David Brendan O'Meara

This weekend I read Nazi Literature in the Americas, the latest novel by Roberto Bolaño to be translated into English. In the last year, since reading Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I’ve found myself increasingly hungry for his prose—so far, I’ve read most of Bolaño’s work that has been, as Nabokov would say, “Englished.” For an American reader, this means working through the elegant volumes released by New Directions: the novels By Night in Chile, Amulet, and Distant Star, and the short story collection Last Evenings on Earth. (The North American publishing rights for Bolaño seem to have been allocated by thickness: New Directions, working with translator Chris Andrews, publishes Bolaño’s slim volumes, and Farrar Straus Giroux gets the massive tomes: The Savage Detectives and Bolaño’s last work, 2666, which, I trust, Natasha Wimmer is at this very moment busily translating.) I’ve read them all except Amulet, which arrived in the same Amazon.com Super Saver shipment as Nazi Literature in the Americas, so that’s next on my list. The New Yorker also recently ran a short story by Bolaño—a very Borgesian piece about an Argentinean judge who retires to a ranch in the pampas, translated by Chris Andrews—so I’m hopeful that New Directions will soon release another short story collection.

Short digression here: What about the poetry? If Bolaño turned to fiction in 1990, at the age of 37, as a way of making money, then there must be at least 20 years of poetry, written in obscurity. Is it any good? Does it translate? Or was it a protracted period of juvenilia, of apprenticeship, the poetic martial arts exercises that eventually produced Bolaño’s prose voice—a prose voice that is simultaneously poetry-centric and down-to-earth, unaffected and yet capable of taking off, without warning, into— well, into passages like this:

For a while we couldn’t think of anything to else to say to each other. I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded with what she was describing, ridiculous tests of strength, terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood, so distant from what I once thought would become of him, and even his sister’s voice talking about the Latin American revolution and the defeats and victories and deaths that it would bring began to sound strange and then I couldn’t sit there a second longer and I told her I had to go to class and we’d see each other some other time.

That’s from one of many “interviews” that make up the long middle section of The Savage Detectives. An old girlfriend of Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s fictional alter ego) is talking about how she ran into Belano’s sister some years later. I picked this passage, pretty much at random, from the passages I underlined in that long middle section, after I realized what was going on—that in the midst of Studs Terkelesque monologues, convincing recreations of actual spoken language, there would always appear at least one passage—two or three lines at least—where the everyday vernacular suddenly rises to vertiginous flights of metaphor—always in the character’s voice, and always true to the emotion of the moment.

So anyway—back to Nazi Literature in the Americas. The most remarkable thing about this book is that it is not a parody, satire, caricature or burlesque—which is to say, it never limits itself to one-dimensional cheap shots. It presents us, in a mostly scholarly tone, with fourteen brief literary biographies of poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, plagiarists, and novelists, all of them inventions of Bolaño, all of them working in North and South America in the 20th century, and all of whom align themselves, one way or another, with the extreme right wing. Among them are cranks, crooks, rich dabblers, murderers and mediocrities, but also among them are true lovers of literature, hard-working devotees of their craft, prolific correspondents, tragic lovers, true friends, real writers of talent, and at least one or two deeply disturbing geniuses.

This is, by my count, the third work of Bolaño’s to deal with what we may call “the fascist mind.” (Actually, it was the first one written—but of course to me, as a monolingual American, it’s the order of English translation that matters. The others are By Night in Chile—whose narrator is a very sympathetic, if profoundly compromised, Catholic priest, and Distant Star, whose central character is an utterly monstrous poet and pilot in Pinochet’s Air Force.) It seems to have been an important part of Bolaño’s artistic program—the tasks he set himself—to understand how a poetic mind, whatever its level of talent, could reconcile itself to a political ideology he found not merely abhorrent, but evidently and actively evil.

Since I am lucky enough not to know many true fascists, I have noted some of the values which Bolaño’s imaginary littérateurs hold dear:

• a love of strength
• a love of victory in battle
• a secret admiration for the marshals of the Soviet army
• a love of wealth
• a love of landed property
• a desire to preserve the hierarchies of the existing social order
• a hatred of the existing social order, for having weakened its hierarchies
• a longing for some time in the past, when the social hierarchies were stronger (say, the Spanish Inquisition)
• a vision of a glorious future
• a hatred of Jews, homosexuals, and miscegenation
• a hatred of the Enlightenment
• a love of Germany
• a love (at least among mixed-race Haitians) of the Masai
• a love of the Catholic Church
• a “longing for the epic and its proportions”
• a love of death
• a love of violence

Many of them are closeted homosexuals; most of them, whether wealthy or poor, harbor a deep resentment based on a humiliating experience. Others simply hate.

I should mention that Bolaño’s characters are imaginary only in their names and the details of their lives—there are people just like them out there, in our world, right now.

Finally, I should like to mention that the last biography in Nazi Literature in the Americas is a rough draft of the story that would become Distant Star. That novel is vastly superior, in every way, to the version in Nazi Literature in the Americas. I would recommend to a reader new to Bolaño: when you get to the final chapter (“Carlos Ramirez Hoffman”), set the book aside and read Distant Star. Then return, if you are curious, to see the rough draft.

Esta resvista fue escrito en 2008. Desde entonces, aprendí español y leí La literatura Nazi en América en su idioma original. Aunque ya no estoy un norteamericano monolingüe, mi opinión de esta novela permanece la misma.