Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

John Brenkman reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer. But beyond that, it produces an unsettling mix of overt satire and covert elegy. The reductive force of summary after summary starts to have an effect that transcends the satire; the book begins to convey a sense of the vanity of human endeavor and the ease with which a lifetime's work might be flicked into oblivion by a witty remark. As the mocking of the imaginary writers' lives reverberates through one entry after the next, it comes back to mock the mockery itself; if the lives and works are in vain, the mocking of them is even more acutely in vain. So, too, does the satirized impulse to fuse a poetic project with a radical political vision lose its right-wing provenance: The conviction that reality will be utterly transformed "by novel, unexpected, marvelous means" is, Bolaño implies, a sickness of the left as well as the right. A masterful satirist, Bolaño wields a scalpel sharpened on both edges. Ultimately, his almost juvenile imaginative exuberance expresses just the opposite: a precocious world-weariness.

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Chilean Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Stacey d'Erasmo reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

“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.

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Chilean Literature

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles

Katie Goldstein reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.

Through a series of wartime memories, many including Olvido, Pérez-Reverte takes us to the burning oil fields of Kuwait, to the war-torn Balkans, to Lebanon, Somalia, Romania, Mozambique, Chad, and beyond. Meanwhile, he acquaints us with Faulques' mural, where ancient and modern war coexist, where everyone from Hector and Andromache to Bosch and Goya plays a role. Markovic, when not prodding Faulques with provocative questions, takes an interest in the painting, in Faulques' vision of war - the vision of an observer, not a participant.

Though Markovic at times seems nothing more than a pain in the painter's side, much like the one that visits the artist reliably every eight hours or so, his presence forces Faulques to face his demons. "Did you ever try to stop anything, señor Faulques?" Markovic asks. "Even once? A beating? A death?"

Both men have lived war, one from behind his camera lens, the other with an automatic weapon in his hands. "Is it chance that leaves an animal's tracks in the snow?" Markovic asks. "Was that what put me in front of your camera or did I walk toward it for subconscious reasons I can't explain?" The narrative development may sometimes move slowly or seem repetitive, but Pérez-Reverte is a skillful architect of the tension between the retired photographer and his former subject, of those who witness and take photographs and those who fight, kill, beat, and torture.

Throughout the course of The Painter of Battles, it becomes apparent that the painter and his former subject have more in common than initially appears. Both are ravaged by war, still living, years later, in its aftermath.

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Spainish Literature

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Neel Mukherjee reviews Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

And through the tissue of the personal dramas of his characters, Díaz weaves the history of 20th-century Dominican Republic, both in its presence as a kind of scathing narrative unfolding through the footnotes, and in the more oblique way of how his characters come to get caught up in that history, participate in it, become its victims and survivors. This is a blistering novel, its language and style an effortless extension of the immense varieties of immigrant Englishes that have been appropriated for fiction, a high-octane, amphetamine-fuelled marriage of demotic Spanish and English that is equally at home with rough street slang and the domain of poetry.

Its characters are unforgettable, its emotional impact both crushing and liberating at the same time, and the voice in which it speaks, a rare, new, spellbinding sound altogether.

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Dominican Literature

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives

Alex Abramovich reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsize, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the "visceral realist" poets, pot dealers, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively—it was Bolaño's most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel's many surprises.

The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima across four continents and twenty-some years; it's framed by the journals of seventeen-year-old Juan García Madero. ("I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists," García Madero explains, by way of introduction. And the very next day: "I'm not really sure what visceral realism is.") But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all—jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others—and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author's own biography. (Among other things, visceral realism is an echo of infrarealism, a movement Bolaño helped launch in Mexico City around 1975, fusing elements of surrealism, shoplifting, and street theater in hopes of urging young Latin Americans to blur whatever lines remained between life and literature.) Even in translation, the effect is cumulative and fuguelike.

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Chilean Literature

José Saramago: The Double

Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double.

The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel Santa-Clara, whose job it apparently is to perform bit parts in a myriad of forgettable B-films. Beyond their professional differences, Tertuliano and Daniel (whose real name is António Claro) are otherwise completely identical, down to their date of birth, their moles, and even their scars. The course of the novel concerns Tertuliano's attempts to locate and meet Daniel/António, the bad blood that emerges from their meeting, and the fiendish plots they then initiate against each other. I won't ruin the end, which is quite moving and features at least one considerably surprising plot twist.

As it is with Saramago's best novels (in the United States, they are probably reckoned to be Blindness, a true masterpiece in my view, and The Cave), The Double seems to have a parabolic, or allegorical, layer, whereby it's possible to view the fabulism of the central conceit as standing in for something particular. Unlike in dream logic, in which the play of interpretation is imperative to arriving at understanding, in Saramago's parabolic world blindness tends to mean one or two things exactly, and the plight of the blind has a clearly representational, if not mimetic, flavor: The modern world, Blindness argues, exists as it does in this story. Saramago's work is not surreal, therefore, in the sense that we might understand it from Breton, or, to take a more recent case, Rikki Ducornet. Saramago is more like the poetry of Bunyan, or perhaps like Swift.

