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Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (Translator)

3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 · rating details · 1,697 ratings · 202 reviews

Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth an...more

Paperback, 240 pages

Published May 29th 2009 by New Directions (first published 1993)

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Mar 14, 2013 G rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary

Few novels bring me to a place that is best described as that plane one is trapped in before waking from a very lucid dream. You know the place where you can taste the air, feel the colors, where reality and imagination are embraced so thoroughly that borders blend and realign themselves. NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS is like that place. Bolano creates a completely fabricated world where poets and novelists and artists mingle with other characters-both fictional and real-as if they were all si...more

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Mar 07, 2013 Anthony Vacca rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: translation, new-directions, writers-behaving-badly

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano is in some ways the literary equivalent of this song: Nazi Punks-The Dead Kennedys

While the song may be kind of juvenile and limited in its scope, it still shares that same irreverent, vicious snarl of an attitude as this awesome little book. So, yes, I’ll give it to you straight: this book and its author are sooo punk rock.

But Bolano is more clever and subtle with his punk-i-tude: he sets up a playful and academic tone throughout this book that...more

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Apr 30, 2008 brian rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: obsessives

i spend way too much time making my bookshelves pretty: pruning, arranging, designing... i'm regularly plagued by some pretty critical issues: chronologically? by author? color? size? (y'see... unlike the rest of my shitty and privileged generation who gets all pantiebunched about evil corporations & all them bombs dropped on all them brown people, i actually have serious things on the brain) i fantasize that i'm gonna bring some gorgeous woman back home (please god let it be marisa tomei an...more

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May 25, 2013 Richard rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: pearl-ruled

Abandon ship! Abandon ship! On p41, I admit defeat and Roberto Bolaño wins the archly clever condescending twit sweepstakes hands down.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

9 likes · like · see review

May 18, 2012 AC rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fascism, novels-spanish-writers

This book is not for everyone - it requires that you are already in on Bolaño's prosopographical (inside) jokes (if you are, much of this is hysterical); love his jungle of proper nouns - reminiscent of Whitman or Catullus, but lusher -- and have a serious interest in understanding the pathologies of fascism and Nazism. For what Bolaño offers here is nothing less than a filleting of the psychology/pathology of fascism -- on the premise that fascism is not a doctrine (not wholly true), but a mood...more This book is not for everyone - it requires that you are already in on Bolaño's prosopographical (inside) jokes (if you are, much of this is hysterical); love his jungle of proper nouns - reminiscent of Whitman or Catullus, but lusher -- and have a serious interest in understanding the pathologies of fascism and Nazism. For what Bolaño offers here is nothing less than a filleting of the psychology/pathology of fascism -- on the premise that fascism is not a doctrine (not wholly true), but a mood, a sentiment, a virus... an "instinct in the soul" (Maurice Bardèche), this is precisely (one of) the right approach(es). Bolaño is one of the great anti-fascist writers of our times -- and serves to warn us, from his grave, of the dangers that the fascist international (always hiding under different names and different romances) poses in the coming century.

(For an example of what I mean by the 'lyrical' element in Nazism, see the appendices to this book - the two letters written by Cioran in the mid or early-30's that express his "love", admiration, and exaltation of Hitler: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31... -- a sentiment that proves to have been quite widespread in Romantic circles in Europe at this time. There are photos of Hitler entering Austria by car at the Anschluss, where the women lining the street are screaming orgasmically as if he were one of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

Finally, regarding the lyrical fascist aesthetic, here is Susan Sontag's 1974 NYRB article on "Fascinating Fascism" and Leni Riefenstahl, which makes many of the essential points, and is a must read: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/m...

And don't skip the Epilogue, with its lists of "Secondary Figures" and "Publishing Houses"... e.g.

Eugenio Entrescu. Bacau, Rumania, 1905 - Kishinev, Ukraine, 1944. Rumanian General. During the Second World War he distinguished himself in the capture of Odessa, the Siege of Sebastopol and the Battle of Stalingrad. Erect, his member was exactly twelve inches long, half an inch longer than that of Dan Carmine [see ad loc.]. He commanded the 20th Division, the 14th Division and the 3rd Infantry Corps. His soldiers crucified him in a village near Kishinev.

or...

María Teresa Greco. New Jersey, 1936 - Orlando, 2004. Argentino Schiaffino's [see ad loc.] second wife. According to eye-witnesses she was tall, thin and bony, a sort of ghost or incarnation of the will.

The final chapter, "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" is the chapter that was expanded into Distant Star.

