Customer Reviews

Nazi Literature in the Americas

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To preface: As we all know, Roberto Bolano passed away in 2003. Like many in America, New Directions let us in on the secret with "By Night In Chile" and "Distant Star" (which is actually an elaboration of the final story in "Nazi Literature in the Americas"). Next came "Last Evenings on Earth" and "Amulet" last year. "The Savage Detectives" came out via Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year as well and, his masterpiece, "2666" is on its way. If you haven't read any of these, it doesn't matter what order, just read any and all.

"Nazi Literature in the Americas" reads like a history (but not in a bad way). Bolano creates dozens of personalities, each with intricite details and interesting character traits that even a third-party (Bolano) can convey gently. Each character exists throughout North and South America in the twentieth-century, some not dying until 2040 (which Bolano uses to hint that these people still exist into the later twenty-first century).

As the title suggests, each character is tied, in Bolano fashion, to fascist literary movements in their respective time period and country. Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, the first chronicled in the novel, is a bourgeois Argentine who met Hitler in the 1930's and was sympathetic to the cause ever since. Max Mirebalais, is a poor Haitian who steals from other European poets and crafts "many masks," which he uses to create an ideology of hate. Argentino Schiaffino is a thug from Buenos Aires who loves soccer and violence and believes in the heirarchy of races and is on the run most of his life for murder.

One gets the point. The problem is, this doesn't half convey the textual density and complexity of the work. The way the characters interact within each others stories, how one influences the other, etc. The depth that Bolano went through to create this world is astonishing (as his epilogue with a glossary of names, places, publishers, books, and miniture biographies of minor characters in the stories).

The beauty, in the end, is that each is not a celebrate of Hitler or Aryan supremacy. Most are misguided and some are playing games even with themselves. The real world is ever present in Bolanos world and the presence of these characters moving, most of the time at odds with the real world, is fascinating. The trick is that each characters intolerance is shown in different ways - not directed at Hitler or other fascist leaders, but in the culture of fascism that still exists today - even as it did in 1996 when this novel was published.

I cannot recommend this more highly. I was anticipating it greatly and I was not let down. The only problem for avid readers of Bolano, is the final chapter, "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" is the shortened version of his previous novel "Distant Star," which he does allude to at the beginning of that work. But taken separately, the shortened version does leave much to be desired - which one fulfills with "Distant Star." It is also different because, while famous for his first person narration, "Ramirez Hoffman" is the only instance that Bolano appears in this novel, so take what one can from it.

If you love this, don't worry - New Directions has many more novels coming. This will surely tide fans down until FSG releases Bolano's 1,200+ page masterpiece "2666" sometime, hopefully, next year. Enjoy.

When I approach a satirical work I follow a simple rubric: does it make me laugh. The honest belly laugh is, for me, the "scathe" in scathing satire. There is not a single chapter in Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in America" that failed to elicit howls of laughter sometimes accompanied by tears. Bolano presents the reader with a compendium of fictional biographies of non-existent writers. With each entry one gets the impression that he has taken Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" seriously. Each author is presented in an uncritical and dead-pan manner which forces the reader to ferret out the "evil" in the context of his/her "banal" biographical narrative. Not a single "author" in "Nazi Literature" approaches anything like genius. Even those who live rather colorful lives write in rather turgid prose and aimless fiction that produces a sort of stupor in their readership. This, I think is the key to understanding what Bolano is really up to. He may have had Goya's famous etching in mind:"El sueno de la razon produce monstruos" (the sleep of reason brings forth monsters).

Nazi Literature in the Americas was Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's first major success when it was first published in Spanish in 1996. It is the latest of his books to be published in England, following the excellent The Savage Detectives, the epic 2666 and the novella Amulet. But Nazi Literature in the Americas is a very different book to these previous translations, albeit equally innovative and interesting.

The book is a collection of imaginary biographies of invented right wing writers from Latin and North America, both historic and from the future. Bolaño knew something about political writers, having himself been imprisoned in Chile as a suspected left wing terrorist. What he provides here is a parody of both the right wing views and of literary criticism. His invented writers are intentionally absurd, often leading bizarre and tragic lives which are beautifully crafted in their descriptions. It's an exceptional achievement that these all hang together in a complete imagined world with the book complete with bibliographies of their works - often covering obscure and strange titles. I particularly likes the pilot-poet whose chosen medium is sky writing and the two football supporter gang leaders in Argentina who in their more tender moments resort to poetry.

There are plenty of amusing moments and the effect is a clever parody of literature, political views and literary criticism. There's an almost Bob Dylan-like take on the absurdities of analysis of these sad writers.

