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Loading... Nazi Literature in the Americasby Roberto Bolaño
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Nazi Literature in the America's is a fascinating pseudo-dictionary covering over a half century of fictional Latin American fascist writers. While the title suggests the book focuses on Nazis, the authors and poets discussed are more general fascists and madmen (or madwomen as the case sometimes is) that strict Nazi's. The book itself is a fascinating look into the world of Roberto Bolano, and is self-referencing and at times very funny. While the articles themselves vary, most are only a few pages long. All in all, Nazi Literature is a strange and interesting book on (fictional) extremist literature and Bolano's sly portrayal of what literature as a whole might mean. ( )The format of this fiction is as a biographical guide to Nazi writers, pre- and post-World War II. I was expecting the "entries" to tie together into some sort of recognizable narrative. Bolano does not do this. Indeed, Bolano is not even interested in this. Each entry is freestanding and could be subtracted from the whole as easily as, say, new entries could be added. While there is some cross-pollination it doesn't pull the disparate parts together into a story. While the book has relevance for Bolano's œuvre as a whole, it is not the place to start if you are new to this author. Try BY NIGHT IN CHILE or DISTANT STAR, or even 2666 first. A good, but limiting idea. Very humorous in some places and a quick read. Certainly worth the time, but it isn't deep or penetrating, just a light read about a dark, taboo subject. A novel for monsters. Yet another compendium of literary lives, of the fictional sort. At the heart of each of these mini-bio "wiki” entries is a deceptive question: What makes for a Nazi writer, the written work or the life led? The alternative answer is probably worthy of a new theory. It is interesting to compare Bolaño's apolitical creations of Nazi literary writers with Javier Marías's mini-bios of real writers in Written Lives. no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)
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