I agree w/ others (William) that this is not the book to start with, for Bolaño, and think that Distant Star and Last Evenings on Earth are the place to start. But for those with the strange and requisite interests, this book has much to offer.(less)

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Feb 18, 2009 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009

Christopher Wilson
Silver Spring (Maryland), 1978 -- Kalamazoo (Michigan), 2055

In 2008, Wilson was enthralled by the story of the New Jersey couple who publicly feuded with a timid grocery store establishment that unconstitutionally refused to bake a swastika cake for their son, Adolf. It was during this time that Wilson decided to fight political correctness through baby names. Having spent the greater part of the previous decade toiling away in the federal government, Wilson had developed a pre...more Christopher Wilson
Silver Spring (Maryland), 1978 -- Kalamazoo (Michigan), 2055

In 2008, Wilson was enthralled by the story of the New Jersey couple who publicly feuded with a timid grocery store establishment that unconstitutionally refused to bake a swastika cake for their son, Adolf. It was during this time that Wilson decided to fight political correctness through baby names. Having spent the greater part of the previous decade toiling away in the federal government, Wilson had developed a predilection for acronyms. With a son named Connor in tow and another boy on the way, Wilson decided that he would attack the liberal establishment with more subtlety than his predecessors. He named his second son Oliver. Then came the twin girls, Maddie and Molly. Then came Udolf (a rather obvious hint) followed by Nancy, Irene, and Samuel. From all accounts, Wilson's wife was unaware of his ulterior motives up until the day she died giving birth to their ninth child, Miles.

With his message far from complete, Wilson spent the next year courting young women with wide hips. He eventually married an Argentinian woman who claimed to be Diego Maradona's second cousin. Within weeks she was pregnant and within a few more weeks her stomach had grown to four times its original size. Wilson and his new bride soon discovered that she was pregnant with quintuplets. After giving birth to the litter of babies, Wilson's second wife died from childbirth complications involving amniotic fluid entering her bloodstream. Exhausted and overwhelmed at the thought of finding another wife, Wilson decided to cut his message short. He gave the quintuplets the following names: Brandon, Lauren, Oscar, Wyatt, and Sharon. Wilson never revealed what his original message was going to be but insisted that the message as it stood was able to get his point across, albeit less eloquently than he had originally planned.

Wilson spent the latter part of his life writing poetry and spending no more than a year in any one city. His poem "Wizard" hinted that his nomadic life was another one of his subtle acronym messages. The last three known cities where he lived were Kansas City, Missouri, Kennebunkport, Maine, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he died from skin cancer.(less)

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May 23, 2008 Jim Coughenour rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: darkandfunny

This brutal little classic will be only appreciated by misfits, if they're lucky enough to discover it. It's the most recently translated novel of the late Roberto Bolaño (in another handsome edition from New Directions): a volume of invented biographies, detailing the lives and works of fascist litterateurs who never existed.

Here is wicked humor of the highest order – but I suspect it will be opaque to anyone innocent of the cruelties of literary gossip masquerading as criticism (and as an occa...more

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Oct 12, 2012 Vilma rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2666, my-fave-4-star-books

Traditional 19th century style novels, with a beginning, middle and end part, with their ways, their causes and consequences, their linear time frame, are finished, dead and gone even that doesnt mean they dont continue being written and are sold fairly or even successfully well. One likes them because they can be understood more easily. Even Roberto Bolaño never wrote a novel which cannot be understood, almost all of these features are more or less absent from his works.

All this does not mean w...more Traditional 19th century style novels, with a beginning, middle and end part, with their ways, their causes and consequences, their linear time frame, are finished, dead and gone even that doesnt mean they dont continue being written and are sold fairly or even successfully well. One likes them because they can be understood more easily. Even Roberto Bolaño never wrote a novel which cannot be understood, almost all of these features are more or less absent from his works.

All this does not mean we dont have some keys to approach the works of Bolaño but what are those keys exactly? Lets go for a hunt, shall we?

Some ideas exploited in his works are eg finding forgotten poets, those who were falling for one reason or the other into oblivion. Of course there are some recurring motifs as well: namely violence; passion for literature; poets maudits who yearn to create the most ephemeral art imaginable; a narrative that follows a paragraph to move from one corner of the world to another; outsider characters who are also writers regardless if they actually use pen and paper; a mockery of the (academic) literary world; detective stories; a world of traveling and murder; and alot of dark humor. Lets not forget all the cross-references to all his other novels. Characters who appear as a side-kick in one and play a major rule in another. Hence I am convinced that Bolaño is best read as an entity, that a distinction between his several novels shall not be made and that it would be erraneous to try to read them as stand-alone books. (btw dont panic, he is one of the most prolific dead writers ever so there is plenty to cut your teeth into).

