Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature In The Americas

Following his death in 2003, Chilean born writer Roberto Bolaño posthumously received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nine hundred and twelve page epic, 2666. The recent surge of interest in the author has resulted in his entire back-catalogue being re-issued, with Picador re-releasing Nazi Literature in the Americas this year. Written in a pseudo-encyclopaedic style, the novel is separated into individual character biographies that often interweave. One of the first things the reader will notice is that some of these characters - all of them writers and poets - are relatives or friends of one another. However, they also share an additional connection; the titles of the books they publish; the content of their stories; the societies or activities they are involved in all point towards Nazism. Active in left-wing political causes himself, Bolaño subtly mocks and jeers at his own characters. Like Zach Sodenstern who is depicted as a deluded man, a friend 'to no one but his dog' Flip, of whose 'adventures and reflections constitute sub-novels within [his] novel', and who was comically said to have conjectured that the 'messiah could be Flip's son'. But Bolaño's character lampooning reaches its crescendo in the fantastic Epilogue for Monsters, by far the most strikingly auspicious part of the novel. Not only for the impressively detailed list of secondary characters and their books - which is reminiscent of Borges; the Argentinean writer who peppered his short stories with meticulous lists and footnotes - but also the use of language and imagery becomes much darker and visceral here, leaving the reader with no qualms about Bolaño's opinion of his own creations. Like Enzo Raúl Castiglioni 'leader of the Boca Juniors soccer gang' who, Bolaño sneers, 'closely resembled a rat' and was a 'pathetic loser, in the opinion of his family'; or the Rumanian general Eugenio Entrescu, whose 'member was exactly twelve inches long' and who, after distinguishing himself in the siege of Sebastopol and the battle of Stalingrad, was eventually crucified by his own soldiers 'in a village near Kishinev'. Indeed, Nazi Literature in the Americas' power lies in its satirical depiction of fascism. Bolaño himself said that Nazi Literature's 'focus is on the world of the ultra right, but much of the time, in reality, I'm talking about the left.When I'm talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, I'm talking about the world'. By highlighting the hypocrisy of the left Bolaño shows us in a highly convincing way that there are pockets of the 'left' (the proportions of which are inestimable) that still preach fascist ideology under the banner of liberalism. But the novel's real magic comes from Bolaño's adeptness at creating a fully realised, living and breathing universe. Our complete belief in his characters' existence; their work, their families, their crimes, means that we perceive them as real, which makes the brooding, malignant mood that lurks behind the text ever more foreboding. Yet, as Bolaño himself reminds us, 'real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares.'