“Look after yourself, Bolaño, he said, and off he went.”
Short story as encyclopaedia entry and nightmare of fascism. Bolaño spends most of Nazi Literatures in the Americas in an objective third person as he documents the lives and works of various fictional fascist writers – football hooligan poet brothers, a novelist who spells out LONG LIVE HITLER using the first letters of each chapter, a Texan who edits the Aryan Brotherhood’s literary journal from within prison – but the final section moves into first person. After the intoxication of the previous pages, things sober up. The jokes stop. Bolaño himself is enlisted in a quest to find a murderous, sky-writing Nazi pilot poet (who will reappear in the novel Distant Star), against the backdrop of Pinochet’s brutal coup. The final line, when Bolaño is told to look after himself, calmly underlines the terror in the world that Bolaño has witnessed. With the obsession of someone not really being listened to, Bolaño told us again and again of the inextricability of literature and evil. I mean it, he tells us here, I’m not just making it up.
From Nazi Literatures in the Americas, Picador, 2010
A Personal Anthology 