Product Description

A "biographical dictionary" gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7). .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171043 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780811217941
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, February 2008: As with the emergence of W.G. Sebald into English a decade ago, the most exciting new writer to watch is one we're just catching up with: the late Roberto Bolaño, whose ground-breaking fiction defined a generation of Spanish-speaking literature. In between last year's thrillingly meandering epic, The Savage Detectives, and the upcoming alleged masterwork, 2666, comes a small and strange book (but no stranger than the rest), Nazi Literature in the Americas. Presented as a biographical encyclopedia of right-wing writers in North and South America, these short, invented lives are full of the stuff of minor literary scenes and forgotten books, with delusion and creation mixed in equal fashion. Funny, melancholy, surprisingly tender, and--once in a while--erupting into fury, Bolaño spins out tale after tale with the joy of sheer invention and the burden of inescapable history. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
The title chosen by Bolaño (1953–2003) for this slim, fake encyclopedia is not wholly tongue-in-cheek: given the very real presence of former (and not-so-former) Nazis in Latin America following WWII, this book, despite being fiction, still had j'accuse-like power when first published in 1996. The poets described herein, though invented, seem—even at their most absurd—plausible, which is the secret to this sly book's devastating effect. And as one proceeds from an entry on Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce (In high spirits, Edelmira asked for the Führer's advice: which would be the most appropriate school for her sons?) to one on Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute), it becomes clear that there is a single witness to all of these terrible figures, one who has spent time in one of Pinochet's prisons and is bent on coolly totting up the crimes of fascism's literary perpetrators. Some readers will recognize figures and episodes from Bolaño's other books (including The Savage Detectives and Distant Star). The wild inventiveness of Bolaño's evocations places them squarely in the realm of Borges—another writer who draws enormous power from the movement between the fictive and the real. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Let me admit, straight off, that any reviewer might feel hesitant before recommending a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas. At the checkout, the bookstore clerk will almost certainly look twice at the title -- and then avoid looking at you. Certainly, it would be politic to leave the dust jacket at home if you like to read on the subway; and even then, you might want to invest in one of those anonymous wrap-around opaque covers. When friends casually ask the title of the book you're carrying, you'll want to have an explanation prepared in advance.

Why? Because Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas very much deserves reading: It is imaginative, full of a love for literature, and, unlikely as it may seem, exceptionally entertaining. The book purports to be a biographical dictionary gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. While several meet violent ends, most are simply deluded sentimentalists and frustrated litterateurs. They come from all the Latin American countries, but at least a half-dozen are citizens of these United States, including the fanatical preacher Rory Long, the poet and football player Jim O'Bannon, the science fiction writer J.M.S. Hill and the founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, Thomas R. Murchison, alias The Texan.

Obviously, Bolaño -- a supporter of Chilean President Salvador Allende and a onetime Trotskyite -- is playing a tricky game, carefully balancing mockery and black humor against our natural sense of revulsion. Only occasionally does he remind us of the nightmarish horror of Hitler's Reich and Franco's Spain, or of the atrocities perpetrated by generalissimos and dictators. Bolaño's real satirical point seems to be: Look! These imaginary right-wing zealots -- with their petty rivalries and ludicrous movements, their crazed manifestos and underground periodicals -- are fundamentally not very different from the real writers and publishers of the contemporary literary scene. They want what all artists want: for the world to honor and reward their vision, their aesthetic integrity.

The highly experimental poet Willy Schürholz "had what it takes to fail spectacularly," but ends up a cultural sensation when he traces the outlines of an ideal concentration camp in the desert. What an outraged establishment may call senseless violence, the more sympathetic regard as performance art. Even the most callous murderer in this book views himself as essentially a conceptual artist, working with the ephemeral material of human lives.

Bolaño's tone -- like that of Swift in "A Modest Proposal" -- is non-judgmental and scholarly throughout, no matter how ludicrous or horrible his characters' views and actions. Here is the opening of a short entry for Silvio Salvático (Buenos Aires, 1901 -- Buenos Aires, 1994), a neat litany of one offensive item after another:

"As a young man Salvático advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artists' incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.

