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Read Nazi Literature In The Americas (2008)

Nazi Literature in the Americas (2008)

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3.87 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0811217051 (ISBN13: 9780811217057)
Language
English
Publisher
new directions

Nazi Literature In The Americas (2008) - Plot & Excerpts

Perfect bedtime reading. Short chapters, all to the point. I loved this book while I was reading it, and then discovered an even profounder respect for this book when I was typing up my notes about it. It combines a penchant for indexicality with fervent imaginings and astute critical intelligence. If you value all three as highly as I do, this is a perfect book. Here are examples of the kind of writing you will be treated to:She dreamed of studying architecture and designing grandiose schools to be built in parts of the country as yet untouched by civilization.An anthology of work by young, well-bred poets whose aesthetic objectives included avoiding cacophony, vulgar expressions and ugly-sounding words sold unexpectedly well. She remained lucid (or "furious" as she liked to say) to the end. might be volcanoes or printing defectssetup: He had what it takes to fail spectacularly: even his earliest works have a discernible style of their own, an aesthetic direction that he would follow with hardly a deviation until the day he died. payoff: Schürholz was an experimental poet.Both reading and humiliation were to be constant features in his life. a novel about friendship, full of exhaustive all-night conversationsseventy line poem dedicated to a weaselAccording to eyewitnesses, he spent his last hours very calmly reading his own poemsif you don't like this kind of writing, and the following excerpt in particular, this book is not for you, there's just no hope for your sense of humor or intelligence:A lesson clear as water. It is time to put an end to democracy. Why are so many Nazis still alive? Take Hess, for example, who would have made it to a hundred if he hadn't committed suicide. What makes them live so long? what makes them almost immortal? the blood they spilled? the flight of the Book? a new level of consciousness? The charismatic Church of California went underground. A labyrinth where Ernst and Leni went on fucking, unable to uncouple, like a pair of dogs on fire in a valley of sheep. In a valley of blind sheep? A valley of hypnotized sheep? My voice is hypnotizing them, thought Rory Long. But what is the secret of longevity? Purity. Searching, working, preparing for the millenium on various levels. And some nights he felt that he was touching the body of the New Man with the tips of his fingers. He lost a hundred pounds. Ernst and Leni were fucking in the sky for him. And he realized that this was no vulgar, if torrid, hypnotic therapy, but the veritable Host of Fire.tThen he went completely crazy and Cunning occupied every nook of his body. He had money, fame, and good lawyers. He had radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and television networks. And he has robust good health, until one midday in March 2017, when a young African-American man named Baldwin Rocha blew his head off.

In the one notorious ‘Book’ in 2666, Bolano numbs his reader with one vignette of rape and murder after another. They read like a police blotter. In Nazi Literature in the Americas, one capsule biography of an extreme right-wing writer follows another. They read like encyclopedia entries. There’s an ostensible simplicity there; but this is not just some mere exposition of cleverness. I mean, it can’t just be that, can it?(Whenever I make some pretense of discussing what a work of fiction really means, I always offer the disclaimer that: I don’t know. And I really don’t. Just thinking out loud on the keyboard.)Bolano writes about Evil (with a capital E). And nothing epitomizes evil like the Third Reich. So, Bolano goes again and again to that Nazi well. Which is nice for a reader (looking around my very quiet office) who doesn’t like to burn too many brain cells trying to spot the allegory. There is no hidden DSM-V denouement; no child abuse or bedwetting or near death experience to add explanation. Evil Is.But that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh at it. Among the poems of John Brock that Bolano assures us “merit special attention” is Street Without a Name: “a text in which quotations from MacLeish and Conrad Aiken are combined with the menus of the Orange County jail and the pederastic dreams of a literature professor who taught classes for the prisoners on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” Bolano has that kind of mind. My guess is that that came out in one take.There are quick bios of 100 or so made-up writers and artists. Here’s just two:Arthur Crane. New Orleans, 1947 – Los Angeles, 1989. Poet. Author of a number of important books, including Homosexual Heaven and Disciplining Children. He indulged his suicidal tendencies by frequenting the underworld and hanging out with lowlifes. Others smoke three packs of cigarettes a day.Antonio Lacouture. Buenos Aires, 1943 – Buenos Aires, 1999. Argentinean military officer. He defeated subversives but lost the Falklands. An expert in the “submarine” technique and the application of electrodes. He invented a game using mice. The sound of his voice made prisoners tremble. He received various decorations.Some of the “dates of death” for these writers are beyond the date of publication and beyond today, as I write this: 2021, 2022, 2015, 2029. Again, I don’t know and maybe it’s all too simple, but Evil exists, it is. It did not end at Nuremburg with a few well-deserved hangings. Evil is embedded and lasts. At least until 2666.

What do You think about Nazi Literature In The Americas (2008)?

