Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Tim Martin reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, Nazi Literature in the Americas is the best and weirdest kind of literary game. Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003 and achieved fame posthumously, here presents what purports to be a survey of rightwing writers on the American continent between 1894 and 2021. He sets up a densely imagined alternate world populated by fictional poets and novelists, each comically in thrall to their own refracted versions of the fascist aesthetic. One plans a radical modernity that consists of a return to the Iron Age, while another is haunted by extraterrestrial Merovingians. One proudly becomes “the creator of the Gunther O’Connell saga, the Fourth Reich saga, and of the saga of Gunther O’Connell and the Fourth Reich, in which the previous sagas fuse into one”, while another devotes the last phase of her life to reconstructing Edgar Allen Poe’s ideal sitting-room, a symphony in dark furnishings, dim lamps and scarlet drapes. Meanwhile, characters such as Allen Ginsberg and José Lezama Lima criss-cross the flow of Bolaño’s mock-critical prose.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is not the first book to present a critique of imaginary works, but its single-mindedness makes it an oddity even in this rarefied sub-genre. Thomas Carlyle provided one of the best-known examples in his warped philosophical satire Sartor Resartus (1833), which pretended to analyse a “Theory of Clothes” put forward by a German philosopher called Teufelsdröch, or Devilcrap. Jorge Luis Borges built an entire corpus of work on books and writers who never existed, such as Herbert Quain, who wrote a recursive novel with nine different beginnings, or Pierre Menard, whose attempt to transcend translation results in a “re-authored” copy of Don Quixote. Vladimir Nabokov dreamed up an anagrammatic alter ego called Vivian Darkbloom to comment on his own work, while the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (1971) collected reviews of imaginary books, one of which featured a Nazi in postwar Argentina who is obsessed with the court of Louis XVI. (Bolaño, a fan of science fiction, may have been paying attention.)

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

The beauty of Roberto Bolaño’s slender mystery novel “Monsieur Pain,” originally published in 1999 and now translated from the Spanish by the estimable Chris Andrews, is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel. By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so.

That would be Monsieur Pierre Pain, a middle-aged veteran of the First World War, his lungs seared at Verdun, now scratching out a threadbare existence in Paris by virtue of a modest government pension. In a bachelor’s dusty, jumbled room, he occupies himself by studying the occult. He has gained a minor reputation for the exotic practices of acupuncture and mesmerism, the art of hypnosis.

In April 1938, a beautiful widow with whom Pain is shyly in love comes to him with an urgent request. Her friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet named Vallejo, appears on the verge of hiccuping himself to death from an undiagnosed illness. This, of course, is the same César Vallejo who will one day be famous as perhaps the greatest Latin American poet, but here he is merely one of the first of the failed revolutionary writer-heroes — anonymous, exiled and suffering — who will become the prime movers of Bolaño’s later fiction. The mystique of the down-at-the-heels author always quickens Bolaño’s imagination. What novelist has ever shown more love for writers as characters?

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Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain


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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Alberto Manguel reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

When Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, aged 50, he could not have suspected that, a couple of years later, he would be hailed worldwide as both the prophet and redeemer of Spanish-language fiction. Prophet, his hagiographers declared, because his early books, which had come and gone unnoticed by critics and readers alike, prepared the way for a new kind of novel; redeemer, these same enthusiasts said, because Bolaño himself effected the change in his last books, notably 2666, which was hailed by the New York Times as "a landmark in what's possible for a novel".

And yet a reader coming upon Bolaño for the first time and opening Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published seven years before his death, might ask what all the fuss is about. A compendium of fictional literary lives that purports to trace major and minor examples of rightwing, conservative and reactionary literature in the Americas, Nazi Literature is at first mildly amusing but quickly becomes a tedious pastiche of itself. Like a joke whose punchline is given in the title, the humour is undermined, and all that is left is a series of names, dates and titles that, since they don't come across as funny, become merely irritating.

Fictional lives are something of a Latin American speciality. A history of Latin American literature could be compiled following that genre alone: the classic example is Jorge Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy, based on real characters and inspired by Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, in turn suggested by Aubrey's almost imaginary Brief Lives. Bolaño, no doubt aware of this illustrious ancestry, prefers to ignore it: not only the models, but their wit and discernment as well.

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Spain - 100 Books for 100 Years

To prepare this special issue of Letras Libres, the editors asked four of its critics a list of twenty-five books who had the most influence in the evolution of Spain for the last one hundred years.