And a Roberto Bolaño that towards the end of his novel is stepping out of the shadows, removing his mask and finally declares himself to be the narrator and a fictionalized character in his own novels.

Nazi Literature in the Americas has a misleading title which could one make falsely think its an essay but alas, it is not. It is a curious dictionary-like manual of fictional rightwing/Nazi/football hooligan authors with an overview of their body of work and above all about their lives. Sometimes their lives are picturesque, sometimes dull and boring.

Its a collection of 30 biographical accounts, stylish and with a captivating lightness with proposed and engaging stories in which dilemmas and paradoxes range from the beginning to the end, related to ethics and aesthetics, morality and literature. Bolaño looks at the ideas and actions of those people who are despicable but at the same time show a great sensitivity to literature.

Finally, in the epilogue are listed some of the most important secondary characters, magazines and publishing houses that converge with those named in this dictionary-manual. It gives an impression which is creepy, that it could continue detailing their particular literary universe until infinity. Also two of the authors are not dead yet, they will die in the year 2015 and 2029 respectively, despite their biographies are already closed. Which makes me think that the narrator is in fact Arturo Belano, who is still walking around alive and kicking.

Roberto Bolaño, however, converts ancedotes and circumstances to play with meanings to make a parody of those real-life Nazi writers who are out there, among us all.

4,5 stars

(less)

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Feb 20, 2011 Brent Legault rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolaño, New York, 2008. A collection of faux-criticism and thumbnail biographies of authors who never existed beyond the pages of this book (and others in his oeuvre). The style is direct, written for the public rather than the academic and marred by only a handful of clichés (which may have mushroomed up in translation). Humor is dry but ever-present. Much of the text is told in summary and therefore a bit distant but an occasional "scene" slips throu...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Conrad rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, pomo, owned

When Amalfitano subjects his pharmacist to a short mental screed about the drawbacks of writers' minor works in 2666, this is exactly the kind of thing he's talking about. A series of biographical sketches of fictional western-hemisphere writers with far-right sympathies, it'll take you no more than two or three hours to read. In its personalization of its characters' politics, it offers a bit of a clue to Bolano's modus operandi; it's just not as inventive as you'd like it to be, and not as inv...more When Amalfitano subjects his pharmacist to a short mental screed about the drawbacks of writers' minor works in 2666, this is exactly the kind of thing he's talking about. A series of biographical sketches of fictional western-hemisphere writers with far-right sympathies, it'll take you no more than two or three hours to read. In its personalization of its characters' politics, it offers a bit of a clue to Bolano's modus operandi; it's just not as inventive as you'd like it to be, and not as inventive as its great premise lead me to believe it was going to be, anyway.

You can look at it as a bunch of habits of thought to avoid, or as an archaeological study of the aftershocks of World War II and the wars of ideology that followed. The Phalangists and fanatics herein are sometimes cliched - especially the two repressed homosexual poets who join the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War - but more often surprising, like the Haitian plagiarist and the murderer who writes nihilistic verse across the sky. There are plenty of Fascist versifiers who you're supposed to sympathize with, like the woman who turns to pieties of the far Right in her efforts to liberate herself from a Communist husband who beats her. Juxtaposed against the more cynical exploitation of literature by some untalented hacks (like the soccer-fiend, poetry-writing gang members) and the out-there efforts of the P.K. Dick-like writers who use Nazism as more of an aesthetic than political dictum, you get the feeling Bolano is trying to tell us: yes, these people are all nutjobs, and a lot of them are truly ill-intentioned, but some of them had their reasons.

The very tippy-toe end - which has an actual plot, one I won't spoil - suggested to me that the smug, routine abhorrence of fascism should perhaps not preclude a touch of mercy.

You just don't need a book to do that, and doing so seems a little beneath Bolano in the first place.

