Anthony Cummins
WAR GAMES
The Third Reich
By Roberto Bolaño
(Translated by Natasha Wimmer)
(Picador 277pp £18.99)
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The latest title to appear in English from the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño presents itself as the diary of a young German tourist on the Costa Brava one summer in the 1980s. Udo Berger has taken a holiday against his better judgement: it's not his day job at an electricity company that bothers him, but his reputation as a champion war gamer. To the dismay of his girlfriend, Ingeborg, who would rather lie on the beach and hit the clubs, Udo has brought along his ever-present boards and counters, not to mention a stack of reading for an article he plans to write on strategy in advance of an imminent conference in Paris - all of which means he must maintain contact with Conrad, his mentor back home in Stuttgart.
At his best, Bolaño is a terrific writer, but it may deter sceptics that, despite most of the author's books being short, his most touted novel, the fiendish 2666, is huge, and, for vast stretches, grim as hell. The fourth and longest of its five parts documents in forensically repetitive detail the rapes and murders of dozens of Mexican factory workers. Based on real-life killings that date back to 1993, the victims of which number hundreds, 'The Part about the Crimes' dares you not to care - a device that cuts horrifically to the quick of why most of the actual 'femicides' remain unsolved.
No such ethical weight attaches to readerly boredom in The Third Reich, which was written in 1989, and discovered among Bolaño's papers after his premature death in 2003. 'Of the fourteen infantry corps that ... should be present in the European theater,' Udo explains, 'at least twelve should cover Hexes Q24, P24, O24, N24, M24, L24, Q23, O23, and M23.' If entire pages sound like this, it serves to remind us that - along with freaky similes and elastic syntax - the patient accumulation of data has always been central to Bolaño's style. So much of it is incidental, but no less compelling for that, because his adroit imagination continues to conjure up persuasive factoids. Evaluating his rival tacticians, Udo decides that 'Only Rex Douglas knows anything', then adds, in parenthesis, that 'Beyma, perhaps, is historically rigorous, and Michael Anchors is original and full of enthusiasm'; these names don't reappear. Early on, we learn that Udo has 'published two articles in Cologne':
although I noticed that slight revisions or small changes had been made to each, everything from whole sentences eliminated on the pretext of lack of space - though all the illustrations that I requested were included! - or corrections for style, this last a task performed by some nobody whom I never had the pleasure of meeting, even by phone, and regarding whose real existence I have grave doubts.
But he doesn't say what the articles are actually about, and it's not clear that it even matters, at least not in the way that we tend to think fictional information matters (because it helps us make sense of the story). Such antics can leave readers feeling short-changed: in a review of Nazi Literature in the Americas, Bolaño's faux encyclopaedia of extremist authors, Alberto Manguel complained that it's 'not enough to invent a character and lend it a name ... and a few circumstantial details'. Yet this ignores the benefit of Bolaño's essentially superficial approach, as a more sympathetic review by Benjamin Kunkel suggested with reference to his story 'Enrique Martín': 'You don't feel that ... Martín is a robust character inhabiting a well-made story, you feel ... something perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and that instead of having a story he had a life.'
The story in The Third Reich drifts gradually into a surreal mystery. Udo and Ingeborg fall in with another German couple, Charly and Hanna, who are also in their mid-twenties. Both are out for a good time, but Charly's drinking is out of control. He goes missing after a risky moonlight swim with two vagabonds named Wolf and Lamb, who may be implicated in a rape. The upshot for Udo is that he stays on for longer than planned, whiling away his evenings by playing a Second World War board game with a disfigured South American known as El Quemado ('The Burned One'), and embarking on an affair with a chambermaid while failing to seduce the hotel proprietor's wife. It's the hotel proprietor, laid low with a mysterious illness, who alerts Udo to the likelihood that El Quemado takes a particularly vengeful interest in playing war games with a German, knowledge of which only serves to worsen the protagonist's frequent nightmares.
Bolaño's themes are ever-present whatever he writes. Literary ambition, which he tackles most squarely in The Savage Detectives, his novel about a teenage poet seeking recognition from an avant-garde clique, emerges here in the epistolary relationship between Udo and his mentor, Conrad. Udo intends to 'destroy all the schemes ... All the old ways of playing. Under my system, the game will have to be reimagined,' a promise that has the ring of a manifesto. It's no great surprise when Conrad, concerned that Udo's extended break is becoming a distraction, urges him to focus on his 'career', adding - apropos of nothing - 'the novels, yes, listen to me, the novels you could write if you weren't such a mess'. By all accounts, this is advice Bolaño himself followed, cleaning up his act to produce all his major work in a seven-year flurry. It's a pity he had to die for the English-speaking world to take note.
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Anthony Cummins is a freelance reviewer.
