The Third Reich (2011)
Roberto
Bolaño
This kind of game creates a pretty
interesting documentary urge. It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything
was done in order to change what was done wrong.
It’s absolutely astounding to me that one
of the greatest and most interesting writers of the last twenty years could
have such a backlog of unpublished work, enough for his publishers and heirs to
put out a half-dozen books since his death in 2003. Whoever rejected this book
in 1989, 1990 must surely be kicking themselves now (if it was in fact
rejected, to be honest I don’t actually know). If I had books like this just
sitting around in my desk drawer doing nothing I’d be set for life. One facet
of Bolaño’s legend--his cultish and confusing mythology--that I’ve always found
particularly enthralling is that his entrance into fiction writing was
motivated, at least partially, by purely mercenary reasons: he spent the first
part of his life as a vagabond poet, wandering up and down Latin America, until
finally settling down in Spain, where he got himself a wife and kids, and
knowing that he was dying and that there is no money in poetry, no money at
all, turned to fiction writing in order to secure his children’s future after
his passing. This was his first book, the first one he wrote, and I like to
imagine him sitting at his desk every day with dollar signs in his eyes, knowing
that this was the only way he could do it. Most aspiring writers, if they
wanted to make a big pile of cash, would write cheesy patriarchal detective
fiction, or politically disgusting children’s fantasy novels, or something
similar, but not Roberto Bolaño, he’s way too smart and ambitious for that and
he knows he’s still got to look at himself in the mirror. His first novel is of
course, like everyone else’s first novel, a metaphor using tabletop war games
to explain how we still ache for the return of fascism (or a time machine to
reverse the mistakes of the past) even if we don’t realize it or think better
of ourselves (how liberal and educated we are, certainly no Nazis; our in-laws
are Jewish, we have a gay nephew, one of our neighbors is black, we could never
be a horrible fascist.)
The book is pretty simple: it’s the
journal of a young man, Udo Berger, the German champion of a board game called The Third Reich, who goes on vacation to
a seaside Spanish town with his pretty girlfriend Ingeborg. While there they
meet another German couple, go out drinking and dancing, sit on the beach,
fraternize with vaguely threatening locals the Lamb and the Wolf, Udo has some
sexual tension with the woman who runs the hotel but she keeps her legs shut so
he humps a maid instead, at night the sea is black, thoughtless and menacing
like a predator, and so on. There’s a death and eventually all the Germans
return to Germany one way or another, save Udo, who locks himself in his dark
reeking hotel room to practice and refine his revolutionary new Third Reich strategy with a disciple of
sorts: a muscular and horrifically scarred hulk who rents pedal boats and
sleeps on the beach, not Spanish, possibly South American, a grunting
mysterious threat named El Quemado: The Burned One, The Burn Victim.
Though this is Bolaño’s first novel
and it’s pretty rough, not as mature,
his prose isn’t as good as it would later be and the dialogue is sometimes cringe
worthy and it meanders quite a bit, even for Bolaño, but it’s still quite
evident that this is a Bobby Bolaño book and that name on the cover means you
are in for something good. It’s a real mark of quality. It’s not his best book
(The Savage Detectives or 2666) but it’s certainly not his worst
(looking at you, Amulet). All his
hallmarks are there: long ruminations on literature and poetry and how they
relate to state violence, tourists (outsiders) who travel to a place and
discover the real outsiders, the people really on the fringe who drag the
tourists into their ugly underworld, our latent unrealized potential for
fascism, narrators or central characters who may or may not be going slowly
insane or just falling apart from pressure and stress, vague threats from
indeterminate sources, generalized modern world bourgeois anxiety, and the
blistering away of the mundane and banal surface to reveal the violence and
darkness at the core of our societies and ourselves.