I'd actively discourage people interested in Bolano's work from reading this first, but I'm still glad I've read it - the continuities between this and the world of 2666 (paging General Enterescu?) make it worthwhile as a coda, at least, and there are hints of the wry third-person voice Bolano got so good at later.(less)

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Aug 08, 2008 Jason Pettus rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So have you heard yet about the strange saga of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño? Born in the 1950s, a globetrotting vagabond and revolutionary activist most of his youth, one who just barely escaped the Pinochet coup of the '70s, Bolaño ended up settling down for the first time in the '80s and cranking...more (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So have you heard yet about the strange saga of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño? Born in the 1950s, a globetrotting vagabond and revolutionary activist most of his youth, one who just barely escaped the Pinochet coup of the '70s, Bolaño ended up settling down for the first time in the '80s and cranking out serious literature for the first time as well; and almost immediately his works started getting hailed by his fellow South and Central American intellectuals, with him for example by the late '90s being called by many down there the most important writer of his generation, and with his masterpiece The Savage Detectives being called by critic Ignacio Echevarria in those years "the novel that Borges would have written." Sadly, though, Bolaño died of a liver disorder in 2003, just a few years before his work started getting widely published in English for the first time; and thus it is that we here in the English-speaking world are just now going through a big literary crush on Bolaño for the first time these days, after he has already died and has left behind a definitively finite amount of work.

Take, for example, today's book under review, the slim and experimental Nazi Literature in the Americas; it was actually originally published in its native Spanish in 1996, but not in English until just a few months ago, making it actually being considered a "new" book here at CCLaP today and eligible for the "best of 2008" list at the end of the year. And it's an odd book too, more of a clever artistic game than a full-fledged novel, its concept being just what you would imagine with such a title; it is a fictional reference guide to several dozen supposed fascism-friendly authors and other right-wing intellectuals, all of whom supposedly lived in either North, Central or South America at one time or another in history. And not only that, but it's set in the future, making this not only a fake history that references real events (the Nazi flight to South America after WWII, the various revolutions that took place there in the '70s), but also partly science-fiction as well, detailing a completely fictional moment in future history when a neo-fascist movement apparently catches on in North America quite intensely. (And let's not forget, this was written in 1996, long before 9/11 and the neocon Bush administration.)

It's a fascinating and frustrating book, one you can tell comes from the very beginning of Bolaño's career; and that's because the stuff that's there is just so clever and so fascinating, but ultimately there's simply not enough there to make it a truly great novel. In fact, the entire manuscript is only a padded-out 200 pages, and actually written in the style of a reference guide, thumbnail sketches of each writer with very few connective threads between them; like I said, it feels more like spending an afternoon at Wikipedia than it does reading a full and mature novel. That said, though, what's there is fantastic; it is a complicated, realistic look at how various right-wing theories about the world have been justified and rationalized over the decades by well-meaning but deluded intellectuals and philosophers, how it's not just dogma alone that has inspired such people but also personal loss, love lives, a certain affinity for certain geographical locations at certain moments in history, and all kinds of other complicated factors.

Now, granted, let's just admit, the more of a well-read academe you are, the more you're going to enjoy Nazi Literature in the Americas; as mentioned, for example, I've read online many times now that this book takes on the structure of a typical Borges project, but I'm completely and utterly unfamiliar with Borges myself so couldn't even begin to tell you if that's true. There are a lot of moments in this manuscript that feel like this, to tell you the truth; moments where you can just feel the story going over your head, feel the actual wind as it whips by you, steeped so deeply as it is in the history of obscure left-wing radical South American political groups, barely-known performance artists of the early Modernist age, and other topics you usually only hear discussed among a group of MFA weenies at some museum cocktail fundraiser. And in fact, you could almost see this book as a Bolaño dig at the very people who started embracing him and his work when he himself reached middle age; because frankly, of the dozens of fictional writers and playwrights and artists who Bolaño "covers" in this book, not a one of them ever rise above relative obscurity during their own careers, mostly only known among a handful of college professors who have devoted their entire adult lives to studying only this subject. Given how explosive he could've made the lives of these fictional fascists, I think it says something that he made them barely-known academes instead; I have a feeling that Bolaño had a deliberate point to make by doing so.

But like I said, Bolaño ultimately pulls this book out of the academic mudhole, precisely by adding the fascinating science-fictiony elements that he does; this whole idea that about twenty years after the novel's original publication, there would be this underground neo-fascist movement in the US and Canada that would bubble up into perhaps the most infamous collection of this entire fake history, a group calling itself "The Fourth Reich" that at least got its crap together enough to found a publishing company, to start sponsoring artists, to start getting work actually disseminated. It opens up the mind, opens up the story too, makes it much more of an interesting general-interest tale than specifically a reference-heavy literary exercise just for creative-writing students (although make no mistake, it's that too). It's a flawed work, one that belies Bolaño's relative inexperience as a writer at that point; but Nazi Literature in the Americas is also a fascinating book as well, one that easily makes me want to rush out and read the rest of his ouevre now too. It is generally recommended today, and especially for all you grad students and professors out there.

