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A review by lee_foust
The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño
5.0
Despite the fact that The Third Reich was an unfinished or at least unpublished MS of Bolano's, posthumously published and translated into English more for completeists than general readers, I'm going full five stars and favorite shelf for this bad boy. Ironically, I think I've been grousing a bit in recent reviews about novels I've found mediocre because they seemed to have no unifying theme or message, that their characters and narrative were their only reasons for existing and that such novels just aren't my cup of tea... Then along comes Bolano with this utterly mysterious but wonderfully bizarre narrative of a German couple's vacation on the Spanish coast dragging on and on into something both utterly strange and totally boring AT THE SAME TIME that I find completely riveting even if I have really no idea why. Go figure.
The closest I seem to be able to come right at this minute to explaining how compelling this novel about nothing (and perhaps everything) is, is to compare it to one of Kafka's novels. Like them, as Deleuze and Guattari so well explicate it in their Anti-Oedipus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature books, the novel becomes a kind of narrative machine. It's just not like other plotted novels and its unfamiliarity with novelistic conventions and the comfort that such conventions give complacent readers keeps one on the edge of one's seat--but for none of the reasons that novels usually get us to do that. Here it's because we're mystified and curious, unnerved really, because that narrative machine might just spit out anything tomorrow and it's fascinating. The oddest thing about such books is that they end--and even that is surprising.
Of Bolano's secondary, posthumous works I loved both this one and also the Little Lumpen Novelito. Both are unexpected minor masterpieces in my opinion.
The closest I seem to be able to come right at this minute to explaining how compelling this novel about nothing (and perhaps everything) is, is to compare it to one of Kafka's novels. Like them, as Deleuze and Guattari so well explicate it in their Anti-Oedipus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature books, the novel becomes a kind of narrative machine. It's just not like other plotted novels and its unfamiliarity with novelistic conventions and the comfort that such conventions give complacent readers keeps one on the edge of one's seat--but for none of the reasons that novels usually get us to do that. Here it's because we're mystified and curious, unnerved really, because that narrative machine might just spit out anything tomorrow and it's fascinating. The oddest thing about such books is that they end--and even that is surprising.
Of Bolano's secondary, posthumous works I loved both this one and also the Little Lumpen Novelito. Both are unexpected minor masterpieces in my opinion.