The Third Reich: A Novel [Hardcover]

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: November 22, 2011

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town.

Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo’s well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo’s favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game’s consequences may be all too real.

Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2011: Udo Berger is the German national champion of The Third Reich, a tactical WWII-themed board game seemingly designed to reveal the worst in self-absorbed obsessives like Udo. Even while on vacation at the lush Spanish resort of Costa Brava, Udo is unable to tear himself away from a game he's begun with a beach worker. He ignores his girlfriend as she goes off to enjoy the company of Charly and Hanna, another German couple that can be counted among the many people Udo cannot stand. When Charly goes missing, Udo shows little interest, choosing instead to plot the conquering movements of his army tokens as they march across a hexagonally divided map of Europe.

It may not be the best introduction for new readers of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano, but fans of his biggest works, such as his international breakout The Savage Detectives or the posthumous five-volume epic 2666, will see familiar elements and themes in The Third Reich. Bolano draws a fine line between memory and reality, but blurs them in the final pages, as the novel slowly drifts from realism to a nightmarish fever dream--leaving readers with an ending that is ambiguous yet haunting. --Kevin Nguyen

Review

Praise for The Third Reich

“Novelists tend to be remembered for their most remarkable characters, and in Udo Berger, Bolaño has created someone complex, sometimes frustrating and absolutely unforgettable . . . Compassionate, disturbing and deeply felt, [The Third Reich is] as much of a gift as anything the late author has given us.” —Michael Schaub, NPR

“Bolaño was a writer with tricks up his sleeve, and he distributed his wiles across many genres: novellas, poetry, short stories, essays and the epic 1,100-page 2666. So what’s The Third Reich like? Capering, weird, rascally and short. Imagine a cross between Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the CLUE board game and a wargames fanzine. It’s a scathing novel with a lot of exuberance to it, not unlike the man who wrote it . . . The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño’s first-rate efforts.” —The Economist

Praise for Roberto Bolaño

“[Bolaño] makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world.” —Ben Richards, The Guardian

“When I read Bolaño I think: Everything is possible again.” —Nicole Krauss

“Not since Gabriel García Márquez . . . has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does . . . It’s no exaggeration to call him a genius.” —Ilan Stavans, The Washington Post Book World

“[Bolaño’s] work . . . is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction.” —Christopher Goodwin, The Sunday Times (London)

“Novelists have been smashing high and low together for a century, but Bolaño does it with the force of a supercollider.” —Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker

“[Bolaño] has the natural storyteller’s gift—but more important, he has the power to lend an extraordinary glamour to the activities of making love and making poetry.” —Edmund White

“A successor to Borges, García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar.” —Siddhartha Deb, Harper’s Magazine

“The most influential and admired novelist of his generation.” —Susan Sontag

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (November 22, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780374275624
• ISBN-13: 978-0374275624
• ASIN: 0374275629
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars On the Beach in No Man's Land November 24, 2011

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The best thing about this book is that it was written by Roberto Bolaño. The worst is that he had Roberto Bolaño to compete with. Although discovered after the author's death, and apparently quite complete, this is a relatively early work. Beautifully produced, and with a fluid translation by Natasha Wimmer, the publishers have done it proud. Aficionados will find many hints of what Bolaño would later do in THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666: an almost obsessive concentration on detail, a touch of surrealism, and hints of offstage violence. But the ingredients, instead of reinforcing, here tend to cancel each other out. It is a book in which you keep expecting something to happen, but very little actually does.

The story is simple. Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, is taking a late summer vacation with his girlfriend in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava where he used to come with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, they engage in the usual occupations: swimming, sunbathing, eating, drinking (a lot), and making love. But shadows hang over this idyll. They become involved with a group of slightly sinister local men, called The Wolf, The Lamb, and El Quemado (the burnt one), a hideously-burned South American immigrant who hires out pedal boats on the beach. Their contentment is marred by small acts of offstage violence, and by an unexpected death that touches them more directly.... Eventually only Udo remains as the weather worsens and the hotel prepares to close for the season -- slight echoes here (as so often) of DEATH IN VENICE!