Out of 10:
Story: 7.9
Characters: 9.5
Style: 8.0
Overall: 8.6(less)

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May 12, 2008 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Organized by genre or affiliation, the book presents the literary lives of various Nazi-type writers. It is not restricted to Nazism proper, just the sort of bigoted politics that you find in those who these days would not be surprised or concerned if they visited a friend's basement bar and found a red flag with a swastika on it hung in a place of pride. Also, none of the authors featured actually existed, and some of their lives are traced well past the present day.

I'm not an expert on all the...more

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Mar 23, 2008 Ryan Chapman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Man, this guy always swings for the fences, and in the two books of his I've read, he hits home runs. Except they're experimental novels, so it's like he veers off-course as he rounds the bases and runs wildly off to tackle the left-fielder. Or something.

Anyways, this books reads so simply, so seductively, its greater power is easy to miss. In fact I sped through the book almost too quickly, taking everything at face value. Only upon much reflection did I realize this is a balance between the c...more

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Mar 25, 2008 R. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008

Another typo, near the end.
"The" should've been "Then".

***

They say how these books are lovingly translated - there's a fawking typo in the table of contents: "Mercernaries" ?? (small miracle that it's corrected on pg. 111).

***
On order from Amazon. Saw this on a goodreads friend's to-read list and wondered if she'd suddenly subscribed to the Stormfront idealogy - something that would have been out of character by miles and miles not to mention a bit scary. Turned out that this is a Borgesian ency...more

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Dec 04, 2008 Alex V. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Like many other I suspect, I am freshly enamored with Roberto Bolaño, but this is the first book of his I've picked up that I didn't finish immediately. Not that it isn't a good book, but halfway through the series of short fictional biographies of South American right wing writers, I kept thinking OK I get it... so I put it down. I think Bolaño is very much about the spiral down through hell, but this was a little like reading only the explanatory notes of the Inferno, forsaking the verses.

The...more

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Dec 28, 2008 Tuck rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

ok, i hate cute fucking nazis. probably only Bolaño has the mendacity to make them cute, sort of interesting and worth thinking about.added bonus of this book helping you dear reader with some of the history and characters in other Bolaño novels like "the savage detectives" and "2666". ok, if you aren't really into Bolaño then don't worry about. just go away and continue with your damn ethnocide.

if you click on the book cover you can read some really great comments and reviews about this book an...more

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Jul 04, 2012 Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In Nazi Literature in the Americas Roberto Bolaño - a Chilean writer who sadly died aged fifty in 2003 - has provided the perfect literary companion. It’s an exhaustive collection of pocket obituaries of all the major and many of the minor poets, writers and novelists whose political conservatism took them to the extreme right, who became Nazis or fellow travellers, all of whom were born in the Americas. It’s such a pity we do not have a European equivalent.

I confess I had never heard of many of...more

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Jul 17, 2008 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An odd book. A series of short profiles of fictional right wing Latin American writers. A kind of Borgesian literary joke.

Bolano is without question a man of the left, and one doesn't get the sense (thank God) that he's one of those lefties who underwent a right-wing political conversion late in life. But despite the title of his fictional appendix and bibliography, Epilogue For Monsters, the characters, with one exception (The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman), are almost all written as likable sorts....more An odd book. A series of short profiles of fictional right wing Latin American writers. A kind of Borgesian literary joke.

Bolano is without question a man of the left, and one doesn't get the sense (thank God) that he's one of those lefties who underwent a right-wing political conversion late in life. But despite the title of his fictional appendix and bibliography, Epilogue For Monsters, the characters, with one exception (The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman), are almost all written as likable sorts. Or, rather, the tone of the entries is light, philosophical, there's little moralizing. And even in the chapter on Ramirez Hoffman--a short story version of the novella Distant Star-- the Bolano character helps a presumed assassin track down the mass murderer Hoffman, only to balk at actually killing him.

These are characters who are swept up by the tides of history. Often their political trajectories are defined as much by chance as by burning conviction. Or, rather, chance occurrences give rise to burning conviction. And even though each entry is very economical, Bolano sketches out a full set of biographical details for many, so that they aren't strictly defined by their politics. Politics for right wingers, he seems to say, is like politics for left wingers--to the extent that they are trying to live a full life, just one part of the mix.

So what's right wing about these characters? Many hate the standard scapegoats of the 20th century: blacks and Jews. Many are Nazi symps. There's a romanticization of agrarian life in many, an embrace of the myth of blood and soil. In others there's a Futurist enthusiasm for the ultra modern, for the spiritual life of destructive machines. Many are cultural outsiders, rejected by the literary establishment. They are obsessed with purity. They romanticize death. Etc.