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Portuguese Literature

Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture

Damon Krukowski reviews "Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture".

The late-'60s Brazilian pop music movement known as Tropicália or Tropicalismo is—like Dylan's "Basement Tapes"—highly "overdetermined," as they say in grad school, and therefore a good candidate for a Geertz or Marcus-like "unpacking." But Christopher Dunn's book on the subject, Brutality Garden, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, never reaches those fanciful heights. This is not to say that Dunn isn't in possession of valuable knowledge for non-Brazilian fans of this music, just that the cautious and formal academic tone of his book obscures the fruits of his research. Countless asides, like "In Hegel's formulation, the slave could only comprehend his/her reality as a reflection of the master's will and therefore lacked historical subjectivity and agency," dull one's attention and weary the soul. Likewise the many scholarly tics in his writing, such as the use of "reference" as a verb or the closing of each chapter with a section called "Conclusion." His numerous allusions to Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Horkheimer, Jameson, et al. do not advance the argument of the book; rather they seem intended to justify its subject as worthy of study.

No such excuses are necessary. There is a dearth of information available about Tropicália in English, and I suspect there are many people who, like me, are hunting for more. Tropicália—characterized by a genre-bending passion for both low and high culture, colored by kitsch but also by political urgency, its youthful interest in outrageous costume and style countered by a maturity in its lyrics and melodies—has in recent years attracted the excited attention of a wide range of musicians and music fans in the US and UK.

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Brazilian Culture

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

Peter Bush interviews Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

My family was destroyed. My mother was killed. I was a child of the war, as I describe in Forbidden Territory, a war followed by more than thirty years of General Franco's dictatorship. By the age of eighteen I had decided to abandon a Spain where I knew work such as my novel Fiestas would never be published. Although I was part of a group of young writers opposed to the regime, I still found that writing critically of the regime meant you wrote with the censor looking over your shoulder. Spain was asphyxiating, and I was asphyxiated: From 1962 to 1976, none of my writing came out in Spain.

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Spanish Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat

Francisco Goldman reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat.

The Feast of the Goat, nearly documentary in tone, is a dense, dramatic, at times almost unbearably cruel and relentless political novel. It belongs to the illustrious tradition of the Latin American–dictator novel, in this case the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. But it is also a culmination of two searches that have characterized Vargas Llosa's writing since the beginning of his career: for what he has referred to as the "total novel"; and also for a Flaubertian perfection, a perfect fusion of style, form, and subject. A few years ago, in an essay on Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Vargas Llosa reflected on this idea of a "total" novel: "This is a desire to extend itself, to grow and multiply through descriptions, characters and incidents in order to exhaust all the possibilities, to represent its world on the largest, and also the most minute scale, at all levels and from all angles." Among the great works he lists that have achieved this is, of course, Madame Bovary. The "total" and Flaubertian idea, the "utopian design," is to create a novelistic reality so autonomous and whole that the reader feels convinced that this illusory reality is as true and durable as the reality it purports to describe, perhaps even more so.

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Peruvian Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Jason Weiss reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille—the last book published in Cortázar’s lifetime, it appeared in Spanish in 1983 and is now available in a fluid and felicitous English translation by Anne McLean—figures among his most playful works, its tone recalling, in a lighter vein, travelers’ tales from the age of discovery. Simultaneously, it offers another take on the collage aesthetic that underlies his novels and kaleidoscopic multigenre books, such as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967). After an extended preamble, which introduces the expedition’s protagonists, genesis, and preparations, the record itself comprises a daily log, photos, hand-drawn maps of the rest areas, and the authors’ many commentaries. In these, Cortázar and Dunlop dwell on physical surroundings, metaphysical speculations, cultural reflections, and encounters with truckers, highway workers, and other travelers, as well as observations of each other’s habits; they remark, too, on how their enchanted state has changed them, even sharpening the details in their dreams.

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

bookforum.com just published an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.

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Chilean Literature

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Nicole Gluckstern reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista).

Certain travelogues can be likened to love letters to a destination, though rarely does actual romance play a part in their construction. But when acclaimed postmodern Argentine author Julio Cortázar took to the road with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, it was a journey precipitated by mutual fondness as much as a desire for discovery.

In Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago Books, 354 pages, $20) an author best known for his nonsequential opus Hopscotch and collections of surreal short stories approaches the task of travel with the same whimsy and contradiction that characterize his literary oeuvre. Setting out on a pseudoscientific expedition to map the freeway between Paris and Marseilles, a distance of approximately 500 miles, Cortázar (nicknamed El Lobo) and the Canadian Dunlop (La Osita) spend a full 33 days en route, confining themselves to two rest stops per day.

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Argentine Literature