A review by smark1342
The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

Spooky and unsettling the whole way through. German war games champion udo visits the Costa brava (towns gotta be blanes where bolano lived) that he used to visit as a child with his girlfriend ingeborg. They meet another German couple, Hanna and drunk violent scumbag Charly. Udo also sees the hotel owners wife, frau elsa, who he had a crush on. Soon Charly and Hanna introduce them to the lamb and the wolf, two local creeps, and el quemado, a jacked badly burned guy who lives in a fortress of pedal boats he rents out. They go to shitty bars and get drunk and udos narration gives off a foreboding violent atmosphere that really genuinely weirded me out.

Charly drowns while windsurfing. Eventually Hanna and ingeborg go back to Germany (separately) and udo stays behind ostensibly to id the body but really to play third Reich with el quemado, who has seemingly been receiving advice from frau Elsa's husband, the hotel owner, who is sick and mostly confined to bed. Udo visits him (after starting a relatively chaste affair with Elsa) where he warns udo that after el quemado wins, he'll probably kill udo. The real scene after the end of the game is confused and dreamlike and maybe the highpoint of UFOs growing madness

. Thematically way far up bolano alley. He's obsessed with evil and with borders and apparently in real life with board games which is funny to imagine. In his other books the obsession with obscure writers is just replaced by him being a huge board game nerd. His characters always have weird gestures and seem to have more knowledge than they should but less than is sometimes implied. They all know something the trader and the narrotor don't but they won't always say exactly what it is and they might be wrong about it ultimately. Every scene with Charly or the wolf and the lamb I was struck by how creepy he makes the ugly darkness in your average regular jamokes. A lot of his books set up these poles where he demonstrates the things he thinks are important (writing, games, I'm thinking of mesmerism and spirituality in monsieur pain) aren't inherently "good". If they're powerful for good they can be powerful for evil too.