Reviews

The Lamb winked at me and sat on the bed, behind the maid, miming sex in a way that was doubly silent because even his ear-to-ear smile was turned not toward me or Clarita's back but toward... a kind of realm of stone... a silent zone (with raw staring eyes) that had surreptitiously established itself in the middle of my room... say, from the bed to the wall where the photocopies were tacked.

3 Bolaño stars, which is to say I loved it.

smark1342's review against another edition

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Spooky and unsettling the whole way through. German war games champion udo visits the Costa brava (towns gotta be blanes where bolano lived) that he used to visit as a child with his girlfriend ingeborg. They meet another German couple, Hanna and drunk violent scumbag Charly. Udo also sees the hotel owners wife, frau elsa, who he had a crush on. Soon Charly and Hanna introduce them to the lamb and the wolf, two local creeps, and el quemado, a jacked badly burned guy who lives in a fortress of pedal boats he rents out. They go to shitty bars and get drunk and udos narration gives off a foreboding violent atmosphere that really genuinely weirded me out.

Charly drowns while windsurfing. Eventually Hanna and ingeborg go back to Germany (separately) and udo stays behind ostensibly to id the body but really to play third Reich with el quemado, who has seemingly been receiving advice from frau Elsa's husband, the hotel owner, who is sick and mostly confined to bed. Udo visits him (after starting a relatively chaste affair with Elsa) where he warns udo that after el quemado wins, he'll probably kill udo. The real scene after the end of the game is confused and dreamlike and maybe the highpoint of UFOs growing madness

. Thematically way far up bolano alley. He's obsessed with evil and with borders and apparently in real life with board games which is funny to imagine. In his other books the obsession with obscure writers is just replaced by him being a huge board game nerd. His characters always have weird gestures and seem to have more knowledge than they should but less than is sometimes implied. They all know something the trader and the narrotor don't but they won't always say exactly what it is and they might be wrong about it ultimately. Every scene with Charly or the wolf and the lamb I was struck by how creepy he makes the ugly darkness in your average regular jamokes. A lot of his books set up these poles where he demonstrates the things he thinks are important (writing, games, I'm thinking of mesmerism and spirituality in monsieur pain) aren't inherently "good". If they're powerful for good they can be powerful for evil too.

manoncremers's review against another edition

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2.0

Required reading for my Spanish Literature class: while Amuleto was entertaining and opened up debate surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, The Third Reich left much to be desired. I did like how the subtlety of the game blurred the lines between reality and fiction and how that affected our main character. However, much is to be desired and it certainly didn't reach its full potential. It would have been a bit better if the first half of the book didn't just let the reader wander around, waiting for something to happen.

squidjum's review against another edition

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3.0

It took me quite a while to get into the story, but I was enjoying it by the end.

aller23's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.0

yardtulpa's review against another edition

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5.0

Perfect for a beach-side vacation...

pearloz's review against another edition

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4.0

Solid writing for a barely-there plot. In the end it felt like an exercise but, again, the writing was so good, it made up for that. Plus the intricacies of the gaming (and his life--also a game he's losing!) were very interesting.

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