FICTION

The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño, Picador, 288pp, £18.99 (hardback)

Since his premature death in 2003 at the age of fifty, Roberto Bolaño’s life has come to assume almost legendary status. Given its deeply romantic nature, it is perhaps not difficult to understand why. In an increasingly professionalised literary scene, Bolaño’s outlaw persona and accompanying free-wheeling writing style have come to seem refreshingly authentic. The main elements of the Bolaño myth are now well known; it begins with his fighting in the Chilean revolution to ‘help build socialism’ and subsequent arrest. From there he moved to Mexico to found an idealistic surrealist poetry movement called Infrareallismo, a period he affectionately documented in The Savage Detectives. This was followed by decades of exile in Spain living the life of a vagabond, during which he developed the heroin habit that would infect his liver and ultimately shorten his life. It was during this last decade, as he knew he was dying, that he settled down and dedicated himself to writing the novels and short stories upon which his reputation now rests. These included his sprawling masterwork, 2666, which was unfinished at the time of his death and published posthumously. Many of these biographical elements have since been disputed, particularly the revolutionary fighting and heroin addiction, but the myth nevertheless remains a potent one that colours the reception of his work.

The Third Reich was, like 2666, discovered among his papers after his death in a manuscript that only existed in longhand. However, those expecting a similarly multi-vocal epic may well be in for a surprise. Written in 1989, The Third Reich has more in common with the earlier, shorter, first-person narratives of Monsieur Pain and By Night in Chile, which, in contrast to the constantly shifting perspectives of the later works, offer a fixed view – a view which does not always understand what it is seeing.In the late eighties, twenty-five year-old German, Udo Berger, takes his beautiful girlfriend, Ingeborg, on holiday to the Spanish coastal resort of Del Mar, the same resort that he visited every year with his family as a teenager. Udo is the national War Games champion, a military strategy game that was a craze at the time. He has started to write a journal, in which he intends to develop his tactical ideas, but he soon begins to record the world around him. It is this journal that we are reading. This approach allows us to experience the slightly surreal world of the seedy resort through Udo’s constantly strategising mind. We are invited to question along with him the significance of apparently meaningless events, which creates an intriguing sense of mystery.

A variant of the game in which Udo specialises is called the Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. This might suggest to those familiar with Bolaño’s previous work that we are being given another portrait of a fascist similar to those we saw in Nazi Literature in the Americas. Yet, whilst the choice of game is clearly no coincidence and although Bolaño does invite us to be suspicious of Udo’s passion, it seems that this time his intention is not quite so straightforward. In fairness, Udo is shown to exhibit many quasi-fascist instincts, such as fantasies about forcing the maid to perform subservient sexual acts on him. He also has an acknowledged love of Nazi or proto-Nazi writers. His own prose style seems to be trying to emulate their ‘clean and orderly beauty’ – an approach that in Bolaño’s work is always ‘aligned with cruelty’. Bolaño’s monsters always have a taste for the ‘literary, well-ordered and highly finished’ in marked contrast to his own preference for the ‘plain-spoken, unstylised and inconclusive’. However, simply to characterise Udo as a neo-Nazi is problematic. He does not think of himself in that way. Indeed, when challenged, he goes as far as to describe himself as an anti-Nazi. Furthermore, when he is contrasted with his fellow Germans, such as Conrad, a gamer who believes that Germany only lost the war because they ‘played fair and didn’t use poison gas’, or with Charly, whose drinking and violent behaviour disgusts Udo, then our initial characterisation seems less secure.

Unfortunately for Udo, the easy-going Ingeborg is charmed by Charly and his girlfriend Hanna. She insists that they spend every evening with them, going to a series of garish clubs. Ingeborg wants nothing more than to drink and dance the night away while Udo sits quietly in the corner developing his strategy. As further evidence of how mismatched they are, Udo buys Inge a defecating Mexican toy which, although he thinks vulgar, he feels certain she will find hilarious. Searching for reprieve from his tiresome companions, Udo befriends a local pedalo owner who instantly shows an interest in the game. His name is El Quemado (the burnt one), so called because his face and body are covered in horrific burns. We later learn that he is from South America and we are led to question whether he received them at the hands of the fascists, but our fears are never confirmed. We could perhaps wonder if El Quemado is supposed to stand in for Bolaño himself, but this is probably too simplistic. Later, Charly disappears and when, after a few days, he has not been found, the local police have to admit that he is probably dead. We never find out what happened to him. It is yet another mystery that Bolaño sets up only to deny us any resolution. It is soon time for Ingeborg and Udo to return home but, unaccountably, Udo decides to stay behind to wait until they find the body. Ingeborg cannot understand his decision and nor can anybody else. Indeed it is unclear whether even Udo himself understands his own motivation. He does not will what comes next, nor is it exactly fated; it simply happens. Eventually the body is found, the summer season comes to an end, the tourists depart and yet still Udo does not leave. The resort becomes like a ‘movie set consigned to oblivion’ and it is not long before the locals begin to resent Udo’s lingering presence. Here Bolaño brilliantly captures a sense of growing menace, only to make us doubt, along with Udo, whether we have been imagining the whole thing. He creates the atmosphere of a mystery in which everything appears significant but where none of it really is – except in Udo’s disintegrating mind, where everything appears as threatening as the next move on the game board.

It is only now that Udo matter-of-factly begins to play The Third Reich with El Quemado. He is a quick learner and starts to win, upon which Udo begins to unravel further. But is he losing his mind because he is losing the game or vice versa? There then follows extended, jargon-heavy descriptions of the games, which defiantly refuse to offer us any insight into the workings of the game or the thoughts of the characters. As a result the game and its significance remain ambiguous, with Bolaño giving us only a series of conflicting possible interpretations, none of which are allowed to dominate for long. For example, Udo believes at one point that El Quemado wants to win the game to get his revenge on the fascists. Bolaño at first encourages this interpretation only to frustrate it by keeping El Quemado’s motivation obscure. Later, Udo imagines himself losing the game and sitting trial for war crimes with El Quemado as the judge. This could have suggested that we were being given an examination of German guilt but, again, this reading is frustrated by refusing Udo any insight into the meaning of his behaviour.

The game drifts towards a strange anti-climax. When El Quemado finally wins it seems to come almost as a relief. Udo returns to Germany and gradually phases out the game and his circle of friends. In this way another meaning of the game is presented: as an analogy with poetry. Bolaño seems to see a similarity between the players’ obsession and that of poets. Earlier in the novel Udo had intended to present his ideas at the forthcoming Paris conference, whereupon he believed they would completely revolutionise the way people think about the game. Anyone familiar with Bolaño’s previous work will hear echoes here of the idealistic young poets of whom Bolaño has often written, who are forever writing radical poetry manifestos with just such lofty ambitions. Bolaño seems to see a correlation between the way the game player attempts to correct the mistakes of history and his own youthful dream that poetry could re-make the world. We learn that in The Third Reich it is possible for the Germans to win the war. In the game they play, however, it turns out almost exactly as it did in reality. This would seem to imply the impossibility of changing the past.

Bolaño’s portrayal of Udo veers between affection and condemnation. It sometimes seems as though he is criticising him for wasting all his time playing games while his life is crumbling outside. Jonathan Lethem has suggested, in The New York Review of Books, that Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is asking ‘Is a lifetime spent loving poems in a fallen world only a poor joke?’ Much the same could be asked of game playing in The Third Reich. Yet, to judge by the broken figure cut by Udo having renounced the game, it does not seem that the alternative is any better.