{"id":5411,"date":"2008-02-17T19:18:11","date_gmt":"2008-02-18T01:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/?p=5411"},"modified":"2022-03-20T17:32:31","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T22:32:31","slug":"review-nazi-literature-in-the-americas-by-roberto-bolano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daveomeara.com\/home\/5411\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Nazi Literature in the Americas<\/em> by Roberto Bola\u00f1o"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend I read\u00a0Nazi Literature in the America<\/em>s, the latest novel by Roberto Bola\u00f1o to be translated into English. In the last year, since reading Bola\u00f1o’s\u00a0The Savage Detectives<\/em>, I’ve found myself increasingly hungry for his prose\u2014so far, I’ve read most of Bola\u00f1o’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\u00a0By Night in Chile<\/em>,\u00a0Amulet<\/em>, and\u00a0Distant Star<\/em>, and the short story collection\u00a0Last Evenings on Earth<\/em>. (The North American publishing rights for Bola\u00f1o seem to have been allocated by thickness: New Directions, working with translator Chris Andrews, publishes Bola\u00f1o’s slim volumes, and Farrar Straus Giroux gets the massive tomes:\u00a0The Savage Detectives<\/em>\u00a0and Bola\u00f1o’s last work,\u00a02666<\/em>, which, I trust, Natasha Wimmer is at this very moment busily translating.) I’ve read them all except\u00a0Amulet<\/em>, which arrived in the same Amazon.com Super Saver shipment as\u00a0Nazi Literature in the America<\/em>s, so that’s next on my list. The New Yorker also recently ran a short story by Bola\u00f1o\u2014a very Borgesian piece about an Argentinean judge who retires to a ranch in the pampas, translated by Chris Andrews\u2014so I’m hopeful that New Directions will soon release another short story collection.\n<\/p>\n

Short digression here: What about the poetry? If Bola\u00f1o 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 Bola\u00f1o’s prose voice\u2014a prose voice that is simultaneously poetry-centric and down-to-earth, unaffected and yet capable of taking off, without warning, into\u2014 well, into passages like this:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s from one of many “interviews” that make up the long middle section of\u00a0The Savage Detectives<\/em>. An old girlfriend of Arturo Belano (Bola\u00f1o’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\u2014that in the midst of Studs Terkelesque monologues, convincing recreations of actual spoken language, there would always appear at least one passage\u2014two or three lines at least\u2014where the everyday vernacular suddenly rises to vertiginous flights of metaphor\u2014always in the character’s voice, and always true to the emotion of the moment.\n<\/p>\n

So anyway\u2014back to\u00a0Nazi Literature in the Americas<\/em>.\u00a0The most remarkable thing about this book is that it is\u00a0not\u00a0a parody, satire, caricature or burlesque\u2014which 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 Bola\u00f1o, 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.\n<\/p>\n

This is, by my count, the third work of Bola\u00f1o’s to deal with what we may call “the fascist mind.” (Actually, it was the first one written\u2014but of course to me, as a monolingual American, it’s the order of English translation that matters. The others are\u00a0By Night in Chile<\/em>\u2014whose narrator is a very sympathetic, if profoundly compromised, Catholic priest, and\u00a0Distant Star<\/em>, whose central character is an utterly monstrous poet and pilot in Pinochet’s Air Force.) It seems to have been an important part of Bola\u00f1o’s artistic program\u2014the tasks he set himself\u2014to 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.\n<\/p>\n

Since I am lucky enough not to know many true fascists, I have noted some of the values which Bola\u00f1o’s imaginary litt\u00e9rateurs hold dear:<\/p>\n