Nazi Literature in the Americas

[Dave Monroe]

Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

"It's the sort of clever idea an author like Borges might sketch out
in the short space of one of his stories -- but what's so remarkable
is that Bolano takes the idea and sees it through... Nazi Literature
in the Americas is an astonishing work." -- The Complete Review

Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño's
books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in
1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an
important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical
dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme
right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It
is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies,
including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for
Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons
mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they
are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds.
Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an
imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical
clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between
Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera
Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse.
Authors from twelve different countries are included.  The countries
with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).

http://www.ndpublishing.com/authors/bolano.html