Loners in Roberto Bolano's stories drift from anxiety and obsession into something darker. Like poetry, bibliophilia, murder, madness. The downward spiral is gradual and unstoppable, its path littered with symbols, graveyards and black humour. Very black. And very humorous. You emerge from one of his books _ and so many of them have been released in English in the seven years since his death, aged 50, in 2003 _ soaked in a cold sweat, like one of those amateur detectives in his novels who stray too close to the abyss and limbo.
THE THIRD REICH By Roberto Bolano. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Published in Great Britain, 2011, by Picador; 277 pages. At Kinokuniya Books, 462 baht.
On the back cover of The Third Reich _ the manuscript of which was found after Bolano's death in a heap of discarded papers _ the publisher quotes a review from the Sunday Times: "Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano." That's a hip bait, dropping the name of someone who's probably the hippest author of his generation who doesn't write in English. While Murakami has fashioned blockbusters out of loneliness and alienation, as is obvious in his international hit IQ84, what moves Bolano is the dark matter of history, art and despair.
These are not subjects you can "snack on"; you devour them _ or you're devoured by them. Because after blood, booze, semen and the destiny of insomniac poets and loners lost in the twilight of South America, literature, according to a character in Bolano's The Savage Detectives, "is a form of terrorism".
To be honest, The Third Reich may not be the best introduction to Bolano if you've never wandered onto his turf before. Fortunately, the posthumous adulation the Chilean has received means that most of his books have been available (though, in contrast to the treatment accorded IQ84, not exactly promoted) in Bangkok bookstores, from the phantom-like The Savage Detectives to the epic 2666 and even that novella about sky-writing, military murders and barbaric literature, Distant Star. Those titles _ plus the satire on artists and the Pinochet dictatorship, By Night in Chile, and Amulet , a story about "the mother of Mexican poets" who hides in a bathroom while soldiers storm a university in Mexico City _ attest to the heft and hypnotic quality of Bolano's rich oeuvre on the theme of youth, loss and the path towards poetry ablaze with fire and death.
His popularity (after his demise) means that publishers have scoured his literary legacy and made him a very productive dead writer. Last year Bolano had three new releases: Beyond Parentheses, a collection of his newspaper columns; Tres, a book of prose poems and noir-ish dreams; and The Third Reich, a supposedly lost novel which came out in November. If your ideas about Latin American literature remain centred on Boom heroes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, my recommendation would be that you take a plunge with one of Bolano's big books, preferably The Savage Detectives, and save the smaller ones until you've staggered through the archway into the battlefields.
It looks like Bolano wasn't very pleased with The Third Reich for he tossed the manuscript into the depths of a drawer. And you can feel the impatience, the untidiness, especially in the concluding chapters. But even a minor Bolano stands tall beside most books by contemporary authors; The Third Reich smells of acid, suntan cream and dried blood. On the surface, it's the story of a man who's slowly going mad while on a vacation _ a touch of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, just like how the ending of Bolano's Amulet reminds one of Mann's Magic Mountain _ but as Udo Berger burrows deeper into himself the book becomes a shuddering piece of sarcasm on historical ignorance and an obsession with the desire, for better or worse, to tamper with history.
Told in diary form, with each chapter given a date of entry, The Third Reich is narrated in unfussy prose by Udo, a German war-game champion holidaying in Spain with his girlfriend. The war game, we gather, is a strategic board game in which World War Two scenarios are re-enacted, toy battalions deployed and weapons mobilised, all on grid maps laid out on a table. It's a dark chapter of European history replayed by enthusiasts (Bolano used to be one) as a sport, or probably as a sort of retrospective lesson to figure out what went wrong or, even, why Germany lost ("... because it played fair; the proof is that [Germany] didn't use poison gas, not even against the Russians, ha-ha-ha," muses Udo in his delirium).
In the hot, sticky seaside town, Udo and his girlfriend, Ingeborg, meet another German couple, the reckless, rowdy Charly and his date, Hanna. They drink a copious amount of alcohol and mingle with other shady characters with names like The Lamb and The Wolf. But the pivot of dread and enigma arrives with a man called El Quemado (The Burn Victim), a pedal-boat operator whose face is marred by mysterious scars. One day, Charly disappears and the tension that follows slowly shatters the shallow friendship that people on beach holidays tend to form out of necessity. Soon, Udo, plagued by obsession, introduces El Quemado to a war game called The Third Reich, but the disfigured man with the secret past turns out to be an even better player than the champion himself. Germany is about to lose again, even in the replay.
Loners in most of Bolano's books find solace and horror in poetry; Udo is no poet _ nor is he Spanish or South American! _ but he writes long analyses of war games for magazines with names like The General, Stockade and Front Line; while El Quemado, as the game he is playing with Udo progresses, starts bringing photocopies of World War Two breakdowns to Udo's room and troubles the German with the sharp, casual sense of menace he exudes.
The Third Reich is a story of how history can haunt the present by means of memories, the written word and subterfuge, all creeping violently beneath a calm surface of ignorance and sanity. It's a story of Europe, but it's also a story of everywhere, where knowledge of the past is confronted by blindness and prejudice. Because it's narrated in the first person, the book subtly registers the slow collapse of Udo's mind in a voice tinged with nervousness, fright _ and black humour. And like all Bolano's stories, this one is very black and. yes, very humorous.
