The Third Reich

August 22, 2011
Many hallmarks of Bolaño’s work are present in this novel, written in 1989 and found among his papers after his death in 2003. Presented in diary-like entries over a two-month span late in an unspecified year after WWII, the book follows the unstable Udo Berger, a man who veers between love and hate and is barely able to control his violent impulses. Udo has come from Stuttgart with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, to the Costa Brava in Spain where he vacationed a decade before. A self-absorbed, egotistical autodidact war game champion, Udo obsessively plays a strategy game called the Third Reich while Ingeborg enjoys the beach with Charly and Hanna, another German couple they’ve met, and three local characters: the Wolf, the Lamb, and a badly burned beach worker called El Quemado. Charly goes for a swim and disappears, and Udo makes advances on the hotel manager, an older woman who calls his game “obscene... horrible... tasteless.” Udo soon lures El Quemado to play and events turn feverish and surreal; the novice defeats Udo, symbolically repeating the Nazis’ downfall. Infused with unease and menace, deliberately ambiguous about reality vs. perception, Bolaño’s novel is a psychological thriller without a convincing payoff. Its atmosphere, however, clearly prefigures the preoccupations of the author’s later masterpieces.

October 15, 2011
From the acclaimed Chilean novelist (1953–2003), a recently discovered 1989 novel; this enigmatic look at power though the prism of war games is on a smaller scale than the two sprawling works that secured his reputation: The Savage Detectives (2007) and 2666 (2008). Udo Berger and his girlfriend Ingeborg, Germans in their 20s, arrive on Spain's Costa Brava for their vacation. Life's never been better, Udo confides in one of the diary entries that comprise the novel. War games are Udo's passion, and he's the German champion, a brilliant strategist moving armies across the board; he's brought with him a World War II game, the eponymous Third Reich. (Udo's no Nazi, despite his nostalgic love for German generals.) He and Ingeborg make friends with another German couple, Charly and Hanna; they go drinking and clubbing together. Charly is an aggressive boor who drowns while windsurfing, and a puzzling distraction from the core of the novel: the game and two unlikely opponents. Hanna and Ingeborg return to Germany; Udo has other fish to fry. He remains behind ostensibly to identify Charly's body when it washes up (it does). But he also wants to romance the attractive hotel owner, and more importantly pursue his obsession with a mysterious, badly scarred guy known as El Quemado (the Burn Victim), who owns a pedal-boat business and sleeps on the beach. No one is sure of his background; South America? There's even a suggestion he's the re-incarnation of an Incan warrior. At first Udo idealizes him as a Noble Savage, but he's plenty smart, a poetry lover. Udo teaches him the game; El Quemado catches on fast. Power shifts from the cocksure Udo to his humble opponent as the German crumbles, on the board and off. It's an allegory, yes, but Bolaño casts around uncertainly for the best way to frame it, and juggles various endings. A sluggish novel that gives few indications of the extraordinary work to come.

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July 1, 2011

Yes, another novel from the Latin American sensation who broke out with The Savage Detectives and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2666. Bolano always coats his sociopolitical understanding with a wild imagination, but I find his inventions here particularly intriguing. Vacationing on Spain's Costa Brava with his girlfriend, German war-games champion Udo Berger meets German couple Charly and Hanna, who have ingratiated themselves with locals who include El Quemado ("the Burnt One"). When Charly disappears, Udo returns home, holes up in a hotel, and begins a savage round of his favorite war-strategy game, the Third Reich, with El Quemado. Bolano is always fresh, and all his gorgeousness should glint through in this shorter, more concentrated work. Buy wherever you have smart readers.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2011
The Bolao renaissance is upon us, and adding fuel to the fire of intense global readership is this recently translated novel written in 1989 and discovered in the Chilean author's papers after his death at 50. If you believe yourself immune or, at least, accustomed to Bolao's writerly charms, you stand to be corrected by this mesmerizing tale. A dark, brooding, even threatening atmosphere seems to surround a young German couple, Udo and Ingeborg, during their stay in a Spanish resort town. The first of a series of fateful events happens when they meet another couple of their age and nationality. Udo is an expert at board games (remember, this novel was written in the 1980s, before the supremacy of video games), and while he and a bizarre local habitu' of the beach entangle in protracted combat over a board game called the Third Reich, one of Udo and Ingeborg's new friends disappears, presumably drowned. Adding further drama, Udo veers unadvisedly close to an affair with the older hotel manager, whom he remembers from years back, when his parents brought him to this same resort. A piercing, even lovely writing style, typical for Bolao, belies the kind of graphic, earthy themes he absorbinglyalbeit shockinglycontinued to develop over the course of his career, including the urge for violent revenge for past wrongs and the ineffectualness of sex to mask emotional dysfunction. Bolao is at once easy and difficult to read, which explains his fascination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)