In saying that, if this is your first introduction to Bolaño, I'd recommend starting elsewhere - probably with The Savage Detectives. Why? Simply because while this is undoubtedly clever and certainly entertaining, it doesn't really go anywhere other than an expansion of a good idea. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I'm glad I had some previous Bolaño experience and that, I think enhanced my enjoyment of this book. There's no doubt he was a major talent and his tragically early death in 2003 aged just 50 was a great loss. It's fascinating to see where his reputation started.

An unusual and enjoyable book apparently inspired by some of the work of Borges. Nazi... is a pseudohistory of fictitious literary figures of the Western Hemisphere, mainly from Latin America, who fall under the general umbrella of Fascism or far right views. Something of a parody of scholarly work, the book is a series of sketches of each fictitious figure of varying length, often overlapping with some of the other fictitious figures. The book concludes with a fake bibliography and listing of more minor figures. Bolano's creativity is impressive. Wildly romantic upper class Argentinean female poets, lower class Argentine soccer hooligans, Chilean military officers, American white supremacist criminals, and bizarre loners of all nationalities are depicted. I suspect this book has a number of references apparent only to people with a good knowledge of Latin American literature.

This is more than a clever work of imagination. Nor is it merely a pastiche-imitation of Borges. Bolano's apparent themes of frustrated passion, and the diversion of passion into brutal violence are his own. While this is hardly a major work of literature, I'm impressed with Bolano's clear, mordant, and sometimes surprising prose.

From founders of far right literary schools to all the genres,Roberto Bolano gives us the 'history' of nazi literature in North and Latin America! There's Zach Soldenstern,author of appalling and cretinous (to his detractors) sci-fi literature that sees the birth of the Fourth Reich.Or the psychopath Carlos Ramirez Hoffman,who not only writes poetry in the sky,but murders on behalf of Pinochet and displays the photo's of his victims as works of art.Then there's the Schiaffino brothers,notorious hooligans for the Boca juniors and authors of indecipherable poems and stories.Amongst other's!

This is hugely inventive and very funny,not only satarising the vapid nazi ideology that has dogged Latin American politics and had many apologists(Peron for example)but also having a good dig at all the pretentious literary schools and fads.Most of the authors here repeat and pay homage to the incoherrent mystical ramblings and prejudices that was Hitler's 'Mein Kamph'

Bolano also intermingles real literary figures and their works as many of his featured 'writer's' not only shamelessly plagiarise their work,but nazify it too! So good is Bolano that I can see many of Bolano's creations and histories being deemed as fact in the future,in much the same way as Conan Doyle's fictional account of the discovery of the Marie Celeste has convinced people to this day that hot plates of food and drinks were found neat and untouched on the tables.

Truly original,truly inventive,truly delightful in a very dark way. Bolano creates a new genre himself.

This collection of 30 odd " hagliographies"(obituaries of fictitious Pan American writers of the 20th Century) gives Bolano enormous scope for his imagination but perhaps due to my lack of knowledge of South American literature and history I found that most of the references to supposed books written by these fictitious authors conveyed little of interest. There were moments of very humourous observations but some 'lives' were very mundane and the list of works (and number of pages) failed to mean anything to me. The final chapter and by far the longest (30 pages) where Bolano brings himself into the narrative is the most interesting. It explores the theme when an artist gets emersed in politics, a theme more deeply developed in Ishiguro's "An Artist of the Floating World". The precis of secondary characters, details of the publishing houses and bibliography of all the fictitious works mentioned in the book at the end was a step too far and any meaning Bolano had for their inclusion left me totally mystified.

Nazi Literature in the America's is a fascinating pseudo-dictionary covering over a half century of fictional Latin American fascist writers. While the title suggests the book focuses on Nazis, the authors and poets discussed are more generally fascists and madmen (or madwomen as the case sometimes is) that strict Nazi's. The book itself is a fascinating look into the world of Roberto Bolano, and is self-referencing and at times very funny. While the articles themselves vary, most are only a few pages long. All in all, Nazi Literature is a strange and interesting book on (fictional) extremist literature and Bolano's sly portrayal of what literature as a whole might mean.

... that appear at the ends of tunnels." "... literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence ..." "... a fable suggesting that life on Earth is the result of a disastrous intergalactic television game show..."

Don't be misled by its title: Nazi Literature in the Americas is not an academic essay in historical or literary criticism. It's a gigantic spoof, at the most obvious level a satire of encyclopedic scholarship, a collection of capsule biographies of 31 fictitious 'authors' from the Americas, including the USA, their imaginary careers stretching from the late 19th to the mid 21st Centuries. The bios, all but the last one, are ludicrously dry and dispassionate -- mostly accounts of bizarre personalities achieving absurd failures. Bolaño's first target is the pompous self-importance of the literary intelligentsia, and as always in his work, it seems that every third fool in Latin America is a poet, closeted or published. I suspect this aspect of Bolaño's satire will appeal more to those of us fools who are amused at having our vanity ridiculed. Readers who are familiar with the actual biographies of real 'avant-garde' writers of Chile, Mexico, Argentina, etc. will have an unfair advantage, of course, over innocent anglophones in apprehending Bolaño's most sardonic slurs.

