The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño (A Review by Joseph Michael Owens)

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

$14.95/288 pgs

I made a mistake in writing this review, or, perhaps more specifically, before writing this review: I read a couple reviews online. I did it on a whim and it was only because I was rating it on Goodreads (5 stars) and moving it to my “read” shelf. I think it was more out of surprise than anything else that I read a few of the reviews in the first place—surprise because more than a couple of them were less than favorable.

Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is tabbed as “a stunning exploration of memory and violence.” Whether or not this is the first of Bolaño’s books the uninitiated should read is debatable. I’ve read The Savage Detectives and half of 2666, so I more or less knew what I was getting into with The Third Reich. On one hand, The Third Reich is a fantastic illustration of Bolaño settling into the voice that would make The Savage Detectives and 2666 so fantastic and celebrated. On the other hand, Bolaño probably did not publish this manuscript during his lifetime for a reason. One reason could be that it simply wasn’t finished.

Much like another2011 posthumous release—David Foster Wallace’s “unfinished novel”The Pale King—readers need to understand what they are getting into when they crack this book open. Let me make it clear that I think the book, as it stands in its current form, is still fantastic all on its own. However, it is definitely not The Savage Detectives or 2666. It doesn’t have the bulk to build up an epic head of steam like those other two novels do. Irrespective of that detail, I took a great deal of pleasure in seeing where the prose and the narrative go above and beyond the rest of the bookin flourishes of a little extra brilliance and cleverness that would ultimately come to define Bolaño’s later novels.

Calling the The Third Reich an“exploration of memory and violence seems appropriate” enough.  Udo Berger is the German national champion of “The Third Reich,” a tactical WWII-themed board game he’s completely obsessed with. Even while on vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, at a lush Spanish resort, Udo is unable to tear himself away from a game he’s begun with El Quemado (ominously known as “The Burn Victim”), a potentially dangerous man who rents pedal boats to tourists on the resort’s beach. Right away, Udo and Ingeborg meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a pair of locals called the Wolf and the Lamb. One night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo’s seemingly well-ordered life is thrown totallly into upheaval.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” [Udo] confesses. “But my face remains unchanged. And my pulse is steady. I scarcely move a muscle, though inside I’m falling apart.”

End plot synopsis.

For readers familiar with Bolaño’s work, this plot seems, for all intents and purposes, prototypical. Bolaño became a master of psychologically stringing his readers along and The Third Reich is no exception. Bolaño balances the book’s narrative on tightrope strung, nearly unwavering, between remembered events and events occurring in the narrative in real time. However, he blurs the two sides together in the last few pages as the novel slowly dissolves from realism into a horrifying lucid dream sequence. The ending is simultaneously abstruse and troubling (but in a trulyfantastic and memorable sort of way).

*

Joseph Michael Owens has written for various publications including Specter Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review and InDigest Magazine. His short collection, Shenanigans! will be released in 2012 by Grey Sparrow Press. Joe lives in Omaha with four dogs and one wife.