Darkness Lurks Behind Humor of 'Nazi Literature'

Look up Adolf Hitler in Wikipedia and you’ll learn that he was “an Austrian who led the National Socialist German Workers Party,” which “emphasised nationalism and antisemitism and murdered many of its opponents to ensure success.” Look up the Holocaust: “the term used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II.”

So it is that, on a website that serves as a central information source for our era, one of history’s greatest villains is reduced to a spectral figure of fear while one of its greatest tragedies becomes a dispassionate statement of fact. The encyclopedia drains the entries of their terror and, indeed, of their very life, reducing them to little more than a hazy nightmare in our morning-after memory. But that doesn’t mean their terror is irrelevant: as Roberto Bolaño reminds us in “Nazi Literature in the Americas,” “real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares.”

In this faux-encyclopedic account of 30 fictional far-right writers and poets, Bolaño the bibliophilic wordsmith collides with Bolaño the one-time Chilean dissident. When his encyclopedist-narrator calls 1953 “the year in which Stalin and Dylan Thomas died,” he means it: political and cultural changes, for Bolaño, are not only of equal importance but inseparable, always moving hand-in-hand.

“Nazi Literature,” originally published in 1996, is the book that first established Bolaño as an important voice in Latin American literature, but Chris Andrews’ new translation arrives at the apex of Bolaño’s posthumous acclaim in the English-speaking world. The title of a 2007 New York Review of Books article says it all: “The Great Bolaño.”

Yet it is here, away from the weight and reverence surrounding Bolaño’s best-known work, that his central concerns—the place and politics of the written word and those who produce it—take a subsidiary role to the abilities that make him memorable. His dark, biting sense of irony, stunning range of characterization and voice, and subtle manipulation of the deepest and most unexpected pathos are all on display. “Nazi Literature” may not be Bolaño’s most important work, but it’s enjoyable and meaningful enough to be read alongside his best.

The book is divided into 14 sections, ranging from “Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment” to “Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Creatures.” Bolaño presents each chapter as an objective portrait of one writer’s life and literature—and that literature is often as hilarious and absurd as it is disturbing.

When not in an insane asylum, one character spends his life producing 500-page-plus refutations of philosophers ranging from Voltaire to Rousseau, including a five-volume critique of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” Another character’s play combines scenes of rape with a masturbation contest (judged in three categories: thickness, length, “and, most importantly, distance covered by semen”) between the ambassadors of three nations. A third character writes a poem called “Concentration Camp” that, we’re told, “is the humorous and at times touching story of [his] life as a child, between the ages of five and ten, in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas.”

The blackness of this humor is a reminder that, however amusing their writing may be, these characters remain misanthropic monsters. Throughout the book, Bolaño exhibits an anxiety about the inability to simply enjoy literature for its own sake. What does it mean when, in a poem about personal relationships, the fictional Luz Mendiluce Thompson writes, “in my heart I am the last Nazi?”

For Claudia, the woman she madly loves, it means that they’re mortal enemies. “Why? Because I’m a Trotskyite and you’re a Fascist shit, said Claudia…And there’s no way around that? [Luz] asked, desperately lovesick…What about poetry? Poetry is pretty irrelevant these days, with what’s going on in Argentina. Maybe you’re right, Luz admitted, on the verge of tears, but maybe you’re wrong.” After briefly allowing this novelistic flourish to enter the story, Bolaño concludes by again taking on the dispassionate voice of the encyclopedist. After Claudia’s death, he tells us in the most understated yet poignant manner, Luz “crashed into a gas station. The explosion was considerable.”

But that literary urge cannot be kept out of the book. Maybe Claudia is both right and wrong: Literature cannot transcend politics, but politics cannot escape literature. It’s a truth that Bolaño lived when he led an outlaw band of avant-garde poets called the “infrarealists,” and it’s a truth that he writes into his book. One character, hoping to gain status but choosing to forgo violence, turns to “literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence.”

As the book proceeds, Bolaño’s seemingly objective portrait of these writers slowly breaks down. In the book’s final portrait, “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman,” Bolaño gives up the dispassionate encyclopedist’s voice and instead injects himself directly into the story. He becomes one of the primary characters and narrates in first-person, which, he says, “may be reliable. Or not.” The portrait features the book’s most indelible image: ignoring the “bulging black cumulus clouds” and eventual thunderstorm, the murderous Ramírez Hoffman sky-wrights a poem from his plane, one line at a time (“Death is friendship,” “Death is Chile,” “Death is my heart”).

At the end, Bolaño insists that Ramírez Hoffman can no longer hurt anyone, but immediately backtracks: “I didn’t really believe it. Of course he could. We all could.” The nightmare, after all, is unsettlingly close to the real.

And that, ultimately, is what makes these fictional and absurd monsters so indelible. Within the pages of Bolaño’s faux-encyclopedia, they become sympathetic, conflicted, troubled, and strangely believable; they become, in short, real human beings whom we understand as much as we despise and whom we like as much as we fear. And that’s something you can’t get from Wikipedia.

—Staff Writer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu.