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the complete review - fiction

Nazi Literature in the Americas

by
Roberto Bolaño

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : fantastic(al) literary creation

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "In its obsession with poetry, and with the lives of poets especially, it speaks to the writing Bolaño was still to do, and yet remains a solitary artifact of literary experimentation; a formative exercise in ersatz scholarship that should be shelved beside similar stunts by Bolaño’s Argentinean mentor, Jorge Luis Borges" - Joshua Cohen, Forward
  
  
• "Er hat ihre Werke und Taten derart täuschend in echte literarhistorische Zusammenhänge hineinkopiert, daß man sich eine Geschichte der südamerikanischen Literatur künftig schwer ohne Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce vorstellen kann. (...) Das Buch beginnt als Parodie eines literarischen Handbuchs und endet beinahe wie ein Roman." - Christoph Bartmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "It's his most Borgesian work, but unlike his literary ancestor, Bolaño cares more for the real world than for the library. His is not the account of a concerted movement or school, but the taxonomy of a wide-ranging sensibility. All of the writers are fictitious, but they do not inhabit an alternate universe; instead, they and their work are, case by case, just plausible. (...) The voluminousness of this creativity would be one thing, but Bolaño is also -- simultaneously -- overachieving tonally." - Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun
  
  
• "Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. (...) Goose-stepping caricatures à la The Producers they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible." - Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "But for all the objectivity of the prose, Bolaño unleashes blistering, dark comedy. Despite the layers of protective irony, despite the fact that the writers never seem as grotesque as we imagine fascist writers will be, the humor remains tense, even disorienting. In this sense, the book becomes a kind of ethical dare" - Todd Shy, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Fortunately, the pleasures of Bolaño's dark and imaginative vision go well beyond simple satire. At once funny, furious and frightening, Nazi Literature in the Americas reflects Bolaño's dual nature as a book-besotted romantic committed to the transcendent power of literature, and a postmodern trickster who knows how cruelly art can mislead and be misused." - Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The jugular that Bolaño particularly goes for is the literary sensibility and talent that seduces itself with grand political fantasies. (...) Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer. But beyond that, it produces an unsettling mix of overt satire and covert elegy. The reductive force of summary after summary starts to have an effect that transcends the satire; the book begins to convey a sense of the vanity of human endeavor and the ease with which a lifetime's work might be flicked into oblivion by a witty remark." - John Brenkman, The Village Voice
  
  
• "Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas very much deserves reading: It is imaginative, full of a love for literature, and, unlikely as it may seem, exceptionally entertaining." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In A Perfect Vacuum Stanislaw Lem collects 'reviews' of books that were never written, and in Nazi Literature in the Americas Roberto Bolaño goes even further, conceiving a whole small literary universe. He invents the lives and work of more than two dozen writers (and dozens more who are mentioned as secondary figures), presenting them in an encyclopaedic collection, complete with a bibliography. It's the sort of clever idea an author like Borges might sketch out in the short space of one of his stories -- but what's so remarkable is that Bolaño takes the idea and sees it through.
       It's an astonishing achievement in its attention to detail alone: every work that's mentioned -- over two hundred -- is listed in the bibliography. More than six pages are devoted to the 'Publishing house, magazines, places ...' the authors contributed to. The lives and works of the authors are tied in to actual events and real authors; they are also -- sometimes intricately -- interconnected. And then there's the sheer variety of the main entries, the chapters devoted to each of the thirty authors.
       Nazi Literature in the Americas posits an alternate world, of sorts (though always touching on the real one, too). Yet since it focusses almost entirely on the literary sphere, and on the works of imagination of these characters, it is also strikingly plausible. There is almost no indication that this is all fabrication; readers might well think they are merely unfamiliar with these authors and their works -- hardly surprising, given that many of them were abject (and worse) failures. For all intents and purposes -- in this capricious world of literature and literary reputation -- this book could very well be true: there are, in fact, thousands of writers who had careers and produced works like these, and of whom nearly all traces are lost and forgotten (and can, at best be found, in dusty libraries and used-book stores). (Among the few give-aways that these are not real figures is that Bolaño gives the dates -- birth and death -- of each of the authors, and more than a quarter of them survive into the 21st century -- this in a book written in 1996; one (Willy Schürholz) is listed as passing away (in Kampala, Uganda) only in 2029.)
       The title is certainly meant to be provocative, but while the writers tend to be, to varying degrees, right-wing (and in many cases quite extremist) -- and one was "dandled by the Führer" himself as a babe -- they're hardly impressive bearers of that particular ideological torch. They do share a penchant for absolutism, and are drawn to to rightist causes, and quite a few are sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but there are also other dimensions to many of these writings.
       Bolaño only devotes a limited space to each of the authors -- from barely a page to twenty-six pages (the last, most story-like entry) -- but it makes for surprisingly rich reading: this is not your usual author-encyclopaedia. Bolaño's tone varies, the pieces ranging from neutral, factual accounts to very subjective narratives, with the book ending on a personal note, the last sentence of the text proper (i.e. before the 'Epilogue for Monsters'-set of appendices) reading:

Look after yourself, Bolaño, he said, and off he went.

      - "The War Criminals' Son," the book's long title poem, is a vigorous and excessive piece, in which Zwickau, bemoaning the fact that he was born twenty-five years too late, gives free rein to his verbal facility, his hatred, his humour, and his unrelieved pessimism. In free verse of a kind rarely seen in Venezuela, the author depicts an appalling, indescribable childhood, compares himself to a black boy in Alabama in 1858, dances, sings, masturbates, lifts weights, dreams of a fabulous Berlin, recites Goethe and Jünger, attacks Montaigne and Pascal (whose work he knows well), adopts the voices of an alpine mountaineer, a peasant woman, a German tanker in Peiper's brigade who was killed in the Ardennes in December 1944, and a North American journalist in Nuremberg.

     Needless to say, the collection was ignored, perhaps in a deliberate and concerted manner, by the influential critics of the day.

Death took him by surprise seven years later in his comfortable apartment in the Leblon neighborhood of Rio, as he listened to a record by the Argentinean Tito Vásquez, and looked out of the window at night falling over the city, passing cars, people chatting on the sidewalks, lights coming on and going out, and windows being closed.

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Editorial Seix-Barral publicity page
• Christian Bourgois publicity page
• Kunstmann publicity page
• Excerpt

• The Brooklyn Rail
• Forward
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• Freitag (German)
• Jungle World (German)
• Letras Libres (German)
• The New York Sun
• San Francisco Bay Guardian
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Three Percent
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Post

• Official site
• Roberto Bolaño at sololiteratura
• The Mysterious Chilean by Wendy Lesser at The Threepenny Review
• Profile in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

• Distant Star
• The Savage Detectives

• See Index of Latin and South American literature
• See Index of Spanish literature

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About the Author:

       Chilean author Roberto Bolaño lived 1953 to 2003.

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© 2008 the complete review

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