Maybe there's a sense in Bolano, having come of age in Chile under the Allende and Pinochet regimes, and having experienced the rise and dashing of revolutionary hopes, and having seen left wing saviors like the Sandinistas and Castro either fail or become authoritarians, that in such an environment you were going to become political whether you liked it or not. And that the choice of which side to take was not always determined by things you could control, or that the same root impulse could lead in either direction.

Some might complain that this book is really just a sketch for a novel, or multiple novels, or an exercise designed to generate plots and characters to be used in more substantial works. One thing is certainly true: while the book as a whole doesn't tell any one story, there are multiple stories in the book, way too many to keep track of--there are the stories of each character's life and career, and there are all the stories suggested by all the novels and poems that Bolano attributes to all the writers he invents. Maybe this is the kind of book you'd expect from a man with a death sentence hanging over his head, as Bolano was for the last decade of his life (he died at age 50, in 2003, while waiting for a liver transplant). Perhaps it was in part a way for Bolano to get all this stuff out of his head and on paper before leaving this world for good.(less)

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Feb 17, 2008 Jesse rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If he writes it, I'll read it. Still, the ways he gets published here are a little confusing. As one other review points out, the publication order in this country is a little off, so this one comes out AFTER a lot of his later stuff, including a later novel, Distant Star, that expands this book's last chapter into a short novel.

It's no stretch to say that he turns all of his fascists, Nazis, and traditionalists into Bolano characters--they're uncomprising avant-garde poets, stubborn pulp fictio...more If he writes it, I'll read it. Still, the ways he gets published here are a little confusing. As one other review points out, the publication order in this country is a little off, so this one comes out AFTER a lot of his later stuff, including a later novel, Distant Star, that expands this book's last chapter into a short novel.

It's no stretch to say that he turns all of his fascists, Nazis, and traditionalists into Bolano characters--they're uncomprising avant-garde poets, stubborn pulp fictioneers, scrubs from the provinces trying to eke out a win in yet another of those minor literary contests Bolnao so loves...indistinguishable from his heroes in the Savage Detectives or similar figures in the stories in Last Evenings on Earth, which raises the question of what we do (and what he's doing) with such misdirected artistic urges. (Because he's really not mocking them, any more than he mocks any of his other marginal artistic types: maybe a little chiding, but mostly love and shared values.) Surely, as such an engagé writer, Bolano doesn't believe that politics are immaterial; precisely the opposite. So then the imagination of an entire cosmos of such writers has about it something of the odor of...charity, in that he grants the sincerity, though monstrous wrongness, of their beliefs? ...of belated struggles with history, in an attempt to understand what happened in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, how such appalling ideas got smuggled South and then reanimated?...a political sense that BECAUSE extreme right-wing ideas partake so much of fantasy both personal and collective, we need to understand and counteract, or counterprogram, those same urges?

I'm not sure he's worked this out yet. His main character in Distant Star, a sort of concrete poet of torture, more powerfully poses the whole question of art in a dictatorship. These seem more like gestures, attempts in the direction of understanding the whole corpus of ideas rather than the kind of finished, if ambivalent, artistic manifesto we see presented in, say, The Savage Detectives.

Still, it's not a bad introduction to his aesthetic, which strikes me as absolutely unique--can't think of a single writer with his stupefying imagination and capacity for narrative play (almost every one of his novels seems to be arguing, why can't every book contain as many styles and models as you want? note that, for instance, Distant Star throws in TWO utterly superfluous locked-room mysteries in its final pages, for no other reason than that he felt like it), flair for, and love of, so many genres in enormous detail (one of his pulpsters sounds like H.P. Lovecraft, another writes these bizarre post-apocalyptic macho gunplay fantasies that recall the grocery-store Mac Bolan thrillers), all combined with a relentlessly avant-garde sense of literature and an earthy grounding in bodies and sweat. Definitely worth a read, if not reaching the greatness of his best stuff so far.

2666, when are you coming out?(less)

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Mar 27, 2008 Deb rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, pseudo-history

This book contains short fictional biographies of Nazi supporters with real authors/dates/references mixed in.

Honestly, I was really curious about this book--especially about all the wailey hype about "another Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Jose Borges." When will I learn? Almost anytime a book publisher has to fall back on comparisons to major authors instead of actual book descriptions, it's gonna be somewhat of a fail. The fantasy market is always proclaiming some new author as "the next Tolkien," wh...more

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Feb 03, 2008 Dmitry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I know there is often no rhyme or reason to the order of publication of books in translation, but I wish this one had come out sooner.

