More like a Cemetery

Michael Wood

  • BuyNazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews
    New Directions, 227 pp, £17.95, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 8112 1705 7
  • Buy2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
    Picador, 898 pp, £20.00, January 2009, ISBN 978 0 330 44742 3

Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes. This book is not a satirical attack on the right-wing imagination in North and South America: it is a darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible.

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