Less simple is Bolaño's choice of a title. It will become obvious that this is merely the name of a war game that Udo is playing, studying, and writing about. The German national champion of war-gaming, he seems at times like an Ishiguro protagonist, a man of distinction in his own self-absorbed world, but a nonentity outside it. But the game is concerned only with the military history of WW2, "essentially ghosts of a ghostly General Staff, forever performing military exercises on game boards." It might as easily have been called "Fortress Europa" or something. By choosing the title he did, Bolaño invites other associations, which permeate the story like a miasma, but ultimately come to nothing. This was an easy and relatively absorbing book to read. But when I think what Bolaño did by loitering on the edge of horror in BY NIGHT IN CHILE, an even more compact work, I am disappointed by the almost facile use of the associations here. Read more ›

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Existentialism and Naturalism Lite December 5, 2011

By Steven C. Hull

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Udo Berger, a twenty-something German too young to have tripped over the cracks of life, suffers the arrogance that comes from knowing he is one of the best. Udo works as a clerk while he hones his skill as a war game-board player, hoping to earn a living writing columns about his unassailable intellectual strategies. He takes his girlfriend to vacation in a declining hotel on the Costa Brava, the polluted Spanish coast north of Barcelona. Udo spends his vacation immersed in analyzing the strategy of his favorite game, "The Third Reich," the battles of German, Russian and Allied armies, consuming his time and emotions as he searches for those perfect German maneuvers that would have won the war.

Udo and his gaming buddies are part of the Bavarian working class in the late 1980's who viewed the war from the prospective of the elite Wehrmacht officer corps, conveniently ignoring the Nazi-directed genocide ("I'm not a Nazi," he says). Udo and his friends were the grandchildren-generation of the Bavarians that led the Nazi putsch some fifty years before. The story revolves around an extended game between Udo, as the German supreme commander, and a poor, struggling paddleboat operator, El Quemado, badly burned and disfigured from some unknown event in the past, a man somewhat shunned for the ugliness of his scars. Udo executes his strategy while writing a paper to present at a Paris convention. The game stretches over several days as Udo slowly realizes the inevitability of history.

Bolano shrouds the resort in gloomy September weather as the vacation season winds down. There is a constant undercurrent of lurking violence, the beating of a girlfriend, a possible rape, an unresolved death and imagined threats, a lightweight, modern version of Emil Zola's naturalism.... Udo loves trying to change history, without understanding history; he professes love for Goethe's poetry, without understanding the meaning of "until you have possessed dying and rebirth." He sinks into a malaise as he realizes the pointlessness of his solipsistic passion and identity, his folly and hubris of his youth.

Roberto Bolano died in 2003 at the age of 50. Born in Chile, his family migrated to Mexico City when he was a teenager. He played with communism, claiming to be a Trotskyist, and in his twenties, returned to Chile in support of Allende, only to be imprisoned for a short period by the subsequent Pinochet government. He meagerly supported himself as a poet and short story writer until, in the late eighties and settled on the Costa Brava, he turned to novels in order to support his family.

The Third Reich was apparently his first novel, written in the late 1980's when he was in his mid-thirties, and laid in his desk until his publishers finally decided to publish it for his Spanish audience in 2010. Bolano was well recognized with two of his novels, Savage Detectives and 2666, in Latin America, but none of his novels were translated into English until after his death. The Paris Review thought highly enough of the novel to serialize it over the past year. Perhaps Bolano felt the same way about The Third Reich as I do, a book that doesn't quite come together. His prose is as beautifully crafted as the poet he was (and the translation retains that wonderful voice), but he left this first novel in the back of his desk drawer for fourteen years for a reason: the lack of something to make it a compelling narrative. Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Elemental Example of Literary Archeology December 2, 2011

By Kelly Cooper VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This was my third Bolaño novel, (the first two being "2666" and "The Savage Detectives"). Familiarity with where he would eventually end up as a novelist makes reading "The Third Reich" an eerily fun experience. It also illuminates the central themes of his later works. "The Third Reich" is the name of a strategic board game that mirrors the battle chronology of World War II, and Bolaño has made the champion player a young German on vacation in Spain. It's worth noting that Bolaño had a special interest in the ineffable qualities of evil that seem to pass through time and space in a steady, yet unknowable, way. The real-world migration of Nazi war criminals to South America seems connected in an almost spiritual way to Bolaño's fictional portrays of German war veterans and Nazi mystique.