In Spanish, "Nazi Literature in the Americas" came out in 1996, followed by "Last Evenings on Earth" in 1997, and "The Savage Detectives" in 1998. I tried to read "Last Evenings on Earth," and found it fascinating, but also severe and one-note, and gave up on the much-heralded "Savage Detectives" because I simply didn't get it.

However, I adore "Nazi Literature in...more

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Nov 25, 2007 jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, fiction

bolaño, at least in his novels & short stories, seemed obsessed with the role of the writer within society; or rather, not so much the writer's role in society, per se, but rather the writer's relation, if any, to society.
not knowing bolaño's work, one could easily mistake this book for an actual critical, somewhat academic analysis of american (north & south) authors with ties to national socialism. bolaño has penned brief vignettes on nearly two and a half dozen of these writers and...more

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Jan 19, 2012 Rhockman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Miki que es más despierta

Shelves: literatura-hispanoamericana

Eh...
Hacía rato que no me sentía tan tonto leyendo un libro.
Primero porque tarde un tercio del libro en darme cuenta que las biografías que lo componen son ficticias. Después porque hay una enorme cantidad de referencias y autores de los que nunca escuché en mi vida, o sí, pero no lo suficiente cómo para entender los chistes.

Así y todo, me reí bastante con muchas de las situaciones biográficas. Algunas, tan absurdas que uno no puede dejar de pensar que son verídicas. Por momentos, amargo cuándo...more

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Sep 14, 2008 Andrew Bourne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Andrew by: Stuart Strange

The literary equivalent of Peter Greenaway's 1980 film The Falls...both suffer from and are also enhanced by their indulgences. Both are predicated on a gimmick, practically the same gimmick actually, indeed a lovable gimmick, but one that wears thin. Or perhaps just is thin. Bolaño Lite.

That said, it's still equal parts incredibly inventive, fun, funny, and dark. There's even a section specifically set in my hometown of Richmond Virginia--a place I'm sure Señor Bolaño, though infamously well-tr...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Molly rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After planting my feet solidly in the Bolano camp, I had to check out a few of his other books. This one, which in the hilarious index features a few characters that make an appearance in 2666, is comprised of short biographical sketches of nazi sympathizers and the literature they loved and created. My three stars can be explained as follows: first, I find I don't particularly enjoy short stories, and although the biographical sketches can not be considered as pithy or as tightly-constructed as...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Troy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2009

This book is a fake encyclopedia of fictional right wing writers. The stories are short and largely disparate and the writing is, as usual for Bolaño, fantastic. That said, this is a slight book, despite its craft; the sketches of the writers are incisive and vicious, but the book is largely one note.

The book deals with the amoral nature of art; how art (and especially beauty) is not necessarily associated with truth or goodness, and how writing and art can have a direct and deep effect on the l...more This book is a fake encyclopedia of fictional right wing writers. The stories are short and largely disparate and the writing is, as usual for Bolaño, fantastic. That said, this is a slight book, despite its craft; the sketches of the writers are incisive and vicious, but the book is largely one note.

The book deals with the amoral nature of art; how art (and especially beauty) is not necessarily associated with truth or goodness, and how writing and art can have a direct and deep effect on the larger world. The writers in this book are generally awful people, as is their message. Some of the writers are fantastic, yet most are hacks; some are retrograde, others are avant garde.

The book is similar to Borges' A Universal History of Iniquity, which was also a collection of short (and fun) stories about awful people. Both books explore the nature of evil, but while Borges was interested in vicious men and women of action, Bolaño is interested in writers, most of whom are passive. Like the Borges collection, these stories occasionally get repetitive and very wildly in quality. But unlike the Borges collection (which were written for a popular and trashy tabloid) Nazi Literature in the Americas is written as a whole, and its "message" is coherent and overwhelming.

The book feels like a warm up to Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, esp. in his relentless and monotonous parade of voices and books (it also resembles, in writing style, the fourth book of 2666).

Despite the book's brilliance, I almost gave it three stars; as I said, it feels too slight for Bolaño; too one-note. That said, it's still great, and the story "The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman" is fantastic. The story is of a writer/utterly-creepy-horror-villain, and in it, the character of Bolaño suddenly intrudes. It's a wicked genre piece that suddenly turns the tables on Bolaño, and makes him directly guilty. It's a brutal coda that reminds us that it's easy to be complicit, even for those who are desperately trying not to be.

