“Any thoughts about the word ‘posthumous’?” a cheeky
interviewer asked Roberto Bolano
in the last, waning days of his life. “It sounds like a Roman gladiator,” Bolano said. As in: Spartacus
, Commodus,
Posthumous. “An
invincible
Roman gladiator,” he added. “Or so poor Posthumous would like to think, in order to give himself courage.”
Bolano was hardly short on courage, at least in literary matters. Nor did he need valor to speak his prickly, spirited mind. He is, if critics around the world can be believed, the most fearless Latin American novelist of his generation. Born in Chile, raised in Mexico, a resident of Spain, he straddled the Spanish-speaking world, flouted its assiduously guarded boundaries. His peripatetic characters — obsessed geeks who played, read and wrote as if it were their last day on Earth — had something of Posthumous in them. Prickly, spirited, invincible, many saw life between a book’s covers only after their author was gone.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - "The Third Reich: A Novel" by Roberto Bolano
Bolano died of a liver ailment in 2003, a few years after the release of his masterwork “Savage Detectives.” He was 50 years old. With his illness diagnosed as incurable in 1993, Bolano spent 10 years battling “the hot whore” of death, writing as much as his feverish mind could summon. He was tireless, manic, producing a veritable flood of poetry and prose — so obsessed by the work at hand that he forgot to go to medical appointments. He would be spotted now and then in the streets of the small Spanish town where he lived: gaunt, his book bag slung over one shoulder, hair askew, the eternal cigarette dangling from his lips. He knew perfectly well that his remedy was the pen. If Bolano died before his time, his works have been swarming to life ever since. Every season seems to herald a new release by and about him. At the start of 1998, he was a virtual unknown; a decade later, three of his novels — “Savage Detectives,” “2666” and “Distant Star” — were judged among the top 15 Spanish-language books of the past quarter-century. Poor Posthumous, indeed.
“The Third Reich” is the latest of Bolano’s works to stride into the arena. Written in 1989, when Bolano was still waiting tables and selling trinkets at jewelry counters, the manuscript existed only in longhand. But after his death, 60 pages of it were found typed up, signaling Bolano’s intent to rework it for publication. Fascinating and quirky, the novel displays all the elements of a Bolano story: love, death, destiny, obsession and a few of life’s twists that would test even a gladiator’s courage.
At the heart of this tale is young Udo Berger, a German war-games champion who, with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, revisits the small Spanish town where he spent his childhood summers. Anticipating a languid two weeks on the beach, Udo and Ingeborg check into the quiet hotel where he used to stay with his parents. The same proprietors are there: an old, fading recluse and his beautiful young wife. In time, Udo and Ingeborg meet another German couple, Charly and Hanna, whose appetites for danger will take them to a darker, wilder side of town.
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