MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Roberto Bolano We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE THIRD REICH by Roberto Bolano /2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/ /2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:46:53 +0000 /?p=22086 Book Quote:

“And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 22, 2011)

Bolaño cites this quotation from Goethe (also given in German) towards the end of this early but posthumously discovered novel. It is as good a key as any to what the book may be about. The protagonist, Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, is literally a guest — in a hotel. He is taking a late summer vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava where he used to come with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, Hanna and Charly, 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. Udo will stay on until the hotel is about to close for the season, a change in atmosphere that is summed up by Bolaño in itchily discordant images:

“The regular muted sound of the elevator has been replaced by scratching and races behind the plaster of the walls. The wind that every night shakes the window frame and hinges is more powerful. The faucets of the sink squeak and shudder before releasing water. Even the smell of the hallways, perfumed with artificial lavender, breaks down more quickly and turns into a pestilent stink that causes terrible coughing fits late at night.”

The biggest shadow of all is that cast by the title, The Third Reich. We learn early on that it is the name of a war game played with counters on a stylized map. The war that the game replays is a purely military operation of armies, deployments, and supply lines; the text has no hint of Nazi ideology or the Holocaust. Yet those associations are inevitably in the mind of the reader, who waits for some at least symbolic equivalent to surface, for the dream holiday to become a nightmare. And Bolaño, who is a master at generating angst from a meticulous compilation of detail, makes a fine start to building the tension here. Udo is the German national champion of war-gaming. Like one of those solipsistic characters out of Ishiguro, he is obsessed in his hermetic world, working out variants of the games, publishing them in obscure magazines, corresponding with gamers in other countries. Alone of the German quartet, he remains pale while the others develop suntans, since he prefers working in his room to lounging on the beach. There is a danger in him, a potential for mental instability, at least as great as any threat posed by the low-life characters with whom the four associate.

This is a beautifully produced book with an evocatively surreal cover and a fluid translation by Natasha Wimmer. I leaped into it the moment it arrived and truly wanted to like it. But I have to say that, for all the fascinating hints of ideas he would develop in The Savage Detectives and especially in 2666, this is not vintage Bolaño. It seemed to be all wind-up and no punch. As so often with Bolaño, there is a surreal element competing with the meticulous realism, but here I felt they canceled each other out rather than reinforcing. Udo, of course, lives much of his time in a totally irreal world, “essentially ghosts of a ghostly General Staff, forever performing military exercises on game boards.” Ingeborg, his girlfriend, is forever reading a mystery featuring the detective Florian Linden, but although reportedly near the end she never reaches it. A vacation involving so great a consumption of alcohol is in itself somewhat unreal, and Udo’s imagination verges increasingly on paranoia. Yet while nightmares, in the sense of actual dreams, play a larger and larger part in the story, the nightmare fails to materialize in reality; the book ends in distinct anticlimax.

All the same, I do see the point of the Goethe quotation. “Dying and rebirth” are certainly among the ideas in play, and Udo is a different person at the end. The novel makes a fascinating addendum for existing fans of Bolaño’s work. But though it is an easy read, even lighthearted at times, I would not recommend it as an introduction for those who do not know the author. For them, and especially for those leery of tackling the vast scale of his major works, I would suggest the novella By Night in Chile, whose compact power is merely hinted at here.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 24 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 22, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography (translations only):

]]> /2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/feed/ 0 2666 by Roberto Bolano /2009/2666-by-roberto-bolano/ /2009/2666-by-roberto-bolano/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:18:00 +0000 /?p=2554 Book Quote:

“Do you believe in love?” asked Reiter.
“Frankly, no,” said the girl.
“What about honesty?” asked Reiter.
“Ugh, that’s worse than love,” said the girl.
“Do you believe in sunsets,” asked Reiter, “starry nights, bright mornings?”
“No, no, no,” said the girl with a gesture of evident distaste. “I don’t believe in anything ridiculous.”
“You’re right,” said Reiter. “What about books?”
“Even worse,” said the girl.

 

Book Review:

Reviewed by Doug Bruns (JUL 03, 2009)

I came to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: A Novel after a long spell of reading narrative non-fiction. I was spending a lot of time with other women and my wife knew about it, Joan Didion and Anne Dillard, in particular. Not that she minded, my wife. She is refreshingly open about these things, but I was starting to feel guilty and was, frankly, longing for some male companionship, specifically companionship that would take me down a windy path, into a woods or alley, lose me on the wet streets of a foreign city, then find me again, guide me then threaten me–all the while making me feel more manly, whatever that might mean. Hemingway can do that, to cite a cliché. Also, I was coming to Maine for the summer and wanted to get lost in a big thick weighty book, a book that would be wasted in the city where it would be not so much attacked as toyed with. How can you read a 900 page book but to attack it? You can’t nibble at it. You have to take blocks of time and sit down in a quiet place and rest the tome on your lap and go after it, like a loon after a harbor sardine. I had wanted to read 2666 since it came out in English last year (from the Spanish), published posthumously a year after Bolaño’s death. Now was the time.