For me, the ultimate praise is that I really want to read the books that Bolaño invented and described. I want to read the books of Zach Sodenstern; see the creepy map-poems of Willy Schürholz; get lost in the dorky post-modern historical fantasy of Harry Sibelius; and of course, see the sky poetry of Carlos Ramírez Hoffman.(less)

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Jun 11, 2013 Cameron rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If this were a book on factual Nazi literature in the Americas then it would probably be an interesting read, even if only for those curious about the subject. But as it is this is a work of fiction, bite-sized biographies of boring people who never even existed outside of its pages. Now these may be carefully crafted characters, each made to resemble some specific person or idea surrounding Nazi literature in the Americas, but unless you are already well-versed on the subject you will find gett...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Perfect bedtime reading. Short chapters, all to the point.
I loved this book while I was reading it, and then discovered an even profounder respect for this book when I was typing up my notes about it. It combines a penchant for indexicality with fervent imaginings and astute critical intelligence. If you value all three as highly as I do, this is a perfect book. Here are examples of the kind of writing you will be treated to:

She dreamed of studying architecture and designing grandiose schools t...more

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Dec 25, 2012 Evan rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I couldn't finish The Savage Detectives or 2666, but this seemed manageable, in terms of both length and subject matter. It largely avoids the main things that bothered me about ...Detectives: its fake-reference-book tone provides enough distance to play up the snark and downplay the (over)sincerity in its elevation of minor literary figures into supercharacters (-heroes in that one, -villains in this one), and the (fake) critical detachment makes his incessant namedropping of fictional characte...more

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Mar 27, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, read-in-2011

Every single review I've read of this book mentions Borges. There are no exceptions, because to not mention him would be unthinkable - this collection of capsule biographies of imaginary fascist/right-wing authors would never have been written without the existence of Borges' prior work like A Universal History of Infamy, which itself was based on similar prior experiments. However, I think Bolaño sort of missed the point on why Borges used the format of fictional book reviews. Borges did it out...more Every single review I've read of this book mentions Borges. There are no exceptions, because to not mention him would be unthinkable - this collection of capsule biographies of imaginary fascist/right-wing authors would never have been written without the existence of Borges' prior work like A Universal History of Infamy, which itself was based on similar prior experiments. However, I think Bolaño sort of missed the point on why Borges used the format of fictional book reviews. Borges did it out of laziness, by his own admission (also economy - why write a whole book when you can just give people the gist in a few pages?), but the device also allowed him to keep the very interesting and subtle philosophical questions he was exploring (e.g. the notions of authorship and authenticity in Pierre Menard) grounded in some sort of reality. Philosophy puts people to sleep fairly easily, but if it's clothed in a narrative or something closer to what people expect in a work of fiction, it's both more interesting and more relevant. Bolaño's book, which is the only one of his I've read, for some reason leaves out the philosophy entirely and so I confess I really don't get the point of it - why am I reading yet another two-page summary of the life of a no-name poet whose fascism is only mentioned briefly, and whose life is connected to any of the others only vaguely, if at all? What broader picture is supposed to emerge from these lives and the ties between them? That some of these lives extend into the near future is surely supposed to mean something, but what? Some of the longer ones are fairly involved and hint at what could have been interesting stories on their own (such as the two Schiaffino brothers). Unfortunately, except for the final biography, which is written in a narrative style that feels like a compressed version of a potentially interesting full-length crime novel (it actually was later turned into his novel Distant Star), it just comes off as writing for its own sake; there's pretty much nothing beyond the concept to make the book worth reading. None of the authors have much to say, and except for occasional brief lists of themes or ideas or imagery, there's very little description of what they wrote. The fascism or Nazism of the writers is completely incidental and doesn't add up to anything, which is odd considering Bolaño's own history as a prisoner of Pinochet. You could write something like "this is a series of meditations on fascism" if you wanted to trick people into thinking there was something more going on here, but there really isn't. The main item on display is Bolaño's writing style, which is dry, detached, and subtly ironic, but still fairly clinical and so even a warmth that could have breathed some life into these characters is absent. I will say that Bolaño is exceptionally well-read, to judge by the lists of authors the various protagonists either read, meet, or are compared to, so it's certainly possible to be impressed by the detail he crams into each life. I wouldn't say any of them exactly leap of the page, but they are all pretty good imitations of what could have been real people, and if you're the kind of person who enjoys reading obituaries you will appreciate his skill in making each creation feel unique. Borges once wrote "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." There's tons of that useless erudition here, but I don't see the pleasure.(less)

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About Roberto Bolaño

For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

H...more For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.

Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.

In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño died. It has been suggested that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question. It is true that he suffered from liver failure and was close to the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.

Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."

Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.

In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.

In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.(less)

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