Name: Nazi Literature in the Americas
ISBN: 9780811217941

Roberto Bolaño

A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature, Bolano's work is a tour de force of black humor.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Written as a biographical dictionary of twentieth- and twenty-first-century contributors who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies, a series of fictional character portraits is thematically organized under such headings as "Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment" and "North American Poets."

laika rockaway

unfortunately overshadowed by distant star, which develops the final entry (and the project as a whole) masterfully and leaves us wondering.. why are we reading this? some of this is funny, sometimes painful, sometimes dull. it's an interesting artifact, but my interest in bolaño is better served by his other works - this is just a curiosity. an affair for bolañite completionists - not recommended as a first introduction or as anything more useful than a good way to spend an afternoon.

Patrick Book

This is...not for me. 

I’ve tried and I’ve tried, I just can’t figure this guy out.

Donald

Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature. Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Nicholas Hanemann

Bolaño crafts a fictional taxonomy of myriad literary scenes that intersect in various ways with Nazi ideology from ~1870 to ~2040. What's notable about this book is how he creates a range of authors and poets covering the spectrum of fascist ideology, without any of them existing as an "exemplary figure" of an American Nazi Author (as fascism has never been much for clear definitions). None of the characters seem too far-fetched, excepting for maybe the skywriter (though one could easily see D'annunzio pulling such a stunt if skywriting had come about 20 years earlier). There are no Timothy McVeighs (after all, he wasn't much of a literary figure), but some of them share more than a few characteristics with William Luther Pierce (or, in a different key, Leni Riefenstahl).

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Reviews

Highlights