Here's the list:

Andrés Sánchez Robayna

• Soledades (1903), de Antonio Machado
• Lecturas españolas (1912), de Azorín
• Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912), de Miguel de Unamuno
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• Las rosas de Hércules (1922), de Tomás Morales
• Tirano Banderas (1926), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• El público (1930), de Federico García Lorca
• Juan de Mairena (1936), de Antonio Machado
• La realidad y el deseo (1936), de Luis Cernuda
• Poeta en Nueva York (1940), de Federico García Lorca
• El escritor (1941), de Azorín
• La realidad histórica de España (1948), de Américo Castro
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• Dios deseado y deseante (1949), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Cántico (1951), de Jorge Guillén
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• Pido la paz y la palabra (1955), de Blas de Otero
• Conjuros (1958), de Claudio Rodríguez
• Tiempo de silencio (1962), de Luis Martín Santos
• Don Julián (1970), de Juan Goytisolo
• Material memoria (1979-1989), de José Ángel Valente
• Todas las almas (1989), de Javier Marías
• Teatro completo (1997), de Fernando Arrabal
• París no se acaba nunca (2003), de Enrique Vila-Matas

Jordi Canal

• Campos de Castilla (1912), de Antonio Machado
• Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912), de Miguel de Unamuno
• Platero y yo (1917), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), de Federico García Lorca
• Nada (1945), de Carmen Laforet
• Historia de una escalera (1949), de Antonio Buero Vallejo
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• Notícia de Catalunya (1954), de Jaume Vicens Vives
• Obres completes (desde 1956), de Josep Pla
• España, un enigma histórico (1957), de Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz
• Las brujas y su mundo (1961), de Julio Caro Baroja
• Cinco horas con Mario (1966), de Miguel Delibes
• El fracaso de la revolución industrial en España, 1814-1913 (1975), de Jordi Nadal
• La Edad de Plata, 1902-1939 (1975), de José Carlos Mainer
• Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (1977), de Jorge Semprún
• Antiguo régimen y revolución liberal (1978), de Miguel Artola
• Contra las patrias (1984), de Fernando Savater
• Salón de pasos perdidos (1990-2009), de Andrés Trapiello
• El bucle melancólico. Historias de nacionalistas vascos (1997), de Jon Juaristi
• La era de la información (1997-1998), de Manuel Castells
• Sefarad. Una novela de novelas (2001), de Antonio Muñoz Molina
• La loca de la casa (2003), de Rosa Montero
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

Jordi Gracia

• Niebla (1914), de Miguel de Unamuno
• El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925), de Américo Castro
• La rebelión de las masas (1930), de José Ortega y Gasset
• Juan de Mairena (1936), de Antonio Machado
• Lírica de una Atlántida (1936-1954), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Poeta en Nueva York (1940), de Federico García Lorca
• Diccionario de Filosofía (1942-1976), de José Ferrater Mora
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• La colmena (1951), de Camilo José Cela
• El arco y la lira (1956), de Octavio Paz
• Tiempo de silencio (1961), de Luis Martín-Santos
• Desolación de la quimera (1962), de Luis Cernuda
• El quadern gris (1966), de Josep Pla
• Arde el mar (1966), de Pere Gimferrer
• Volverás a Región (1967), de Juan Benet
• Conversación en La catedral (1969), de Mario Vargas Llosa
• Crónica sentimental de España (1971), de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
• Si te dicen que caí (1973), de Juan Marsé
• Las personas del verbo (1975), de Jaime Gil de Biedma
• La edad de plata. Ensayo de interpretación de un proceso cultural, 1902-1936 (1975), de José-Carlos Mainer
• La infancia recuperada (1976), de Fernando Savater
• Coto vedado y En los reinos de Taifa (1985-1986), de Juan Goytisolo
• Vendrán más años malos y nos harán más ciegos (1994), de Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
• Tu rostro mañana (2002-2008), de Javier Marías
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

