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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
Two stars in the goodreads sense. It was okay but not a great starting point. I'll review in more detail when I've had a chance to process it
Chiara ha detto tutto quello che c'era da dire su questo libro. Piu infamia che lode per me...
Chiara rated it 3 of 5 stars
Il limite di questo libro consiste nel generare false aspettative. Il suo punto di forza risiede nel riuscire a mantenere alta l'attenzione proprio in virtù di queste false aspettative. Dal primo al penultimo capitolo, si ha l'impressione di vivere una lunga quiete prima della tempesta, solo che la tempesta non arriva mai, se non nei recessi della mente dei protagonisti e del lettore che segue questo gruppo di persone abbastanza disgraziatamente assortito. E, alla fine, si viene sfiorati da un dubbio amletico: quello che abbiamo appena letto è davvero un libro poco riuscito, oppure è un libro riuscitissimo nella sua capacità di riprodurre l'umana speranza - regolarmente tradita - di essere sorpresi, travolti dagli eventi, investiti da forze capaci di strapparci alla normalità? Nel dubbio, tre stelle. Senza infamia né lode.
Chiara rated it 3 of 5 stars
Il limite di questo libro consiste nel generare false aspettative. Il suo punto di forza risiede nel riuscire a mantenere alta l'attenzione proprio in virtù di queste false aspettative. Dal primo al penultimo capitolo, si ha l'impressione di vivere una lunga quiete prima della tempesta, solo che la tempesta non arriva mai, se non nei recessi della mente dei protagonisti e del lettore che segue questo gruppo di persone abbastanza disgraziatamente assortito. E, alla fine, si viene sfiorati da un dubbio amletico: quello che abbiamo appena letto è davvero un libro poco riuscito, oppure è un libro riuscitissimo nella sua capacità di riprodurre l'umana speranza - regolarmente tradita - di essere sorpresi, travolti dagli eventi, investiti da forze capaci di strapparci alla normalità? Nel dubbio, tre stelle. Senza infamia né lode.
I almost forgot to list this on here. I'm a big Bolaño fan, though almost always bored or frustrated through large parts of his novels. This was no exception, though this one did have a pace and plot that kept up. The trouble is that it sets up this metaphor or allegory or something--right there in the title--that's too huge to ever really pay off in the set-up given to it. Perhaps there's something interesting and trenchant being said with that, but it eluded me on the whole. I can't really fault Bolaño too much as this is a posthumous work found in his papers, never published by him. I've written a lot of crap I haven't published too...
Anyway, the set-up is intriguing, and above a lot of things I really enjoy Bolaño's choices in interesting characters. The novel centers on a vacationing German man who enjoys big Axis & Allies/Risk-type games. He is in Spain on vacation and trying to write an essay about a game called the Third Reich while away. While in Spain, he befriends a man who keeps rental boats by the water and has burns on his skin and face (that part definitely stuck out). He becomes kind of enthralled by this place and his angst to finish the essay about the game, and starts looping in this boatkeeper and other colorful characters.
I was watching the new Twin Peaks season while reading this, which may have had something to do with why I read this as more particularly Lynchian than other Bolaño books. There are physical deformities, weird mysteries, intriguing landscapes, people going mad over trivial stuff, and of course scenes of violence. I guess it's nothing new to compare Lynch and Bolaño, but it was interesting to read what felt almost like an imitation of Bolaño imitating Lynch. But, in terms of payoff, action, and structure, the book was a little more like the second season of Twin Peaks rather than the first.
I really appreciate the way that Bolaño puts huge questions of evil and the weight of history alongside seemingly trivial things like poetry or essays about board games. There is a very admirable vision there. This was perhaps a sort of half-baked version of that vision, but you could still sense it there.
Anyway, the set-up is intriguing, and above a lot of things I really enjoy Bolaño's choices in interesting characters. The novel centers on a vacationing German man who enjoys big Axis & Allies/Risk-type games. He is in Spain on vacation and trying to write an essay about a game called the Third Reich while away. While in Spain, he befriends a man who keeps rental boats by the water and has burns on his skin and face (that part definitely stuck out). He becomes kind of enthralled by this place and his angst to finish the essay about the game, and starts looping in this boatkeeper and other colorful characters.
I was watching the new Twin Peaks season while reading this, which may have had something to do with why I read this as more particularly Lynchian than other Bolaño books. There are physical deformities, weird mysteries, intriguing landscapes, people going mad over trivial stuff, and of course scenes of violence. I guess it's nothing new to compare Lynch and Bolaño, but it was interesting to read what felt almost like an imitation of Bolaño imitating Lynch. But, in terms of payoff, action, and structure, the book was a little more like the second season of Twin Peaks rather than the first.