Christopher WilsonBaltimore (Maryland), 1977 -- Kalamazoo (Michigan), 2055In 2008, Wilson was enthralled by the story of the New Jersey couple who publicly feuded with a timid grocery store establishment that unconstitutionally refused to bake a swastika cake for their son, Adolf. It was during this time that Wilson decided to fight political correctness through baby names. Having spent the greater part of the previous decade toiling away in the federal government, Wilson had developed a predilection for acronyms. With a son named Connor in tow and another boy on the way, Wilson decided that he would attack the liberal establishment with more subtlety than his predecessors. He named his second son Oliver. Then came the twin girls, Maddie and Molly. Then came Udolf (a rather obvious hint) followed by Nancy, Irene, and Samuel. From all accounts, Wilson's wife was unaware of his ulterior motives up until the day she died giving birth to their ninth child, Miles. With his message far from complete, Wilson spent the next year courting young women with wide hips. He eventually married an Argentinian woman who claimed to be Diego Maradona's second cousin. Within weeks she was pregnant and within a few more weeks her stomach had grown to four times its original size. Wilson and his new bride soon discovered that she was pregnant with quintuplets. After giving birth to the litter of babies, Wilson's second wife died from childbirth complications involving amniotic fluid entering her bloodstream. Exhausted and overwhelmed at the thought of finding another wife, Wilson decided to cut his message short. He gave the quintuplets the following names: Brandon, Lauren, Oscar, Wyatt, and Sharon. Wilson never revealed what his original message was going to be but insisted that the message as it stood was able to get his point across, albeit less eloquently than he had originally planned.Wilson spent the latter part of his life writing poetry and spending no more than a year in any one city. His poem "Wizard" hinted that his nomadic life was another one of his subtle acronym messages. The last three known cities where he lived were Kansas City, Missouri, Kennebunkport, Maine, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he died from skin cancer.
—Chris

When Amalfitano subjects his pharmacist to a short mental screed about the drawbacks of writers' minor works in 2666, this is exactly the kind of thing he's talking about. A series of biographical sketches of fictional western-hemisphere writers with far-right sympathies, it'll take you no more than two or three hours to read. In its personalization of its characters' politics, it offers a bit of a clue to Bolano's modus operandi; it's just not as inventive as you'd like it to be, and not as inventive as its great premise lead me to believe it was going to be, anyway.You can look at it as a bunch of habits of thought to avoid, or as an archaeological study of the aftershocks of World War II and the wars of ideology that followed. The Phalangists and fanatics herein are sometimes cliched - especially the two repressed homosexual poets who join the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War - but more often surprising, like the Haitian plagiarist and the murderer who writes nihilistic verse across the sky. There are plenty of Fascist versifiers who you're supposed to sympathize with, like the woman who turns to pieties of the far Right in her efforts to liberate herself from a Communist husband who beats her. Juxtaposed against the more cynical exploitation of literature by some untalented hacks (like the soccer-fiend, poetry-writing gang members) and the out-there efforts of the P.K. Dick-like writers who use Nazism as more of an aesthetic than political dictum, you get the feeling Bolano is trying to tell us: yes, these people are all nutjobs, and a lot of them are truly ill-intentioned, but some of them had their reasons. The very tippy-toe end - which has an actual plot, one I won't spoil - suggested to me that the smug, routine abhorrence of fascism should perhaps not preclude a touch of mercy.You just don't need a book to do that, and doing so seems a little beneath Bolano in the first place.I'd actively discourage people interested in Bolano's work from reading this first, but I'm still glad I've read it - the continuities between this and the world of 2666 (paging General Enterescu?) make it worthwhile as a coda, at least, and there are hints of the wry third-person voice Bolano got so good at later.
—Conrad

Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolaño, New York, 2008. A collection of faux-criticism and thumbnail biographies of authors who never existed beyond the pages of this book (and others in his oeuvre). The style is direct, written for the public rather than the academic and marred by only a handful of clichés (which may have mushroomed up in translation). Humor is dry but ever-present. Much of the text is told in summary and therefore a bit distant but an occasional "scene" slips through, most remarkably in the final "chapter" entitled The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman, where Bolaño steps out from behind his writing desk and gives himself a part to play. On page 92 we learn that what we are reading is more than satire or post-modern fun but also (mildly) science fiction. Later, deep within the index, we know that Nazi Literature in the Americas has been "published" sometime after 2040. What we don't know is why. This book will be compared, no doubt, to Pale Fire but it does not puzzle and pester us in the same way. It does not surprise us in the same either. The title may cause discomfort to family members. Your Jewish wife, for example, might give you one of her "looks." Reassure her by reading (craftily selected) passages aloud. Though, because of its form, it will never be called a "page turner" (except in jest), any intelligent reader will profit from turning its pages. Borgesians should be particularly delighted. And there is at least one imaginary book described within that I wish really did exist: Poe's Room, an artless "response" to his Philosophy of Furniture.Boloño, Roberto. Santiago, 1953 - Blanes, 2003. Chilean author who, until recently, was mostly unknown in the United States. However, since the success of his The Savage Detectives, he has become the (I can't believe I'm going to use this word) literati's "must read."
—Brent Legault

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