Bolaño en Inglaterra

Publicado originalmente el año 1996, "La literatura nazi en América" la intrigante creación de Roberto Bolaño, sigue causando sorprendentes revisiones de sus nuevos lectores en inglés. Publico una muy buena reseña aparecida en Telegraph, por Ed King el pasado domingo 10 de enero.

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño: review

The hundreds of novelists, poets and journalists who populate Roberto Bolaño’s fictional world come in all shapes and sizes. There are quixotic hero figures, exiles and outsiders who express a precarious sense of freedom through their solitary occupation. Then there are corrupt charlatans who sermonise about national poetry while turning a blind eye to the thousands tortured and murdered under the Pinochet regime.

The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s most celebrated novel about a doomed quest to find an avant-garde poet in the deserts of northern Mexico, is an almost exhaustive compendium of Mexican writers from the 1970s, some shrouded in pseudonyms and some (notably Octavio Paz) subjected to open hostility. Nazi Literature in the Americas, an encyclopaedia of fictional right wing writers, is not only Bolaño’s most openly comic book but it is also one of his most explicit treatment of a theme that recurs with obsessive frequency throughout his entire fictional work – the complicity of the literary establishment in Latin America with political power.

Cosmic battle for EarthWritten in a mock-academic tone of detached objectivity, complete with a detailed bibliography and pompous chapter headings, Nazi Literature in the Americas recounts the lives of far-right authors from the Americas in the 20th century and beyond. Among the more outlandish characters in the book are Silvio Salvático, 'a soccer player and a Futurist’ who, in his short literary career in Buenos Aires during the 1920s advocated, amongst other things, 'a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation’. There is the Haitian poet Max Mirebalais, 'a fanatical mulatto Nazi’ who turned plagiarism into an art form and became obsessed with the idea of being a Nazi poet while also 'espousing a certain kind of négritude’.

It was the sheer inventiveness of the writing that so impressed readers when the book was published in Spanish in 1996, becoming Bolaño’s first critical success and sparking the enormously prolific period that led up to his death in 2003. All the characters are furnished with their own bibliographies, as detailed and meticulous as they are bizarre.

But amidst the humour there is a deadly serious side to Bolaño’s satirical vision that becomes clear in the jarring but magnificent final chapter. 'The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman’ introduces a dramatic change of tone, exchanging the mock detachment of the encyclopaedia for a haunting personal account of the fictional, though chillingly plausible, figure of Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, a Chilean poet, sky writer and successful self-publicist who became an assassin for the Pinochet regime when he came to power in a military coup in 1974. The story is narrated as a search for Hoffman written by a fellow writer and countryman - who happens to be called 'Bolaño’. And here’s where the real object of Bolaño’s satire becomes clear. The figure of Hoffman is a strange combination of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and various left-wing writers who remained in Chile during the dictatorship, most notably the experimental poet Raúl Zurita. Bolaño attacks literary institutions from both ends of the political spectrum, which he sees as inevitably complicit with political repression. Literature, we are told, 'is a surreptitious form of violence’.

Nazi Literature in the Americas at first seems strangely anomalous for a Bolaño novel. Where are the drawn out literary conversations in Mexico City cafés or the chance encounters in provincial towns across Europe? But it is typical in one way: the humorous lightness of the writing belies depths of satirical complexity and agonised self-examination.

Nazi Literature in the Americas
By Roberto Bolaño