I really appreciate the way that Bolaño puts huge questions of evil and the weight of history alongside seemingly trivial things like poetry or essays about board games. There is a very admirable vision there. This was perhaps a sort of half-baked version of that vision, but you could still sense it there.
[First read 3 stars:] There's still the dread, the sense of ill-defined menace lurking just there at the corner of the eye. But it fails to quite coalesce into the moments of fevered intensity and dislocation that made _2666_ such a major work.
But of course, failing to match _2666_ is a little unfair as grounds for dismissing a book. So I will not dismiss this one. It is worth reading, but _Distant Star_ and _By Night in Chile_ should be higher on your Bolano queue. (With _2666_ at the top, obviously.)
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Adjusted up to 4 stars on second read. Only did a re-read because it was available as an audiobook right before a road trip to Canada. It's still a notch down from top Bolano, but better than I gave it credit for the first time. Long stretches of real menace and dread. There is a rather unseemly obsession with rape, especially in the second half of the book. Possibly defensible on artistic grounds, reflecting the pathologies of the narrator and also of his milieu. But it's still quite a lot.
All that said, this should be far down the Bolano list. Make sure you get through 2666, Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Return first.
But of course, failing to match _2666_ is a little unfair as grounds for dismissing a book. So I will not dismiss this one. It is worth reading, but _Distant Star_ and _By Night in Chile_ should be higher on your Bolano queue. (With _2666_ at the top, obviously.)
----------------
Adjusted up to 4 stars on second read. Only did a re-read because it was available as an audiobook right before a road trip to Canada. It's still a notch down from top Bolano, but better than I gave it credit for the first time. Long stretches of real menace and dread. There is a rather unseemly obsession with rape, especially in the second half of the book. Possibly defensible on artistic grounds, reflecting the pathologies of the narrator and also of his milieu. But it's still quite a lot.
All that said, this should be far down the Bolano list. Make sure you get through 2666, Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Return first.
An odd story about a man who is obsessed with war themed strategy games. I generally love Bolaño, but this book was really slow.
En El Tercer Reich, Udo Berger y su novia Ingebord se van de vacaciones a la costa española, a un hotel al que Udo frecuentaba de niño. El titulo de la novela se debe a un juego de estrategia del que Udo es campeón en Alemania y que lleva durante sus vacaciones para planificar nuevas tácticas y escribir un artículo que va a cambiar para siempre la forma de jugarlo. Pero en el medio, las cosas se salen de control, y el juego, como si tuviera vida propia, crece hasta conquistarlo todo.
Esta novela se cuece a fuego lento, y su comienzo es un poco estático, sin demasiadas emociones. Udo es un personaje sumamente estructurado y puritano, avocado a sus juegos, sus planificaciones y tropas. Mientras el mundo a su alrededor se mueve y vibra en otra sintonía, Udo se encierra en su habitación para mover fichas y analizar batallas. Pero la llegada de un misterioso contrincante, hace que el juego se traslade del tablero al mundo real, y Udo comience a perder el timón de su propia vida, envuelto en sus propias obsesiones y manías, que resquebrajan los cimientos sobre los que había construido el imperio de su realidad.
Aunque arranca a pasos de bebé, El Tercer Reich va ganando impulso y el mundo que rodea a Udo Berger comienza a tornarse hostil, peligroso, la inocencia se muere en cada página y las máscaras de los personajes se van derritiendo, revelando una naturaleza visceral y peligrosa. Tan peligrosa, que una ficha mal ubicada, un mal movimiento sobre el mapa táctico, puede significar la vida y la muerte. Y nada tiene menos gracia que morirse en vacaciones.
Esta novela se cuece a fuego lento, y su comienzo es un poco estático, sin demasiadas emociones. Udo es un personaje sumamente estructurado y puritano, avocado a sus juegos, sus planificaciones y tropas. Mientras el mundo a su alrededor se mueve y vibra en otra sintonía, Udo se encierra en su habitación para mover fichas y analizar batallas. Pero la llegada de un misterioso contrincante, hace que el juego se traslade del tablero al mundo real, y Udo comience a perder el timón de su propia vida, envuelto en sus propias obsesiones y manías, que resquebrajan los cimientos sobre los que había construido el imperio de su realidad.
Aunque arranca a pasos de bebé, El Tercer Reich va ganando impulso y el mundo que rodea a Udo Berger comienza a tornarse hostil, peligroso, la inocencia se muere en cada página y las máscaras de los personajes se van derritiendo, revelando una naturaleza visceral y peligrosa. Tan peligrosa, que una ficha mal ubicada, un mal movimiento sobre el mapa táctico, puede significar la vida y la muerte. Y nada tiene menos gracia que morirse en vacaciones.
mysterious
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So, I really liked this book, but I wouldn't recommend it as introduction to Bolaño.