"The Third Reich" is a surprisingly good novel, even though it often feels like it was written a century ago. I know that doesn't make sense, but I kept thinking about Thomas Mann while I was reading this. Some plot points and characters don't appear to make sense, but they somehow fit. It's a gloomy, old-world novel that keeps reminding you that it is actually rather contemporary.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What do you expect from Bolano? December 23, 2011

By John M. Litterst

Format:Hardcover

So this is an early work. Okay. There seems to be a general sense among these works that this doesn't measure up to other Bolano. Okay. I neither agree nor disagree. This is different than his other novels-- It isn't the short burst of fire that is most of his shorter novels-- By Night in Chile, Amulet, Distant Star, etc. It also certainly isn't like the two masterpieces, with their endless digressions and unimaginable structures. It is more akin I suppose to The Skating Rink-- not only does it share a setting (the Costa Brava of Spain), but it also uses a chronologically progressive structure. This structure is important in distinguishing it from BNiC or Amulet, both of which are remembrances from one moment, and therefore hold the potential to go anywhere at any time.

Spoiler alert-- the title's sneaky implications, the narrator's gradual disintegration. There is so much hinted at about the whole history of Europe here. So much hinted and unsaid. Bolano retells Germany's WWII narrative in what at first seems to be a minor subplot, but becomes everything, and how could it not? WWII is replayed between a German self-described "anti-Nazi" and an essentially anonymous burn victim (presumably he was imprisoned (and burned) after the Chilean coup and the rise of Pinochet-- though this is only vaguely hinted at). And this Risk-like board game version of WWII becomes an obsession, an actual consequences. And the narrator, the anti-Nazi. He is anti-social, obsessive, utterly self-consumed-- and it is thus that his destruction is inevitable. His self-obsession absolutely opposes any notion of self-knowing.... And then, some kind of kicker-- the game attains the importance of War-- his loss should mean his death-- but he loses and nothing happens, and in fact he returns home, and resumes his relationship with his beautiful girlfriend, and apparently he has even abandoned his obsession. Is this not the perfect metaphor for Germany, for the Third Reich? As in all Bolano, without being "realist" with all the ploddingness that that label connotes, it emanates the real like almost no other literature. Its situations and language and narrative and description are rife with paradox, with the unexplainable, with unharessable and unaccountable emotion, with missed opportunities. He presents a near-perfect approximation, devoid of the frame of literary technique, in a way that is wholly unique. Also, if you like this and you haven't read them, I recommend WT Vollmann's The Royal Family and Paul Auster's City of Glass-- without getting into other simiarities/differences, both these novels have the "slowly-disintegrating-protagonist" narrative that I love dearly.

Spoiler over-- The Point of my review is that I came into this book having read Bolano's other novels and expecting a letdown because of the seeming consensus that it is a "letdown," that it is worthy as a forecast of Bolano's later work but not necessarily as a stand-alone piece. And I wholly reject that notion. Sure it is interesting in conversation with his other work-- all his work inter-converses, such is the nature of Bolano, and that is present here. But reading this novel I was drawn in and shaken, and I finished literally shaking, and I could not sleep the night after, and it was the most profound literary experience I've had in months (probably since I finished The Savage Detectives, haha). SO my advice: you like Bolano, go into this expecting Bolano, you won't be let down. Here's to looking forward to whatever forthcoming translations remain, I know there are a few. Read more ›