"The Third Reich" by Roberto Bolano (2011)

"Today's events are still confused, but I'll try to set them down in orderly fashion so that I can perhaps discover in them something that has thus far eluded me, a difficult and possibly useless task, since there's no remedy for what's happened and little point in nurturing false hopes.  But I have to do something to pass the time."

Roberto Bolano has been discussed here before.  I reviewed 2666 nine (!) years ago, and sometime after that I read The Savage Detectives.  I like some of his work, and he's certainly influential, but I can't say he's my favorite Central/South American author.

I'm happy to say that The Third Reich is a lot easier going than the two other Bolano novels discussed here.  It was written in 1989, about ten years before either 2666 and The Savage Detectives, and it offers a more restrained version of the same author, someone much more focused on telling a good story.  Unpublished during Bolano's lifetime, The manuscript for The Third Reich was discovered among his papers after his death.  It dates back to a period in his career when he was known more as a poet.

The Third Reich is centered around a celebrated player of a war strategy game vacationing in Spain, where he plans on writing a groundbreaking article detailing a new strategy he's invented.  Along for the ride is his girlfriend and two German friends staying at another hotel, and as the player struggles with writer's block he bumps into several sinister local characters, chief among them the enigmatic El Quemado, a disfigured man tending paddle boats on a nearby beach.

The Third Reich reminded me a lot of Hermann Hesse, an author I'm sure Bolano was familiar with.  Hesse's The Glass Bead Game shares with The Third Reich a game which is never fully explained to the reader, and moreover a game which serves a symbolic function in the story.

Thankfully -- in my case at least -- that's where the similarities between The Glass Bead Game and The Third Reich end.  The Glass Bead Game bored me to tears when I read it in high school, and I'm happy to say that The Third Reich was much easier going.  It might flub the ending (knowing Bolano, I was expecting something far more horrific), but it remains engaging throughout.  Overall it's very "German-by-way-of translation," and this take on German themes by a Spanish-speaking writer has, I think, enough novelty to recommend it.

Related Entries:

"The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace (2011)

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens (2018)

"Circe" by Madeline Miller (2018)

"The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller (2012)