A Bob Bolaño book is always such a
special gift. They excite a hunger in me, a real voraciousness. An almost
animalistic feral book love. I feel like I’m a pretty slow, plodding reader but
not when I’m reading Bolaño. Bolaño sets me on fire: I finished Nazi Literature in the Americas in a
single afternoon, 2666 in a week. The Third Reich took me a couple days.
I’ve been dog sitting for my girlfriend’s parents for the last few days, gentle
relaxed mornings with a cup of coffee and this Vizsla on my lap, when I get off
work evenings with a beer and a pastrami sandwich and the dog again… what a
life. A fellow could get used to this. If they kept on putting out Roberto
Bolaño books like they've been doing I’d be in paradise.
Roberto Bolaño is my favorite writer
for a lot of reasons. I recommend him to anyone who asks and will listen. I can
and will ramble on about Bolaño when I’m drunk at a bar but this is the first
time I’ve really tried to sit down and articulate what I like about him. Almost
all of the books I read were written and published before I was born by writers
who died before I was born (there’s so many books out there that I can’t really
read all the classics and keep up
with what’s being published now so I stick mostly with the classics) and I feel
like a lot of books that have been published recently that I have read just
plain aren’t very good (up your ass with a stick Dave Eggers and Brett Easton
Ellis) and have little to nothing say and no interesting ways to say it, and
that the world of American letters is in a really sorry state, so I guess what
I’m trying to say is that I think Bolaño is the first writer I’ve read whose
books make me feel like I’m part of something important, a secret discovery, a
secret someone took to the woods and buried in a shallow hole in the roots of a
tree and I later dug up, horrified; in on the ground floor of a zeitgeist, a
movement, and that part of that movement is mine
and mine alone. I feel included and in on something. I also feel like a lot of
authors popular these days are fake transgressive, like they play act at being
shocking and avant-garde but they’re really just conservative, tedious and
boring (for example Chuck Palahuniuk, the worst writer in the
history of the English language) whereas with Bolaño I don’t feel like he’s
being phony about anything. I find his prose and writing skill worthy of
worship and the level of detail he can get into a novel astounding. He speaks to me like we're equals. He’s the
perfect writer (a eulogist, really) for the end of the 20th Century,
a hundred years that were so ugly for so many people. I think I might be
obsessed with him and I’m not at all worried about it.
Also, and I don’t have any proof of
this but it’s something I feel has to be true: there aren’t many American
writers around these days that I could think of who could produce a politically
acceptable novel. Ninety percent of American writers teach creative writing at
some public college somewhere and, therefore, have a stake in maintaining the
status quo even if they think they don’t, and aren’t going to rock the boat,
not in any real way. Sort of like how NBC is never really going to tell you how
many children were disintegrated by General Electric cruise missiles today, or
how many mutants were born in a fifty-mile radius around a Superfund site. The
writer is institutionalized, part of the state apparatus. What a tragedy. Of
course there’s worse things in the world than a public college (nearly everything I can think of is worse) so maybe I’m overreacting
but I don’t think it’s helped to get any teeth back into our limp wrist
culture, as if anyone actually wants some teeth, and if the state is violent and obscene, and a writer works for the
state, doesn’t that just make him part of the propaganda machine? It’s a stupid
and confused feeling, I know, but this is what I think about when I read
Bolaño.
Mostly though, what I like about
Bolaño is that I find him inspirational, if that doesn’t sound too dorky and
stupid. When I read him I get the feeling that I could do this, that anyone
could—but most importantly that I could—that in Bolaño I’ve found someone who
speaks the same language as me, after years of searching, and that language is
pretty awesome to hear (I can finally have a conversation with someone), that
it’s in my grasp, and that all it takes is a determination and a desire to
paint outside the lines, to stand against boring institutionalized MFA
literature, especially the really pernicious kind that infects this country and
has since the 1970s and makes us stupider and duller and supports the violent
sadistic goals of the state, to stand for something and put it into words. That
it doesn’t take a fancy NYU writing degree to write a book, just a bibliography
and a pair of eyes and one or two ears and some balls.
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