It was a supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores. He finally settled in a resort town on the Costa Brava, and appears to have spent the last decade of his life convulsed by inspiration. He wanted, he said, “to live outside literature.” But literature wouldn’t let him go that easily. In 1976, in his early twenties, after publishing a book of poems, he left Mexico, where he was surrounded night and day by writers, and embarked on years of dissolute and impecunious wandering around Europe.
“The Third Reich” should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit “Antwerp,” “Monsieur Pain,” “The Romantic Dogs,” “Between Parentheses,” and “The Skating Rink.” Although “The Third Reich,” which seems to represent Bolaño’s first attempt at novel-writing, is not without certain characteristic charms-black comedy, idiomatic vigor, a looming and ineffable sense of doom-its power is only intermittent and its prose (“Her sweetness, her charm, her soft gaze, put everything else-my own daily struggles and the back-stabbing of those who envy me-into perspective, allowing me to face facts and rise above them”) is often as flat as old seltzer water.īolaño is unliterary, anti-literary.
Probably not through the latest lost work to surface, “The Third Reich,” a moody and uneven novel about a German war-games champion published by FSG at the end of last year. If you’re a Bolaño neophyte, this must look intimidating. The job they did of sifting through his unpublished writings in the immediate aftermath of Bolaño’s death in 2003 can’t have been especially thorough, for every other week, it seems, they find themselves tripping over another stout stack of papers, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a new thousand-page opus on pornography, obscure minor poets, and the end of the world. You have to question the detective skills, to say nothing of the clerical skills, of Roberto Bolaño’s literary executors.
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