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| Nazi Literature in the Americas | 
| Author: Roberto Bolano
Creator: Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $14.49
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 33802
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 280
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 0811217051
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780811217057
ASIN: 0811217051
Publication Date: February 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081121221340T
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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 Bolano, 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, Bolano spins out tale after tale with the joy of sheer invention and the burden of inescapable history. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature in our hemisphere by Roberto Bolano: "his generation's premier Latin-American writer" (The New York Times).
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Composed of short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the USA, Nazi Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers' works, cross references, a bibliography, and also an epilogue ("For Monsters"). All the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as "Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment," "Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Individuals," and "North American Poets."
Brisk and pseudo-academic, Nazi Literature in the Americas delicately balances irony and pathos. Bolano does not simply use his writers for target practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and disquieting sui generis novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund literary imaginations of our time.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Almost As Strange A The Truth May 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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).
Eerily Fascinating Science Fiction (?) March 27, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Is it science fiction? Although "Nazi Literature In The Americas" was first published in Spanish in 1996, some of his fictional Nazi sympathizers live until years like 2016. This is one of the reader's first clues that something really strange is going on here. This book is structured like a small encyclopedia, with each entry describing an imaginary poet, novelist, or journalist who supposedly supported extremist politics. They come from both North and South America. The Latin American fascists seem quite authentic, and it is impressive that Bolano gets right most of his USA references for his Yankee writers. The author's method is to mingle historical fact and wild speculation to create a portrait and criticism of 20th century literature that is both outrageous and weirdly convincing. His method can be clearly seen in the brief entry in the "Epilogue For Monsters" for the fictional character Otto Haushofer:
"1871--Berlin, 1945. Nazi Philosopher. Godfather of Luz Mendiluce and father of various harebrained theories: hollow earth, solid universe, original civilizations, the interplanetary Aryan tribe. He committed suicide after being raped by three drunk Uzbek soldiers."
There was, in fact, a family of German philosophers named Haushofer who supported the Nazis (and paid dearly for it.) But Bolano's fictional twist is shockingly funny and suddenly chilling. It's the tone he maintains throughout this short book. He plays it with an utterly straight face but at times you can see Bolano struggling not to burst out in dark laughter. At one point he mentions in passing the science fiction writer Norman Spinrad, and it's like a wink at the reader. Spinrad wrote a great science-fiction novel titled The Iron Dream in which he postulates an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler was an acclaimed Golden Age sci-fi writer instead of the scourge of the 20th century. And what Bolano does here is quite as audacious: he gives his Nazis souls, and makes them human instead of mere caricatures. Indeed, many of them are artists; which makes them all the more more appalling. Some of the "stories" (if you want to call them that) are perhaps too short and elliptical to have as much impact as you would like. But others hit the bullseye very squarely. My appetite is now whetted for Bolano's big books: The Savage Detectives: A Novel and his supposed masterpiece 2666: A Novel, which is scheduled for publication in English this year.
 Disappointing March 25, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I appreciate the real creativity that went into conceiving this novel, but found it too dry and lacking in excitement. Contrary to my expectations, the book is comprised of brief pseudo-autobigraphical vignettes that border on the Woody Allen-ish bizarre. Provides us with no real understanding of extremist philosphy or the character of its adherents.
Interesting and Enjoyable March 15, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Neo-Nazism in the Americas February 25, 2008
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
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.
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