Félix Romeo

• Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880-1882), de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo
• El espectador (1916-1934), de José Ortega y Gasset
• Luces de bohemia (1920), de Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• Fiesta (1926), de Ernest Hemingway
• Imán (1930), de Ramón J. Sender
• A sangre y fuego (1937), de Manuel Chaves Nogales
• Homenaje a Cataluña (1938), de George Orwell
• Españoles de tres mundos (1942), de Juan Ramón Jiménez
• Automoribundia (1948), de Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• El corazón y otros frutos amargos (1959), de Ignacio Aldecoa
• El verdugo (1963), de Luis García Berlanga y Rafael Azcona
• El cuaderno gris (1966), de Josep Pla
• La infancia recuperada (1976), de Fernando Savater
• El castillo de la carta cifrada (1979), de Javier Tomeo
• Mi último suspiro (1982), de Luis Buñuel
• Hormigón (1982), de Thomas Bernhard
• Lo peor de todo (1992), de Ray Loriga
• Las armas y las letras (1994), de Andrés Trapiello
• Los detectives salvajes (1998), de Roberto Bolaño
• La fiesta del chivo (2000), de Mario Vargas Llosa
• Cuadernos de todo (2002), de Carmen Martín Gaite
• Fiebre y lanza (2002), de Javier Marías
• París no se acaba nunca (2003), de Enrique Vila-Matas
• Enterrar a los muertos (2005), de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón
• Anatomía de un instante (2009), de Javier Cercas

You can find the full article here.




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Arturo Pérez-Reverte: El Asedio

According to publishing house Alfaguara, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's latest novel, not yet published 'El asedio' (The siege) is allready in the top selling list of the Spanish online bookstore Casa del Libro.

The events of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel occur in 1811 in the province of Cadiz. In a time Spain was fighting for independence, a criminal uses the city as a chessboard in which young women are flayed with whips, with an even more enigmatic event, in each place, before the a body is found, a French bomb has been dropped.




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Latin American Literature

A roundtable discussion (by e-mail) joining Daniel Alarcón, Eduardo Halfon, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez.

I started thinking about language—I mean really thinking about it—a few years ago when I signed up for first-semester Arabic at UC Berkeley. There was something about entering a language knowing absolutely nothing that made me consider what it is I know about those two languages I do speak (and read and write), English and Spanish. In class, we began with the alphabet, the sounds each symbol represented, and even now I am still working on the construction of sound, words, sentences. It’s been said before that language is the architecture of thought, and while I’m not convinced this is entirely accurate (my two-year-old nephew conveys a great deal without the benefit of words) it seems self-evident when one is beginning, when the immensity of all that you don’t know is overwhelming. I’m referring to the poetry of a language, of course, the beauty of which is most apparent (for me) when it is used in daily life—this is the level at which it is transformed, made new. This is the level of language-creation that I find most inspiring when I’m writing, which is odd, considering I write in English; the language I love most is Spanish. Not the literary language, necessarily, but its spoken dialects. It is impossible not to be awed by the inventiveness the language as it exists all over Latin America and Spain, the breadth and diversity of it, the way each local and regional vernacular traces a particular history, honors it, then subverts it, transcends it.

I wanted to talk about the most basic tool that writers utilize—language—with two artists uniquely situated to understand its significance. For most of us, the language we work in is a matter of circumstance, not choice; our language is an inheritance, an accident of the time and place of our birth, the education we were given or subjected to, the country we or our parents emigrated to. Eduardo Halfon and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, two fluent, native English speakers raised in the United States, have both chosen Spanish as their literary language; something that I’ll admit struck me at first as crazy. I mean, isn’t writing fiction hard enough already?

Eduardo Halfon was born in 1971 in Guatemala City. He studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and has published eight books of fiction, most of them in Spain, garnering wide critical praise. His latest novel, The Pirouette, to be published in 2010, was recently awarded the XIV José María de Pereda Literary Prize, in Cantabria, Spain. His work has been translated into Serbian and Portuguese. In 2007 the Hay Festival of Bogotá named him one of the best young Latin American writers.

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an unrepentant border-crosser, painter, former DJ, and currently teaches US Latino literatures and creative writing in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in the Barcelona Review, Ventana abierta, Paralelo Sur, and in the anthologies Líneas aéreas, Se habla español: voces latinas en US, Pequeñas resistencias 4: Antología del Nuevo cuento norteamericano y caribeño, and En la frontera: I migliori racconti della narrativa chicana.

I began this email conversation with a simple, obvious question: Why and how did these two writers make the decision to write in Spanish?

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Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich

According to EFE.

MADRID – In what figures to be among the most significant literary events this year in Spain, Anagrama has released the previously unpublished first novel by late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Appearing at bookstores on Thursday, six and a half years after the acclaimed author’s death, “El Tercer Reich” (The Third Reich) will subsequently be published in the coming weeks in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, among other Latin American countries, sources with the Spanish publishing company told Efe.

The novel, typewritten and then hand-corrected by Bolaño (1953-2003) in 1989, was first shown to publishers in 2008 at the Frankfurt Book Fair after being dug up by his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, known as “the Jackal.”

