The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

Fiction Roberto Bolaño. The Third Reich. Natasha Wimmer, tr. New York. Farrar , Straus & Giroux. 2011. isbn 9780374275624 Despite its title, the most recent of Roberto Bolaño’s novels translated into English has less in common with Nazi Literature in the Americas (2007) than The Skating Rink (2009; see WLT, Jan. 2010, 62), which is also about sex, death, and boredom on Spain’s Costa Brava. Bolaño wrote El tercer reich in the 1980s but did not publish it during his lifetime. As is the case with La universidad desconocida (2007) and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011; see WLT, Sept. 2011, 76), Reich was recovered from Bolaño’s personal archive and published after his death in 2003. Readers of The Savage Detectives (2007; see WLT, Nov. 2007, 57) and Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984), cowritten with Antoni García Porta, will also recognize in Reich Bolaño’s darkly comic fascination with transient spaces such as bars, hotels, nighttime streets, campgrounds, and beaches—and the fights, lengthy conversations, surprising sexual encounters, and deaths (accidental or otherwise) that take place there. Reich consists entirely of diary entries written by Udo Berger, a young man from Stuttgart vacationing with his girlfriend Ingeborg at the same Spanish resort he visited with his family when he was an adolescent. Now the German national champion of an absurdly involved board game from which the novel gets its title, Udo intends to spend his free time on the beach getting to know Ingeborg better, brushing up on World War II military history, and writing Can Xue’s trippy, surreal world. Fiction, page 65 Christian Wiman’s tempered fire. Verse, page 75 Anthony Shadid’s genealogical reconciliation. Miscellaneous, page 77 review world literature in 64 | World Literature Today march–april 2012 | 65 an article for a gaming magazine. But from the moment he returns to the resort—whose attractive, long-serving manager, Frau Else, barely recognizes him—Udo experiences life as something alien and unsettling. His best-laid plans and past experiences fail to prepare him for what happens during more than a month of selfimposed exile in the Del Mar hotel. Udo’s inability to rely on the schemata he develops around the game that obsesses him puts him in the same boat as many of Bolaño’s characters, not least the circle of literary critics in 2666 (2008). In Bolaño’s novels, conceptual frameworks —whether developed by gaming communities, scholars, or poets—tend to founder when they clash with the daily emotional grind of desire, boredom, and fear. Writing presents the only opportunity for escape. As is typical of Bolaño’s work, Reich succeeds by detaching itself ironically from the same characters and events that compel readers to continue turning the book’s pages. Udo is hardly sympathetic, but Bola- ño’s style deftly negotiates the path between his protagonist’s maudlin self-absorption and his gradual emancipation from a longstanding and cloying malaise. Ryan Long University of Oklahoma Can Xue. Vertical Motion. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, tr. Rochester , New York. Open Letter. 2011. isbn 9781934824375 In just a few short years, Open Letter Books, based out of the University of Rochester, has quite impressively staked a claim of literary territory. Not unlike New Directions, Open Letter has made its reputation by finding and publishing some of the best foreign-language writers in the world. Can Xue, the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, is the latest writer to contribute to Open Letter’s quick ascension. In her collection Vertical Motion, Can Xue establishes a trippy and surreal world: apartments float high in the air, and large owls and men with lacquer-black skin haunt troubled people. There’s a common thread between Can Xue and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in that both writers use the surreal to expound the oddness of human experiences; but where Murakami’s is a kind of hipster existentialism, Can Xue roots her existentialism in folklore . In many ways, Can Xue’s place is between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka. For instance, in “Red Leaves,” a story about death and memory, an old man wanders

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