As a result of the largely posthumous cult success his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 have garnered, Roberto Bolaño’s British publishers have begun to commission translations from the increasingly eccentric back-catalogue of the late Chilean writer. Heralded by some as the saviour of contemporary fiction, one by one Bolaño’s works are surfacing on the English-language literary landscape.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is one such book, an encyclopaedia of fictitious fascists throughout North and South America, which was recently shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. The politics of the writers included is seldom overt, and fascism is often no more than passing interest, consistent to this thread of fictional writers in the motley tapestry of actual literary history. American football player and beat poet, Jim O’Bannon corresponds and eventually meets with Allen Ginsberg. Juan Mendiluce Thompson describes Borges’s stories as “parodies of parodies”.
The very idea of the book, paired with the gravity of the its title, is enough to temporarily sedate the reader’s critical faculties. Impressively, these sinister writers are often referenced before they come to be profiled; there are appendices and bibliographies; the narrative is composed in 2021 at the earliest; and there are countless mises en abyme.
These echoes of Borges and Nabokov are appetising; but they’re no more than well-presented side-dressing served to cloak the dearth of meat out in the plate. At times, the book seems like little more than a list of fake titles.
Its content is the cloak’s new emperor.
True, Bolaño produces a few striking images – “the famous photo of her baby self in Hitler’s arms”, “a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock” – and even raises a smile every so often. Full-time football-hooligan, part-time poet, Italo Schiaffino resented the Jewish plutocracy of Argentina because it “hadn’t produced a single good player.”
But the content is forever overshadowed by the cleverness of form. Billed as ‘wildly playful’, the book seems merely frivolous. And though fictional, it avails insufficiently of fictional techniques. Without suspense, say, the book remains an encyclopaedia.
And who would knowingly read an erroneous encyclopaedia?
