Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2011: Udo Berger is the German national champion of The Third Reich, a tactical WWII-themed board game seemingly designed to reveal the worst in self-absorbed obsessives like Udo. Even while on vacation at the lush Spanish resort of Costa Brava, Udo is unable to tear himself away from a game he's begun with a beach worker. He ignores his girlfriend as she goes off to enjoy the company of Charly and Hanna, another German couple that can be counted among the many people Udo cannot stand. When Charly goes missing, Udo shows little interest, choosing instead to plot the conquering movements of his army tokens as they march across a hexagonally divided map of Europe.
It may not be the best introduction for new readers of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano, but fans of his biggest works, such as his international breakout The Savage Detectives or the posthumous five-volume epic 2666, will see familiar elements and themes in The Third Reich. Bolano draws a fine line between memory and reality, but blurs them in the final pages, as the novel slowly drifts from realism to a nightmarish fever dream--leaving readers with an ending that is ambiguous yet haunting. --Kevin Nguyen
“Novelists tend to be remembered for their most remarkable characters, and in Udo Berger, Bolaño has created someone complex, sometimes frustrating and absolutely unforgettable . . . Compassionate, disturbing and deeply felt, [The Third Reich is] as much of a gift as anything the late author has given us.” ―Michael Schaub, NPR
“Bolaño was a writer with tricks up his sleeve, and he distributed his wiles across many genres: novellas, poetry, short stories, essays and the epic 1,100-page 2666. So what's The Third Reich like? Capering, weird, rascally and short. Imagine a cross between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, the CLUE board game and a wargames fanzine. It's a scathing novel with a lot of exuberance to it, not unlike the man who wrote it . . . The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño's first-rate efforts.” ―The Economist
“[Bolaño] makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world.” ―Ben Richards, The Guardian
“When I read Bolaño I think: Everything is possible again.” ―Nicole Krauss
“Not since Gabriel García Márquez . . . has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does . . . It's no exaggeration to call him a genius.” ―Ilan Stavans, The Washington Post Book World
“[Bolaño's] work . . . is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction.” ―Christopher Goodwin, The Sunday Times (London)
“Novelists have been smashing high and low together for a century, but Bolaño does it with the force of a supercollider.” ―Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker
“[Bolaño] has the natural storyteller's gift--but more important, he has the power to lend an extraordinary glamour to the activities of making love and making poetry.” ―Edmund White
“A successor to Borges, García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar.” ―Siddhartha Deb, Harper's Magazine
“The most influential and admired novelist of his generation.” ―Susan Sontag
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.
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.
