Nazi Literature in the Americas
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- € 5,99
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- € 5,99
Beschrijving uitgever
Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature.
Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
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The title chosen by Bola o (1953 2003) for this slim, fake encyclopedia is not wholly tongue-in-cheek: given the very real presence of former (and not-so-former) Nazis in Latin America following WWII, this book, despite being fiction, still had j'accuse-like power when first published in 1996. The poets described herein, though invented, seem even at their most absurd plausible, which is the secret to this sly book's devastating effect. And as one proceeds from an entry on Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce ("In high spirits, Edelmira asked for the F hrer's advice: which would be the most appropriate school for her sons?") to one on Carlos Ram rez Hoffman ("His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute"), it becomes clear that there is a single witness to all of these terrible figures, one who has spent time in one of Pinochet's prisons and is bent on coolly totting up the crimes of fascism's literary perpetrators. Some readers will recognize figures and episodes from Bola o's other books (including The Savage Detectives and Distant Star). The wild inventiveness of Bola o's evocations places them squarely in the realm of Borges another writer who draws enormous power from the movement between the fictive and the real.
