“Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, “Nazi Literature” is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures à la “The Producers” they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible. Like Leni Riefenstahl, the artistes Bolaño invents share a certain Romantic aesthetic, a taste for the classic and nonvulgar, a dislike of “cacophony” and a lurking sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the modern world — that children, for instance, have been “stolen and raised by inferior races” and that a better world in the form of the Fourth Reich is imminent. There is little to no mention of Jews or other undesirables; there are no death camps; World War II is a passing reference at best. Instead, with a straight face, Bolaño narrates the Nazi writers’ tireless imaginations, their persistence in the face of a world history that goes against them, their contrarian determination as they continue to write books that go unread, unreviewed and largely unnoticed. They’re the losers but, with incredible passion, they remain steadfastly in denial of that fact, churning away at their refutations of Voltaire, Rousseau and Sartre; their verses vindicating Il Duce; their novels decrying the decline of piety; their Aryan literary societies. Like Riefenstahl, they find the highest beauty in a particular sort of symmetry and order that only in retrospect seems indubitably fascist. Horribly, persistently, they have a vision that they are incapable of giving up.Read More
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Chilean Literature
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