A review by arilaurel
The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

5.0

This was a friend recommendation who told me to read The Third Reich if I was curious about Bolaño because it was his shortest novel, and many of his other works are like 500-600 pages. I was an English major but I'm still intimidated by books with many pages. It's not an uncommon story. That being said, this book was a lot of fun. The narrator, Udo Berger is a typical gamer. Wonderfully obtuse and entitled. A loser. I've come to love reading feckless narrators. The story is one of trying to hold on to rational thought while getting pulled into impulse and dream logic. I sometimes found myself laughing because something was funny, but I also laughed sometimes because I was uncomfortable and didn't know how to respond otherwise. This story perfectly walks the line between funny and foreboding with its characters. A German visiting Spain, it puts Udo (and you the reader) in that situation of hanging out with people that you'd never spend time with in your home country, but by consequence of being abroad at the same time, you find yourself spending many moments together. The game passages are wild. They're so intense and specific, and even from the 80s, the obsessiveness of modern gamer culture as I know it is perfectly captured. I thought while reading that Bolaño was describing a fictional game, but found out later that Third Reich is a real board game, which puts those passages in a different light, as now all those sentences have meaning that is tied to gamer culture in this universe (which I find funny but also kind of horrifying).