I’ve had the feeling I had when I started reading Third Reich a few times, brought on by the opening pages of The Lord of the Rings, my first Hemingway book, and Tulips by Sylvia Plath, for example. It was the feeling of reading something I knew I’d remember and love my whole life, the feeling of being excited to explore a writer new to me, the feeling of wanting to immediately consume everything they’ve ever written. And this is what Third Reich did to me immediately.
As I kept reading, I kept finding more to like. The book, while reminding me of The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, also didn’t at all. Bolano had taken the idea of an obsessive, intrusive, all-encompassing war game and run with it, while creating apathetic, psychologically advanced characters and tension. This tension, along with lurking violence, death, and danger, kept me flipping pages, and the build-up of a contest between a phantom and a man whose life and motivation is draining away is almost painful. El Quemado, a burn victim living on the beach in a resort town in Spain, is challenging the German champion, Udo (the protagonist) in ways he never thought possible. The game mimics Udo’s strength and resolve throughout the book, he begins his vacation with a girlfriend, he’s happy, he’s motivated, confident. He begins his game with Quemado thus, and by the end of the book he is pitiful, scrambling, paranoid. I read with a growing pit in my stomach, growing voices of warning and advice in my thoughts.
This interaction and urgency in a literary work is a special thing, I think, and reading a book like this inspires a reader. Third Reich is not only a beautiful object, the cover is amazing, but the work really lives up not only to the feeling and look of the cover art, but the reputation of Roberto Bolano’s writing. Third Reich is an intense mixture of literaryiness, Kafkaesque bewilderment, science-fiction, realism, and psychological thriller. It’s strange to think that these elements could become compulsory within a single work, but Third Reich almost decides for you that you will obsess over it.
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