"He was a soccer player and a Futurist."

Most of these brief lives run from two to six pages, though the account of "the infamous Ramírez Hoffman" -- airman, assassin and aesthete -- is almost a short story (and was later expanded into the short novel Distant Star). Along with his relatively full accounts of the fanatical elite, Bolaño also includes a series of appendices, briefly describing some of the lesser cranks, listing various (imaginary) right-wing publishing houses, magazines and organizations -- The Wounded Eagle, Iron Heart, The Church of the True Martyrs of North America -- and providing a bibliography of the various authors' novels, memoirs and poetry collections. The titles alone show Bolaño's sure touch for pastiche: Fields of Honor, The Storm and the Youths, The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe, Warriors of the South, The Best Poems of Jim O'Bannon, Apocalypse in Force City, and -- my favorite -- Cower, Hounds!

Such literary ingenuity from a Latin American author, if not the political edginess, inevitably recalls Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño, we know, revered the Argentine fabulist, and it seems pretty clear that the model for Nazi Literature in the Americas is that master's own portrait gallery of criminals and scoundrels, A Universal History of Infamy. Yet I suspect another influence too: the subgenre of science fiction called alternate history. At one point, Bolaño casually mentions Norman Spinrad, who is best known for The Iron Dream, a devastating satire of the militaristic elements in the fiction of Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) and Robert A. Heinlein. Spinrad depicts Adolf Hitler as a thwarted politician who becomes a pulp science fiction author and works out his Aryan daydreams in sword-and-sorcery novels like "Lord of the Swastika" -- the text of which Spinrad provides, with commentary. More than one fascist writer in Bolaño's book composes what are essentially heroic fantasies, (e.g. the Force-City chronicles of Gustavo Borda). The poet Pedro González Carrera even sings the praises of men in armor, "Merovingians from another planet."

One of the pleasures of Bolaño lies in his subtle humor: He'll mention "an irreproachable style, worthy of Sholokhov" -- and expect the reader to recognize the sarcasm. Irma Carrasco's sonnets are described as "fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to sixteenth-century Spain." Actual writers repeatedly interact with imaginary ones. Many leading figures of Latin American literature -- Adolfo Bioy Casares, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Ernesto Sabato and Osman Lins, among others -- are regularly vilified. Juan Mendiluce Thompson scornfully describes Borges's stories as "parodies of parodies," adding that his "lifeless characters were derived from worn-out traditions of English and French literature, clearly in decline, 'repeating the same old plots ad nauseam.' " The joke here, of course, is that Borges's stories are precisely these things. In a way.

Bolaño, who died in 2003 from liver disease at the age of 50, has been acclaimed as the most exciting Latin American writer since the great days of the Boom. Last year, his novel The Savage Detectives received extensive review coverage and was compared in importance to One Hundred Years of Solitude (an irony that might have amused Bolaño, who couldn't stand Gabriel García Márquez). That long novel recreates the literary and artistic scene in Mexico City during the 1970s and beyond, chronicling the youthful adventures of several young poets (modeled after the author and his friends). Its 400-page middle section is a kind of dossier made up of testimonies from 38 people -- a collage structure not dissimilar to that of Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Next year Farrar Straus Giroux promises a translation of Bolaño's magnum opus 2666, while New Directions will be publishing seven more of his earlier books. This is a lot of attention for a dead writer, born in Chile, long resident in Mexico and buried in Spain. But Roberto Bolaño is worth discovering, worth reading -- and even worth all the trouble of having to explain why it is that you are toting around a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Neo-Nazism in the Americas
To preface: As we all know, Roberto Bolano passed away in 2003. Like many in America, New Directions let us in on the secret with "By Night In Chile" and "Distant Star" (which is actually an elaboration of the final story in "Nazi Literature in the Americas"). Next came "Last Evenings on Earth" and "Amulet" last year. "The Savage Detectives" came out via Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year as well and, his masterpiece, "2666" is on its way. If you haven't read any of these, it doesn't matter what order, just read any and all.

