristic long-breathed syntax and mimicking the restless insomnia of early recovery. It follows the narrator through his daily routine—visits to the beach, noontime methadone treatments, then returning to the sand to lie in the sun and watch without being watched.
Then, one day, an elderly couple appears. The woman is “fat, or round,” about seventy, sitting under an umbrella with a thick book. Her husband is emaciated, “more than thin, a walking skeleton,” lying on the sand in nothing but a tiny swimsuit and drinking “with a voracity that brought me distant memories of junkies frozen in blissful immobility, of junkies focused on what they were doing, on the only thing they could do.” At the sight of such a thin man, he first thinks: “. . . it’s death coming for me.” But then he realizes: nothing is coming for him. These are just two old people, the man clearly dying, spending what may be his last summer on earth.
The story’s genius lies in this doubling. The old man absorbing sunlight becomes a mirror for the narrator’s own recovery; both are engaged in the same desperate project of restoration, of taking something vivifying into a body that has been ravaged. The old man knows he is dying and exposes himself to the sun anyway, and the narrator, emerging from heroin addiction, does the same: the repetitive routine, the watching, the slow accumulation of health. Both are recovering something that can never be fully recovered. Both are saying goodbye.
This is the architecture beneath Posthumous Stories: every piece concerns itself with a recovery that remains perpetually incomplete, with testimony offered at the edge of what can be articulated, with witnessing as both necessity and violation. The opening story, “Colonia Lindavista,” excavates Bolaño’s arrival in Mexico City in 1968 at age fifteen, upon which he moves into an apartment building on a street he remembers as Calle Aurora—though he immediately questions this memory, noting he later lived on a Calle Aurora in Blanes, making it “unlikely” he lived on two streets with the same name, though “the name’s not all that unusual.” Memory itself becomes shaky ground. The story itself focuses on his neighbors, a pilot and his infertile wife, and has no resolution. It simply describes a year, then ends. What makes it devastating is the distance from which it’s written: Bolaño in his final months, dying, remembering his teenage self before Chile, before Pinochet’s coup and eight-day imprisonment, before Europe and poverty and heroin and the disease that would kill him.
The collection’s final story, “The Days of Chaos,” operates as dark twin to this opening. The narrative finds Arturo Belano searching for his missing fifteen-year-old son Gerónimo in Berlin, 2005—but the story simply stops mid-search: “This was in the year 2005. This was in the year 2005.” The repetition becomes incantatory, a desperate attempt to anchor reality as everything dissolves. The father never finds the son. The narrative cuts off with brutal incompletion—because Bolaño died before finishing it, or because he intended it this way. We don’t know.
Between these autobiographical bookends, Posthumous Stories stages violent encounters that demand witness despite their inconclusion. In “The Room Next Door,” a narrator in a Guatemalan boarding house overhears a man confessing to murder, then a woman’s voice saying, “Good night.” In “Crimes,” a journalist investigates another woman in Calama, stabbed twenty-seven times at age twenty-seven. “It could have been me,” she says, the coincidence of numbers becoming a dark arithmetic. Even “The Colonel’s Son,” a shaggy-dog account of a low-budget zombie film, reveals itself as metaphor for addiction, for watching someone choose their disease over you.
The facts of Bolaño’s life are well-rehearsed by now: born in Santiago 1953, emigrated to Mexico City 1968, returned to Chile for Allende 1973, arrested after Pinochet’s coup, imprisoned eight days, narrowly escaped execution. Then 1975-77 as founder of Mexico City’s Infrarealist poetry movement, followed by a decade of European poverty as dishwasher, campground watchman, garbage collector. The contested detail is of heroin addiction, as his widow disputes this characterization, but there is the certain fact of methadone treatment in the late 1980s, when he settled in Blanes. Then comes the 1990 turn from poetry to fiction to support his family. The breakthrough success of The Savage Detectives in 1998 at age forty-six. The diagnosis of liver disease in 1999. The obsessive writing until death in 2003. What distinguishes his posthumous career in translation, then, is how it mirrors his own formal innovations throughout this varied life. His characters exist perpetually at “the brink of the abyss,” searching for vanished figures, pursuing mysteries that cannot be solved. In The Savage Detectives, the visceral realists search for the lost poet Cesárea Tinajero. In 2666, scholars pursue the disappeared German writer Benno von Archimboldi while women are murdered endlessly in Santa Teresa. The search is the point. The incompletion is the chronicle.
Reading Bolaño primarily through posthumous publications, you encounter a writer whose work has always demanded this distancing from life. His methodology was incompletion, digression, the refusal of closure. “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain,” he wrote. In his final interview: “Nothing changed. I discovered that I wasn’t immortal.” Yet, Posthumous Stories outlines Bolaño through the immortality of translation, its own form of recovery. We access texts left unprepared by the author, examining work he might have revised or abandoned, forgotten or destroyed—and it is what his work demands: that we witness what should remain hidden, read at the brink of the abyss, confront incompletion as the truest testimony, and go on. Recovery never ends. The sun will rise. The beach is endless. One continues reading to witness the form of what disappears.
Jordan Silversmith‘s novel Redshift, Blueshift won the 2020 Gival Press Novel Prize. He is also the recipient of the 2020 Slippery Elm Prize in Poetry. His fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in Jewish Fiction, Half Mystic Journal, ANMLY, and elsewhere.
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