Many of his recurring themes were already present in this debut novel, including “the strange forms and deformations of Nazism or (the idea) that culture (games or literature) is reality,” Anagrama said.

“El Tercer Reich” is written in the form of a diary and features as protagonist a 25-year-old German named Udo Berger who is a war-games enthusiast and champion in his homeland, where he writes articles on the subject in specialist journals.

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Roberto Bolaño: The Romantic Dogs

Levi Stahl reviews Roberto Bolanõ's poetry collection The Romantic Dogs.

English-language readers have experienced Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s career sort of upside down and backwards. None of his work was translated into English until after his death in 2003, and it wasn’t until the publication of Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives in 2007—nearly a decade after it took the Spanish-language literary world by storm—that Bolaño got serious attention in the United States. That novel, a sprawling, mesmerizing masterpiece, was the rare translated work that achieved both critical and commercial success. Its renown has led to renewed attention to the handful of other volumes of Bolaño’s fiction that are available in English, and has led New Directions to step up their admirable program of translating all of Bolaño’s older works. Now, coinciding with the English-language publication of the last novel Bolaño wrote, the horror-show magnum opus 2666, we have The Romantic Dogs, a career-spanning poetry collection translated by Laura Healy.

Bolaño would likely appreciate the irony that the translation of his poetry is only viable in the wake of the success of his fiction, for he always considered himself a poet rather than a fiction writer, explaining, “I blush less when I reread my poems.” He turned to prose out of necessity late in life, when faced with the need to support a family. His diagnosis with fatal liver disease only increased the pressure, and while he continued to write poetry, it was into his novels that Bolaño poured the majority of his energy in his final decade. Yet even the novels are suffused with poetry—or, more properly, the epiphenomena of poetry. Amulet opens with the narrator stating “I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but I better not. I know all the poets, and all the poets know me.” The Savage Detectives is lousy with poets declaiming, drinking, fighting, fucking. But there is almost no actual verse in the books—the life of the poet, the trappings of poetry, are what matter, while the poetry itself is passed over in silence.

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Latin American Literature

2666 in French

2666, Roberto Bolaño, éd. Christian Bourgois

Ilan Stavans - Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years

Kevin O’Kelly reviews Ilan Stavans' Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.

In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was an obscure writer drowning in debt, a law school dropout living hand-to-mouth as a journalist and screenwriter. His early novels had garnered solid reviews but little money. Two years later he was the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,’’ a novel that achieved immediate commercial and critical success in the Spanish-speaking world. When “Solitude’’ appeared in English in 1970, critics in the United States invoked the author’s name in the same breath as Faulkner and Günter Grass.

The transformation of a young man from Colombia’s coastal provinces into one of the greatest writers of our time is the subject of “Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years.’’ Ilan Stavans, a prominent scholar of Latin American culture at Amherst College, is an able guide to the world that shaped García Márquez, from the small towns where he spent his early years (he was born in 1928) to the often violent politics that played a pivotal role in his family’s history and radicalized his political consciousness. Stavans also recounts the family stories that provided the novelist with much of the raw material for his fiction, such as his grandparents’ disapproval of his father as a suitor and his parents’ subsequent secret courtship that was recast in “Love in the Time of Cholera.’’

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Roberto Bolaño: El Tercer Reich

The Spanish editon of Roberto Bolaño's posthumous El Tercer Reich is due next week, for now, the first chapter is available here.

20 de agosto
Por la ventana entra el rumor del mar mezclado con las
risas de los últimos noctámbulos, un ruido que tal vez sea
el de los camareros recogiendo las mesas de la terraza, de
vez en cuando un coche que circula con lentitud por el Paseo
Marítimo y zumbidos apagados e inidentificables que
provienen de las otras habitaciones del hotel. Ingeborg
duerme; su rostro semeja el de un ángel al que nada turba
el sueño; sobre el velador hay un vaso de leche que no ha
probado y que ahora debe estar caliente, y junto a su almohada,
a medias cubierto por la sábana, un libro del investigador
Florian Linden del que apenas ha leído un par de
páginas antes de caer dormida. A mí me sucede todo lo
contrario: el calor y el cansancio me quitan el sueño. Generalmente
duermo bien, entre siete y ocho horas diarias,
aunque muy raras veces me acuesto cansado. Por las mañanas
despierto fresco como una lechuga y con una energía
que no decae al cabo de ocho o diez horas de actividad.

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Latin American Literature