A review by ethorwitz
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
4.0
This book is deceptively short. It is a series of biographies, some of them as short as one or two pages, of poets and authors who have adopted either antisemitic or right wing ideologies. The depths of the character's lives and the extent of the underground fascist literary scene implied by these chunks of text would require a sprawling epic to accurately convey if this were a standard novel. But this format allows Bolaño to compress a large amount of content into little pieces.
I've always been a big fan of fake nonfiction, so this would have gotten a good review from me even if it were a series of invented biographies of pastry chefs or fly fishermen. But instead this book is populated by monsters. These subjects all share shades of thoroughly unpleasant, chillingly psychotic, or pitiably deluded.
I'm a lefty and Bolaño is a lefty so it would be a cheap interaction for him to write and me to read something that just makes fun of the other side. But after a while it becomes clear that this isn't a book about ideology or Nazism at all. This book is about alienation. Most of the subjects are pushed further and further down the deep end by the opprobrium of the literary establishment and their peers. They end their lives wasting away of disease or drink somewhere, alone and forgotten. It is clear that these characters could easily be Bolaño or one of his real-life friends.
I've always been a big fan of fake nonfiction, so this would have gotten a good review from me even if it were a series of invented biographies of pastry chefs or fly fishermen. But instead this book is populated by monsters. These subjects all share shades of thoroughly unpleasant, chillingly psychotic, or pitiably deluded.
I'm a lefty and Bolaño is a lefty so it would be a cheap interaction for him to write and me to read something that just makes fun of the other side. But after a while it becomes clear that this isn't a book about ideology or Nazism at all. This book is about alienation. Most of the subjects are pushed further and further down the deep end by the opprobrium of the literary establishment and their peers. They end their lives wasting away of disease or drink somewhere, alone and forgotten. It is clear that these characters could easily be Bolaño or one of his real-life friends.