But Bolaño has also a larger target for his barbs. His satirical sketches are meant to add up to a psychosocial analysis of the Right Wing mentality. As a Chilean, Bolaño is sharpest in his dissection of his countrymen, those evil geniuses who sprang up like weeds with the fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet. What Bolaño depicts - and I have many reasons to think his depiction is strenuously accurate - is a culture of repressed perversion, where the surest outlet from repression is sadism and violence. It's a culture of hierarchies based on wealth, sources of wealth, and 'connection', but complicated by incompatible hierarchies of complexion and glamour. Bolaño's imaginary nazi-sympathizers add up to a profile of the mind of the rightwing ideologue, who may be the heir of a landed fortune or the prison-educated son of a swarthy sharecropper. Certain unifying characteristics are predictable, including an automatic anti-semitism and a predisposition toward sexual decadence, but many other signs of latent insanity are subtler in Bolaño's representations. But the overall conclusion is forthright: Nazism is a pervasive mental illness; right wing extremism under any name is a deep-set character defect.

Such a book would be hard to end effectively. Bolaño clearly found it so. The last chapter is perhaps a mistake, to my mind, though hardly one that spoils the rest of the book. In that last chapter, Bolaño suddenly switches to a 'first-person' narrative, identifying himself by name. It's a capsule summary of his very dark and insightful novel "Distant Star", recounting the career of a Chilean death-squad sadist qua avant-garde artist/poet qua military pilot. Bolaño's point is clear enough, but the abrupt change of tone is jarring, and I'm not convinced that the 'chapter' would be intelligible for anyone who had not read "Distant Star".

Bolaño is one of the great, painful writers of the 20th C, the most horrific era in the history of civilization. His short novels "Distant Star" and "By Night in Chile" are nightmarish masterpieces. This book, "Nazi Literature in the Americas", is a sort of demoniac appendix to his novellas. Don't make it your first experience of Bolaño; it wouldn't make much sense as such! Once you've read the others, however, I'm certain you'll find it meaningful.

Is it science fiction? Although "Nazi Literature In The Americas" was first published in Spanish in 1996, some of his fictional Nazi sympathizers live until years like 2016. This is one of the reader's first clues that something really strange is going on here. This book is structured like a small encyclopedia, with each entry describing an imaginary poet, novelist, or journalist who supposedly supported extremist politics. They come from both North and South America. The Latin American fascists seem quite authentic, and it is impressive that Bolano gets right most of his USA references for his Yankee writers. The author's method is to mingle historical fact and wild speculation to create a portrait and criticism of 20th century literature that is both outrageous and weirdly convincing. His method can be clearly seen in the brief entry in the "Epilogue For Monsters" for the fictional character Otto Haushofer:

"1871--Berlin, 1945. Nazi Philosopher. Godfather of Luz Mendiluce and father of various harebrained theories: hollow earth, solid universe, original civilizations, the interplanetary Aryan tribe. He committed suicide after being raped by three drunk Uzbek soldiers."

There was, in fact, a family of German philosophers named Haushofer who supported the Nazis (and paid dearly for it.) But Bolano's fictional twist is shockingly funny and suddenly chilling. It's the tone he maintains throughout this short book. He plays it with an utterly straight face but at times you can see Bolano struggling not to burst out in dark laughter. At one point he mentions in passing the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad, and it's like a wink at the reader. Spinrad wrote a great science-fiction novel titled The Iron Dream in which he postulates an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler was an acclaimed Golden Age sci-fi writer instead of the scourge of the 20th century. And what Bolano does here is quite as audacious: he gives his Nazis souls, and makes them human instead of mere caricatures. Indeed, many of them are artists; which makes them all the more more appalling. Some of the "stories" (if you want to call them that) are perhaps too short and elliptical to have as much impact as you would like. But others hit the bullseye very squarely. My appetite is now whetted for Bolano's big books: The Savage Detectives: A Novel and his supposed masterpiece 2666: A Novel, which is scheduled for publication in English this year.

Bolano seems like someone who turned making fun of doomed, marginal writers into a sort of science. The venal, pathetic right wingers and the world they occupy in this book are frighteningly well imagined, with all of their incestuous interconnections and fake works (and fake criticisms of those works). And while this struck me as being a lot funnier than the savage detectives, by the end it also gets a lot darker. The violence that you get occasional glimpses of in the earlier portraits really build up, especially in the last story/profile, which for all of it's fantastical elements (sky writing poetry!) has an almost chilling sense of destruction and dread