Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews)
London: Picador, 2010 (first published in Spanish 1996) ISBN 9780330513883
What a very odd book! I've read one other Bolano book, which I've reviewed here, and which has stayed with me. I think this one will as well.
The premise is that the author (identified as Bolano) has compiled an encyclopaedia of American fascist authors, written in the future (at least 2029). There are entries of varying lengths, a list of secondary authors, publishing houses, and a bibliography of works. This is a book that has taken a lot of effort to write - Bolano has created an entire milieu of inter-connected authors and publishers, as well as the thirty main biographies encompassing a menagerie of characters.
These authors range from psychopathic killers, to fabulists, members of the landed gentry and everything inbetween. The biographical entries also contain criticism of the author's oeuvre: just enough to make the reader intrigued about what reading the complete works would be like. It reminded me of the fragments of now-lost classical works and authors that we see reflected in the surviving contemporary works.
The question that arises from a book such as this is: what is Bolano trying to convey to us, the reader? It's an interesting question. In his biography of Carlos Ramirez Hoffman (the longest and most detailed in the book) Bolano himself appears as an inmate of a Chilean prison owing to his left-wing views. So, we can assume that the author of this encyclopaedia is not sympathetic to the politics of any of the people he is writing about. Yet, as each biography passes us by, with the catalogue of failure and obscurity that is laid out for us, we begin to feel for these misfits. Usually, that is the moment that Bolano hits us with something unspeakable, to shock us back into the realisation of the evil of the fascist ideology.
Given who I am and my cultural background, I saw the title of this book and made the assumption that the authors listed within would be from North America. Of course Bolano, and those who would have read the first edition of this book would have not been surprised that in fact most of the authors in this book come from South America (mainly Chile, Argentina and Brasil).
Most of the authors in this book are obscure - quite a few of them have written what they consider to be major works that sank into obscurity - in fact the "best-selling" author sold much of his work to soccer fans. There is an irony in this book: Bolano treats all of his creators and their works seriously, while at the same time being clear that nearly all of their work fell on deaf ears and sunk without a trace. There is also a finely wrought sense of the absurd throughout the book, as Bolano weaves real writers and events into these tawdry lives.
Bolano did seem to have had a fascination with Fascism, the Third Reich, and World War Two. After his death an early work of his entitled The Third Reich was published, which in my opinion is ambiguous about condemning what the German Army did in the War. I think Nazi Literature in the Americas seems to be more firmly anti-Nazi, but not definitively in my opinion.
So what is this book? It's certainly morbidly fascinating, surprisingly readable, memorable, and a result of considerable effort. What was he trying to say? Of that I'm not so sure - is it to show us that Fascism is evil? Is it to say that it's ridiculous? Is it to comment on the state of South American politics? It's hard to say.
When I read the back-cover blurb for this book, I thought "interesting"; when I was part-way through I thought "strange"; when I finished it I thought "wow". Bolano has put so much work into this book one can do nothing but admire it. The front cover of the edition I read has a blurb that reads "Lucid, insane, deadly serious, wildly playful, bibliomaniacal, and perversely imaginative" - I can't really say more than that.
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