Review of Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas

Joshua Cohen has one of the first (hopefully of many) reviews of Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas in yesterday’s Jewish Daily Forward.

A surprise to probably no one, the book sounds awesome:

Nazi Literature in the Americas, first published in Spanish in 1996, is not a work of nonfiction, though it reads as an encyclopedic history, or a biographical dictionary of criminous thought. [. . .]

What Bolaño has given us is a mock reference text, an indispensible companion to the work of collaborationist poets and novelists in the Americas — writers who, whether actively or through aesthetic allegiance, kept company with the Nazi cause. Included and representative are entries on “The Mendiluce Clan”: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, an austere “lady poet”; Juan Mendiluce Thompson, her son, an angry novelist who denounced Julio Cortázar and his mentor Borges, “whose stories, so he claimed, were ‘parodies of parodies’”; and Luz Mendiluce Thompson, the family’s obese poet-daughter, who cherishes throughout her life a photograph of her baby self being cradled by Hitler.

One of the best aspects of the review is the passing reference to a joke manifesto Bolano once wrote:

Bolaño seems to have summarized his own life in the prankish manifesto for the literary movement he founded, “Infrarealism”: “Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions . . .”

Later in this document (of which Bolaño was the sole author and signatory), he wrote: “Risk is always elsewhere. The true poet is always leaving himself behind.”