The Third Reich
A Novel
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town.
Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real.
Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many hallmarks of Bola o's work are present in this novel, written in 1989 and found among his papers after his death in 2003. Presented in diary-like entries over a two-month span late in an unspecified year after WWII, the book follows the unstable Udo Berger, a man who veers between love and hate and is barely able to control his violent impulses. Udo has come from Stuttgart with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, to the Costa Brava in Spain where he vacationed a decade before. A self-absorbed, egotistical autodidact war game champion, Udo obsessively plays a strategy game called the Third Reich while Ingeborg enjoys the beach with Charly and Hanna, another German couple they've met, and three local characters: the Wolf, the Lamb, and a badly burned beach worker called El Quemado. Charly goes for a swim and disappears, and Udo makes advances on the hotel manager, an older woman who calls his game "obscene... horrible... tasteless." Udo soon lures El Quemado to play and events turn feverish and surreal; the novice defeats Udo, symbolically repeating the Nazis' downfall. Infused with unease and menace, deliberately ambiguous about reality vs. perception, Bola o's novel is a psychological thriller without a convincing payoff. Its atmosphere, however, clearly prefigures the preoccupations of the author's later masterpieces.
