USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fiction: The Third Reich: Part I (Roberto Bolaño-Author)

http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6083/the-third-reich-part-i-roberto-bolano

The Third Reich: Part I

Roberto Bolaño

By the time of his death in 2003, at age fifty, Roberto Bolaño was already a somewhat legendary figure. A Chilean who spent most of his life in poverty and exile, Bolaño helped found the Infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico City. Later, he settled in the town of Blanes, on Spain's Costa Brava. In the mid-nineties—according to ­legend—Bolaño set poetry aside, hoping to support his wife and young child by writing fiction. Over the next ten years, he produced a string of books, including By Night in Chile and The Savage Detectives, that made him the most influential Latin American novelist of his generation. He died soon after finishing his most celebrated work, 2666.

This legend was complicated two years ago by the discovery of The Third Reich (El Tercer Reich), a full-length novel that Bolaño wrote in 1989. That the novel exists in typescript (and that Bolaño retyped the first sixty pages when he bought his first computer, in 1995) suggests that he wished to see it published during his lifetime. Why he never did is anyone's guess. From the first sentence, The Third Reich bears his hallmarks. The irony, the atmosphere of erotic anxiety, the dream logic shading into nightmare, the feckless, unreliable narrator: all prefigure his later work. The young novelist must have been exhilarated, and possibly alarmed, to discover his talent so fully formed.

By special arrangement with the Bolaño estate, The Paris Review will publish The Third Reich in its entirety over the space of four issues (making it our first serialized novel since Harry Mathews's The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, forty years ago). A hardcover edition of this translation will be published at the end of the year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Roberto Bolano

    

Review

"A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated…classic Bolaño."---The Washington Post

"A beguiling introduction to Bolaño…The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño's first-rate efforts."---The Economist

"A perfect novel…Compassionate, disturbing, and deeply felt, it's as much of a gift as anything the late author has given us."---NPR

"Think Kafka at a beach resort…For those who like their literature to make them look with fear and suspicion at even the most mundane events, The Third Reich is calling."---The Cleveland Plain Dealer"Bolaño is a master of atmosphere...in the tradition of Georges Simenon's gloomy romans durs...or the tightly controlled hallucinations of Alain Robbe-Grillet."---The Wall Street Journal

"A brilliant first novel…all the more remarkable for its prescience."---The New Republic

   

    About the Author

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

Translator:

Natasha Wimmer has translated many works of fiction and nonfiction by Spanish language authors, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Restrepo, and Rodrigo Fresán, as well as Roberto Bolaño.

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

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