My personal reading order, so far, has been (to the best of my recollection) The Savage Detectives followed by 2666 at some point long after and then a half-hearted attempt at Antwerp. Antwerp (or was it Amulet?), or at least the way I read it, was a misstep, but The Savage Detectives remains far more accessible than either 2666, or this book, which is much shorter, but far less entertaining than any of Bolaño's books that I've read thus far. Well. That might not be fair. The translation is excellent (or least, I assume it is excellent, not that I've compared it to the original, but at any rate, it reads very well, thanks to the efforts of Natasha Wimmer), and there are many moments where I found myself laughing at the unpredictable reactions of the narrator, and others.
Mike Puma nails one of the biggest problems with this book -- the book jacket copy -- which has nothing to do Bolaño, who is dead, as they insist on pointing out several times. Rather than pitching the book as 'lost', I much prefer MP's reading, where The Third Reich was "held onto, perhaps reworked, tweaked, handled like a first-born child—left to be discovered at some future time."
I do think the book is unfinished, in a sense, because if Bolaño had lived, he probably would have come back to it. I see the book as an epilogue of sorts to 2666, or maybe a bridge which connects 2666 to the The Savage Detectives. The Wolf and Lamb, as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out, could very well be Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (or early sketches of the same), and El Quemado and Udo Berger (and the game itself) suggest (in broad strokes) Klaus Haas and Hans Reiter.
In his reading of 2666, Martin Paul Eve proposes that the idea of 'crypto-didacticism,' arguing that the book is a response to the lack of response (by the police on the one hand, and by academics on the other) to over 300 murders in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2003, when Bolaño finished the book. (Since then, another 300 murders have taken place in and around Ciudad Juárez.) To borrow the same framework for understanding The Third Reich, I think you could make the case that The Third Reich, in a very narrow sense, is about what the popularity of war games (and by extension, films, tv shows, etc) says about contemporary Amero-European society. (China and Japan, of course, have variations on this theme, but the experience and treatment of WII differs substantially from our own, being tied more closely to arguments about self-determination, anti-imperialism, and modernity as trauma.)
In a broader sense, The Third Reich is about epistemology -- how we know what we know, and why we believe what we believe. This the other, less obvious strand, I think, that ties it back to 2666, because that novel (as MP Eve argues) is as much about the failures of the academy to create a more just society under neo-liberal / globalized capitalism as it is about the failures of the police in Santa Theresa / Ciudad Juárez. Knowing the history of WWII and the Holocaust not only isn't enough to prevent it from happening again, but can actually cause the same myopia which allowed it to happen in the first place. Udo, 'our German champion,' is a case study in the fetishization of knowledge, which Bolaño (I think rightly) traces back to the pleasure of being recognized as an expert. Where this novel falls short, I think, is that the war games enthusiasts are treated as laughable, or even repugnant, the closest we come to a comparison with the historian is through El Quemado and Udo's brief discussion of poets:
“Are you still going to the library, Quemado?”
“Yes.”
“And you only borrow books about the war?”
“Now I do, but before I didn’t.”
“Before what?”
“Before I started playing with you.”
“So what kind of books did you borrow before, Quemado?”
“Poetry.”
“Books of poetry? How nice. What kind of poetry?”
El Quemado looks at me as if I’m a bumpkin:
“Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca… Do you know them?”
“No. Did you learn the poems by heart?”
“My memory is no good.”
“But you remember something? Can you recite something to give me an idea?”
“No, I only remember feelings.”
“What kind of feelings? Tell me one.”
“Despair…”
“Nothing else? That’s all?”
“Despair, heights, the sea, things that aren’t closed, things that are partway open, like something bursting in the chest.”
“Yes, I see. And when did you stop reading poetry, Quemado? When we started Third Reich? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have played. I like poetry too.”
“Which poets?”
“Goethe.”
And so on until it’s time to leave.
Rather than call out poets directly (and not just any poets, but the greats of the Spanish and German traditions), Bolaño (who had, up to writing this novel, only published poetry) obliquely compares them to role-playing nerds who blindly study atrocity and genocide for the sake of glorifying one nation (or one player) over another. This is the 'crypto' in MP Eve's argument, and part of what (for me at least) makes Bolaño such a compelling writer. If you have a message, yes, to be sure, write a letter. But even better, perhaps, to bind those letters into a solid brick of a novel.
Bolaño (like Murakami) has been criticized for his flat style, a sort of export-ready product, but as others (BR Meyers comes to mind) have pointed out, American fiction is drowning in style. The economist / blogging head Tyler Cowen (along with Steven Pinker in Better Angels et al) has made a similar point, arguing that we need less stories, and more facts. But I think Bolaño's work (and, to a certain extent, Murakami's) makes a compelling argument for why novels are still relevant, or perhaps even more relevant, in the age of over-information.