"Nazi Literature in the Americas" reads like a history (but not in a bad way). Bolano creates dozens of personalities, each with intricite details and interesting character traits that even a third-party (Bolano) can convey gently. Each character exists throughout North and South America in the twentieth-century, some not dying until 2040 (which Bolano uses to hint that these people still exist into the later twenty-first century).

As the title suggests, each character is tied, in Bolano fashion, to fascist literary movements in their respective time period and country. Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, the first chronicled in the novel, is a bourgeois Argentine who met Hitler in the 1930's and was sympathetic to the cause ever since. Max Mirebalais, is a poor Haitian who steals from other European poets and crafts "many masks," which he uses to create an ideology of hate. Argentino Schiaffino is a thug from Buenos Aires who loves soccer and violence and believes in the heirarchy of races and is on the run most of his life for murder.

One gets the point. The problem is, this doesn't half convey the textual density and complexity of the work. The way the characters interact within each others stories, how one influences the other, etc. The depth that Bolano went through to create this world is astonishing (as his epilogue with a glossary of names, places, publishers, books, and miniture biographies of minor characters in the stories).

The beauty, in the end, is that each is not a celebrate of Hitler or Aryan supremacy. Most are misguided and some are playing games even with themselves. The real world is ever present in Bolanos world and the presence of these characters moving, most of the time at odds with the real world, is fascinating. The trick is that each characters intolerance is shown in different ways - not directed at Hitler or other fascist leaders, but in the culture of fascism that still exists today - even as it did in 1996 when this novel was published.

I cannot recommend this more highly. I was anticipating it greatly and I was not let down. The only problem for avid readers of Bolano, is the final chapter, "The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman" is the shortened version of his previous novel "Distant Star," which he does allude to at the beginning of that work. But taken separately, the shortened version does leave much to be desired - which one fulfills with "Distant Star." It is also different because, while famous for his first person narration, "Ramirez Hoffman" is the only instance that Bolano appears in this novel, so take what one can from it.

If you love this, don't worry - New Directions has many more novels coming. This will surely tide fans down until FSG releases Bolano's 1,200+ page masterpiece "2666" sometime, hopefully, next year. Enjoy.

Almost As Strange A The Truth
When I approach a satirical work I follow a simple rubric: does it make me laugh. The honest belly laugh is, for me, the "scathe" in scathing satire. There is not a single chapter in Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in America" that failed to elicit howls of laughter sometimes accompanied by tears. Bolano presents the reader with a compendium of fictional biographies of non-existent writers. With each entry one gets the impression that he has taken Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil" seriously. Each author is presented in an uncritical and dead-pan manner which forces the reader to ferret out the "evil" in the context of his/her "banal" biographical narrative. Not a single "author" in "Nazi Literature" approaches anything like genius. Even those who live rather colorful lives write in rather turgid prose and aimless fiction that produces a sort of stupor in their readership. This, I think is the key to understanding what Bolano is really up to. He may have had Goya's famous etching in mind:"El sueno de la razon produce monstruos" (the sleep of reason brings forth monsters).

Interesting and Enjoyable
An unusual and enjoyable book apparently inspired by some of the work of Borges. Nazi... is a pseudohistory of fictitious literary figures of the Western Hemisphere, mainly from Latin America, who fall under the general umbrella of Fascism or far right views. Something of a parody of scholarly work, the book is a series of sketches of each fictitious figure of varying length, often overlapping with some of the other fictitious figures. The book concludes with a fake bibliography and listing of more minor figures. Bolano's creativity is impressive. Wildly romantic upper class Argentinean female poets, lower class Argentine soccer hooligans, Chilean military officers, American white supremacist criminals, and bizarre loners of all nationalities are depicted. I suspect this book has a number of references apparent only to people with a good knowledge of Latin American literature.

This is more than a clever work of imagination. Nor is it merely a pastiche-imitation of Borges. Bolano's apparent themes of frustrated passion, and the diversion of passion into brutal violence are his own. While this is hardly a major work of literature, I'm impressed with Bolano's clear, mordant, and sometimes surprising prose.