Scan barcode
A review by jonfaith
The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño
4.0
The Lamb winked at me and sat on the bed, behind the maid, miming sex in a way that was doubly silent because even his ear-to-ear smile was turned not toward me or Clarita's back but toward... a kind of realm of stone... a silent zone. . .
This is a strange novel.
There's blinding sun in Costa Brava.
There are waves and wells of tourists.
It is seasonal. It is also the late 1980s.
The degrees and details ensnare the reader.
I felt myself transported and likewise confined. Despite our distractions, our esoterica, we remain under the penumbra of history. One shouldn't second-guess the author's intentions regarding the publication of this apparently first novel. The swarm of the quotidian and the ideological provide something less menacing (as was Distant Star) than the creepy. I am not sure what I mean by such unease. I have never been a beach person, the last time I reclined upon the sand amid the heat to read was sixteen years ago, reading Shelby Foote alongside one of the Great Lakes. I prefer to scowl and walk along the ocean, brooding about fetishism and the evolution of yawning as I might have done in Miami and in Morocco.
This is a strange novel.
There's blinding sun in Costa Brava.
There are waves and wells of tourists.
It is seasonal. It is also the late 1980s.
The degrees and details ensnare the reader.
I felt myself transported and likewise confined. Despite our distractions, our esoterica, we remain under the penumbra of history. One shouldn't second-guess the author's intentions regarding the publication of this apparently first novel. The swarm of the quotidian and the ideological provide something less menacing (as was Distant Star) than the creepy. I am not sure what I mean by such unease. I have never been a beach person, the last time I reclined upon the sand amid the heat to read was sixteen years ago, reading Shelby Foote alongside one of the Great Lakes. I prefer to scowl and walk along the ocean, brooding about fetishism and the evolution of yawning as I might have done in Miami and in Morocco.