2666 consists of five books or chapters. According to an opening note, Bolaño, fearing he would not survive the work, thought it would be most profitable to publish the five “novels” separately. His estate, however, decided differently, arguing that keeping the work whole “seems preferable.” He did, indeed, finish a first draft of the last section. The five sections could stand alone, but Bolaño was writing 2666 as a single work, and it works best read that way. At center to the five sections is the Mexican town of Santa Teresa. Here, in this industrial US border town, an appalling series of murders has been going on unabated. Young girls have been abducted and raped and killed and dumped in fields, alleyways and barren landscapes. The police are impotent to stop the killing. Santa Teresa is modeled after Ciudad Juárez, where a series of murders of factory-working women and girls remains unsolved. At its essence 2666 is a conventional mystery, a who done-it. The murders, taking place over a series of years, share the markings of a serial killer or killers. The other major mystery contained in the novel is the reclusive author Archimboldi, a long-missing Nobel-nominated German novelist. The book opens as four critics cum detectives attempt to track him down while building their careers as scholars around interpretations of his work. The bookend end chapter finds the return of Archimboldi in the flesh, or at least we draw the conclusion, as best we are directed, that we have found him, as certitude is purposefully missing in this novel. In the middle sections he disappears, but is never far from the action, hinted at and drawn upon as a motif incarnate. Indeed, everything in 2666 seems cryptic and shrouded in mystery.

The prose of the novel is straightforward and direct, refreshingly so. It is elegant and rich at one moment, documentary the next. It is opaque. So much so that at one point I found myself enjoying a sentence of particular fluidity and grace and then realized that I had been reading the same sentence for four pages. These were not mind-numbing twisted Proustian pages. But rather, four pages consisting of one remarkable sentence that carried the reader along like a gentle stream. And this is what the book requires, like all great literature: the compliance of the reader. You must give yourself up to it. Like the magical realism of a previous generation, Bolaño’s style requires submission. In the modern tradition, the novel explores all streams of thought. It exploits nuance. Subtlety is in short order–or rather, subtlety permeates everything such that subtlety is lost. By this I mean, the reader must be prepared to be exhausted in the pursuit of creating a masterpiece. There are plots and subplots, nuance, blind alleys and most challengingly, lack of resolution. The mysteries, like life, grow in complexity and are never solved. It is as if a grand oil painting were being attempted in front of our eyes and every brush stroke is being observed. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the protagonist’s name differs from the Renaissance painter’s by only two letters, an observation mentioned in the book. It is telling that Arcimboldo’s paintings were representative portraits, faces created from objects such as fruits, vegetables and flowers. Our guy, Archimboldi, is likewise not so much seen as represented.

In talking to my bookseller recently, he said someone had recently commented on the book, decrying it, putting it aside, saying, “I’m not going to punish myself with this any longer.” I think this is interesting. It is a challenging book, but accessible. If there is punishment to be found in 2666 it would be specific to the fourth section entitled, “The Part About The Crimes.” Here we suffer through 284 pages of murder, rape and molestation. Though minor motifs are employed, we are bludgeoned with account after account of the murders of Santa Theresa. The section breaks suit with the other sections stylistically. It becomes raw and sparse. But still, the artistic motive remains. That is to say, here, as elsewhere, the author explores to the point of exhaustion the work at hand, the attempt to create a masterpiece brushstroke by brushstroke. As a reader, committed to experiencing a literary work of the highest order, I believe I understand why such a section exists, but that does not make it less of a grind.

There is a passage on page 786 spoken by a very minor character (the book is full of minor characters who have lives involving very minor characters, spawning yet more and so forth in increasing twists and turns.): “By now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece.” 2666 has been hailed as a masterpiece by many, but history will judge definitively should that be the case. I think this passage telling though, an author’s nod as to his intent–that writing is only worth it if one is prepared to write a masterpiece. Two pages later the same very minor character, walking away from the challenge of writing a masterpiece, resolves: “What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!” What a relief to simply read. The sentence washed over me like a summer wave. Henry James said that the only obligation of the novel is to be interesting. This is a refreshingly simple evaluation. Is 2666 interesting? Yes. Can one, as the very minor character implies, find relief in simply reading it? Yes again. A troubling relief, given the subject matter, but relief regardless–which is core to the artistic experience.

I finished the novel, closed the covers and turned to my wife. “I wish it didn’t end,” I said. I felt as if the author had inhabited my closing thought. Knowing that he fought to finish the book before he died, I am given to believe Bolaño shared the same sentiment.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 188 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 11, 2008)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: This book makes me think of:

And see our review of:

Bibliography (translations only):

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