My personal reading order, so far, has been (to the best of my recollection) The Savage Detectives followed by 2666 at some point long after and then a half-hearted attempt at Antwerp. Antwerp (or was it Amulet?), or at least the way I read it, was a misstep, but The Savage Detectives remains far more accessible than either 2666, or this book, which is much shorter, but far less entertaining than any of Bolaño's books that I've read thus far. Well. That might not be fair. The translation is excellent (or least, I assume it is excellent, not that I've compared it to the original, but at any rate, it reads very well, thanks to the efforts of Natasha Wimmer), and there are many moments where I found myself laughing at the unpredictable reactions of the narrator, and others.
Mike Puma nails one of the biggest problems with this book -- the book jacket copy -- which has nothing to do Bolaño, who is dead, as they insist on pointing out several times. Rather than pitching the book as 'lost', I much prefer MP's reading, where The Third Reich was "held onto, perhaps reworked, tweaked, handled like a first-born child—left to be discovered at some future time."
I do think the book is unfinished, in a sense, because if Bolaño had lived, he probably would have come back to it. I see the book as an epilogue of sorts to 2666, or maybe a bridge which connects 2666 to the The Savage Detectives. The Wolf and Lamb, as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out, could very well be Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (or early sketches of the same), and El Quemado and Udo Berger (and the game itself) suggest (in broad strokes) Klaus Haas and Hans Reiter.
In his reading of 2666, Martin Paul Eve proposes that the idea of 'crypto-didacticism,' arguing that the book is a response to the lack of response (by the police on the one hand, and by academics on the other) to over 300 murders in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2003, when Bolaño finished the book. (Since then, another 300 murders have taken place in and around Ciudad Juárez.) To borrow the same framework for understanding The Third Reich, I think you could make the case that The Third Reich, in a very narrow sense, is about what the popularity of war games (and by extension, films, tv shows, etc) says about contemporary Amero-European society. (China and Japan, of course, have variations on this theme, but the experience and treatment of WII differs substantially from our own, being tied more closely to arguments about self-determination, anti-imperialism, and modernity as trauma.)
In a broader sense, The Third Reich is about epistemology -- how we know what we know, and why we believe what we believe. This the other, less obvious strand, I think, that ties it back to 2666, because that novel (as MP Eve argues) is as much about the failures of the academy to create a more just society under neo-liberal / globalized capitalism as it is about the failures of the police in Santa Theresa / Ciudad Juárez. Knowing the history of WWII and the Holocaust not only isn't enough to prevent it from happening again, but can actually cause the same myopia which allowed it to happen in the first place. Udo, 'our German champion,' is a case study in the fetishization of knowledge, which Bolaño (I think rightly) traces back to the pleasure of being recognized as an expert. Where this novel falls short, I think, is that the war games enthusiasts are treated as laughable, or even repugnant, the closest we come to a comparison with the historian is through El Quemado and Udo's brief discussion of poets:
“Are you still going to the library, Quemado?”
“Yes.”
“And you only borrow books about the war?”
“Now I do, but before I didn’t.”
“Before what?”
“Before I started playing with you.”
“So what kind of books did you borrow before, Quemado?”
“Poetry.”
“Books of poetry? How nice. What kind of poetry?”
El Quemado looks at me as if I’m a bumpkin:
“Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca… Do you know them?”
“No. Did you learn the poems by heart?”
“My memory is no good.”
“But you remember something? Can you recite something to give me an idea?”
“No, I only remember feelings.”
“What kind of feelings? Tell me one.”
“Despair…”
“Nothing else? That’s all?”
“Despair, heights, the sea, things that aren’t closed, things that are partway open, like something bursting in the chest.”
“Yes, I see. And when did you stop reading poetry, Quemado? When we started Third Reich? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have played. I like poetry too.”
“Which poets?”
“Goethe.”
And so on until it’s time to leave.
Rather than call out poets directly (and not just any poets, but the greats of the Spanish and German traditions), Bolaño (who had, up to writing this novel, only published poetry) obliquely compares them to role-playing nerds who blindly study atrocity and genocide for the sake of glorifying one nation (or one player) over another. This is the 'crypto' in MP Eve's argument, and part of what (for me at least) makes Bolaño such a compelling writer. If you have a message, yes, to be sure, write a letter. But even better, perhaps, to bind those letters into a solid brick of a novel.
Bolaño (like Murakami) has been criticized for his flat style, a sort of export-ready product, but as others (BR Meyers comes to mind) have pointed out, American fiction is drowning in style. The economist / blogging head Tyler Cowen (along with Steven Pinker in Better Angels et al) has made a similar point, arguing that we need less stories, and more facts. But I think Bolaño's work (and, to a certain extent, Murakami's) makes a compelling argument for why novels are still relevant, or perhaps even more relevant, in the age of over-information.