s.penkevich's Reviews > Nazi Literature in the Americas

‘A novel about order and disorder, justice and injustice, God and the Void.’

In the final narrative of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas—a literary joke that is executed with such deadpan precision it becomes a transcendent work of brilliance—we read the life story of Ramírez Hoffman, member of the Chilean Air Force, poet and cold-blooded murderer of the Pinochet regime. Later expanded into the novella, Distant Star, this section includes a scene where Hoffman presents a private art exhibit consisting of countless photos of the women he tortured and murdered. It is clearly an act of evil and an indication that art has moral boundaries not to be crossed lest you become evil. However, if one were to find these photos and display the same exhibit in, say, a Human Rights museum, as a overwhelming warning against evil, would the framing remove the art from proximity of being evil and instead turn the same elements into an aesthetic battering ram against evil? This is precisely what Bolaño has done with Nazi Literature in the Americas, an encyclopedia chronicling the lives and works of fascist artists and the literary outlets that gave them a platform. The joke is, however, that none of them are real yet Bolaño never breaks character and presents the entire book in deadpan seriousness as if it were a highly researched academic work. While 20 pages in it may seem like beating a dead horse of a joke, but as life upon life pile up in this compilation his execution and framing break through the doors of mere playfulness into artistic genius and genuine literary might.

Owing obvious influences in Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Rodolfo Wilcock—Bolaño openly admits in an interview with Spanish literary journal Turia to being influenced by A Universal History of Iniquity and The Temple of Iconoclasts—Nazi Literature is a conjuring of literary oddities, madmen and monsters (and one character that is referential to Fernando Pessoa through the use of many heteronyms) that reveal the dark underbelly of an artform that aims to shape public opinion and convey ideologies. ‘When I’m talking about Nazi writers in the Americas,’ Bolaño says in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, ‘in reality I’m talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general.’ While neither celebrating or openly mocking these writers (though the occasionally humor in this impressively consistent tongue-in-cheek novel allows you to assume the latter), Bolaño reminds us that evil lurks in every corner and just because an author can write a good story doesn’t mean their ideology or personhood is worth enabling.

This book is an excellent microcosm of the Bolaño cannon as a whole, being a hotbed of indicators to his penchant towards in-literary-universe expansion, metarepresentation of novels within novels, and exploration of themes such as the pull of proximity to power and the shadowy evils residing in human nature. Here you will find the names of fake novels and literary journals that will show up in other Bolaño novels as well as characters that make appearances elsewhere, such as the Romanian General Eugenio Entruscu who appears here in the Epilogue for Monsters catalogue of secondary figures as well as crosses paths with Benno von Archimboldi in 2666, the PI Romero who appears in The Savage Detectives and Distant Star along with, most notably, Ramírez Hoffman.

Hoffman appears in Distant Star under the name Alberto Ruiz-Tagle/Wieder, which is a larger aspect of Bolaño’s expansion technique that his English translator, Chris Andrews discusses at length in his book Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe. The name change on one hand represents how Hoffman/Ruiz-Tagle was an enigmatic character (‘in fact, he had always been an absent figure’ -- Distant Star) going under many aliases (his section in Nazi Literature is narrated by Bolaño himself whereas in Distant Star it is filtered through the memories of Arturo B, who, as the authors in-novels alter-ego interacting with the author-himself, forms sort of a surreal meta extravaganza) but also how Bolaño tends to blur the lines of his own fiction as a way of exploding and expanding it. This is similarly done in the story Prefiguration of Lalo Cura in The Return, which gives an alternate backstory to the one presented of Lalo Cura in 2666 or how the story of Bolaño’s own father differs significantly in Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas from anything else he ever wrote about him (usually a boxer). While Bolaño has claimed in interviews and essays that all of his work exists in a singular literary universe, evidence shows this statement is facetious but likely as a further element to his unique style of self-mythologizing and mythmaking that is so central to his work. There is a very distinct Bolaño flair to his self-referential works that separate it from autofiction or purely fictional narratives.

The sheer volume of fictional books and poems that appear in this novel are fascinating and certainly indicative of his influence in Borges. There is a sort of double-distancing, as Andrews puts it, in the way that these stories are surveyed much in the way literary joker Borges would essentially write reviews of fake novels, ‘accessible only through the filter of a summary.’ Bolaño is able to convey the idea of what registers as a fully-fledged novel through a brief synopsis that discards any need for particulars, assuring you the story works as intended. Borges himself joked about why write a novel when you can just make the same point in a single sentence about a novel that doesn’t even need to exist, or as he writes in The Garden of Forking Paths ‘the better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.’ These sorts of short assessments of fake novels appear in many of his works, often a brief aside about a sci-fi novel a character has written to further investigate some moral or existential perspective on life.

What is interesting is that many of the characters contained in this volume don’t appear to be very successful. These episodic lives often end in tragedy and a few short books that don’t receive many sales. Yet, by collecting them, it appears that their life left an impact on the movement. This is particularly fascinating as Bolaño rarely tells you if the books they wrote were good or not, but usually what the critics thought or if public opinion drove up sales, alluding to the idea that our established literary canons are one of popularity and not necessarily quality. A frequent theme in his work is the duality of literature as if it were the most important and life-affirming aspect to be found in life while also lampooning it as overwrought and unimportant. He frequently pokes fun at canonization as a temporary privilege, such as the prophecy in Amulet references authors such as Marcel Proust disappearing from public knowledge in the near future. Whether the lives collected here matter or not is irrelevant.

I enjoyed buddy reading this book with Kenny, and it is certainly a masterful part of the Bolaño canon. He reminds us that evil is everywhere, even in art, and shows characters that are very human yet double as an example of evil as a force of nature (particularly Hoffman). The fictional characters interact with several real figures and works, which boosts the impression that this could be real while also being an avenue for the author to name-drop all his favorites and show off his enviable grasp of world literature. I have yet to read anything, even his posthumously published scene sketches, that have not left an impact on me or charmed me. Certainly one of my favorite authors and this book is such a joy because you can feel his excitement to emulate and surpass his own literary heroes in creating this work. Like Hoffman’s photographs, this book collects moments and members of evil and displays them to remind us what vileness may lurk in any corner.

4/5