Reviews

La littérature nazie en Amérique by Roberto Bolaño

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wechseling's review against another edition

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dark funny slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

imthechillalex's review against another edition

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5.0

A confederacy of cowards and hacks.

FEB 2023 reread: Reread this for a book club with my friends this February and the first 180 pages are funny in a loserdom, hack way. Loser fascist authors and their work never truly gaining much of a success but written in a very dry and scholarly way that lends itself to moments of deadpan comedy. But then the Ramirez Hoffman chapter happens— it shifts to a first person testimonial and it becomes haunting. Pulling the rug out from under you and saying “this is what this ideology leads to, the crimes of dictators and fascists and sadists”. I’m surprised this is only Bolaño’s second published novel and he wrote is still relatively young because this has the concept and hyper-literacy of a seasoned intellectual, but I don’t want to risk sounding like our unnamed encyclopedic critic here. A real master work.

nickjagged's review against another edition

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4.0

Bolaño crafts a fictional taxonomy of myriad literary scenes that intersect in various ways with Nazi ideology from ~1870 to ~2040. What's notable about this book is how he creates a range of authors and poets covering the spectrum of fascist ideology, without any of them existing as an "exemplary figure" of an American Nazi Author (as fascism has never been much for clear definitions). None of the characters seem too far-fetched, excepting for maybe the skywriter (though one could easily see D'annunzio pulling such a stunt if skywriting had come about 20 years earlier). There are no Timothy McVeighs (after all, he wasn't much of a literary figure), but some of them share more than a few characteristics with William Luther Pierce (or, in a different key, Leni Riefenstahl).

fxdpts's review against another edition

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Soccer hooligan nazis, spanish nationalist volunteer nazis, nazis for race, nazis for country, driven to nazism from hating philosophers, haitian nazis, feminist nazis; every time I read a new Bolaño book, I always ask myself “What more could I possibly want that my dear author hasn’t already given?”

Nazi Literature in the Americas stands apart from much of Bolaño’s writing. It’s violent, but the violence is much more subdued than usual. It’s about poets, but fewer of them are failures/dirtbags than the poets he usually writes about, who are written after his friends and acquaintances from his own poetry circles. I certainly don’t think he’s glorifying fascist poets (obvious from his background, but also from much of the tone). Rather, he’s trying not to take the easy way out and humiliate fascism by making them all cuckolds and failures (not that there aren’t a share of those). Good writing isn’t going to initiate the Fourth Reich, but unwarranted attacks on verse isn’t going to stop it either.

I’d like to share some of my favorite passages:
Max Mirebalais - “He soon realized that there were only two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.”

Rory Long - “And he befriended radio hosts, to see if he could learn something from them, like how to recognize the impersonal voice roaming America’s radio waves. A tone at once colloquial and dramatic. The voice of the man-who-is-all-eyes wandering around until it finds the consciousness of the man-who-is-all-ears.”

Zach Sodenstern - “Checking the Maps opens the Fourth Reich saga. It is full of appendices, maps, incomprehensible indices of proper names, and solicits an interaction in which no sensible reader would persist. The events take places mainly in Denver and Midwestern cities. There is no main character. The less chaotic stretches read like collections of stories haphazardly tacked together.”