An American Parody

...Take the Argentinean Futurist Silvio Salvático, who advocates “the re-establishment of the Inquisition...

...lifelong writers’ grants...

...One inconspicuous note, hidden away in the book’s bogus bibliography, neatly makes this clear...

...The Californian John Lee Brook, for instance, “Widely regarded as the best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood,” gets full treatment...

...The old priest, disguised as a farmer, watching the execution from a distance, exemplifies the attitude of Mother Church, exhausted and terrified by the violence of mankind...

...Etcetera, etcetera...

...the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race...

...The ensuing conflict between Peru and Argentina (including Uruguay and Paraguay), which he dubs ‘the Combat of Castor and Pollux.’ The uncertain victory...

...Interracial conflict in Peru (although when he says Peru, and this is perhaps more important than his theory of racial struggle, to which he devotes no more than a couplet, he is also including Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador...

...Published in 1996, it is unlike anything today’s mainstream literature affords...

...corporal punishment in public...

...The informed reader,” we are told, “will have no trouble identifying the protagonist of this story as the Duchess of Bahamontes, and her two antagonists as the inseparable Zubieta and Fernández-Gómez...

...polygamy...

...Bolaño started his career as a poet and founded, with his friend Mario Santiago, an iconoclastic school of poetry, indebted to Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats, that they dubbed “infrarealism...

...English translation 2007) has probably made the biggest impression...

...The novella,” the deadpan narrator continues, “is not without humor, which is remarkable, given the place and date of its composition: Paris, 1944...

...This will quickly be evident to astute readers...

...FOR THOSE BORN before World War I, 1936 was as pivotal a year as 1973 would be for Bolaño’s generation...

...And now we have Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 227 pp., $23.95...

...and the building of new cities in Patagonia...

...Delivering a sharp kick in the pants to the all but institutionalized Latin American magic realism (it “stinks,” he said), Bolaño pointed the way toward an alternative mode of expressing the bizarre and tragic history of his native continent...

...A number of his fictional Right-wing writers went to Madrid and volunteered their services to General Francisco Franco...

...A journalist from a Mexico City newspaper represents the country’s intellectuals: hollow, faithless individuals, interested only in money...

...If writers occasionally play heroic historic roles, they often—too often—have acted as history’s clowns, dupes and villains...

...Bolaño has created a whole interconnected world of imaginary writers and patrons...

...On Fiction An American Parody By Brooke Allen THE EARLY 1970s saw the United States deeply involved in a struggle over the limits of a President’s power that was finally resolved in accordance with the Constitution...

...Bolaño called Latin America “the insane asylum of Europe,” but its authors are not the only ones he skewers...

...In post-Perón Argentina, the “neo-gaucho” poetic style attracts countless disillusioned conservatives: “the Nazis, the embittered and the sociopaths...

...Max von Hauptman,” a bard “who even-handedly explored and sang the magnificence of the Aryan and the Masai races...

...a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation...

...Bolaño saw his generation, many of whose members died or “disappeared” during Pinochet’s rule, as a lost one: “We were stupid and generous, the way young people are, who give everything and don’t ask for anything in return, and now nothing remains of those young people...

...He then went back to Mexico before settling in Spain in 1977, where he remained until his death in 2003 at age 50 from a longstanding liver ailment...

...Then there is the opportunistic and adaptable Haitian who writes under numerous pseudonyms and personae: The patriotic “Max Mirebelais” plagiarizes Aimé Césaire’s poems and invokes the shade of Toussaint L’Ouverture...

...His novels and stories are being translated into English out of order...

...A favorite activity of the infrarealistas was heckling Mexico’s national icon, Octavio Paz, during his pompous public readings...

...One of them is “Street without a Name,” where “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...

...the colonization of Antarctica...

...The coup prompted Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño to declare: “Violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the ’50s and were about 20 years old at the time of Salvador Allende’s death...

...We are regaled with synopses of his better-known poems...

...Latin America is sown with their bones...

...whores, the lives of movie stars, and prison celebrities and their moral authority both inside and outside...

...and “Max Kasimir,” the rapturous celebrant of Négritude...

...This is the perfect parody of a certain type of 20th-century fiction...

...As all this indicates, Bolaño is an ingenious parodist, with a firm grasp of every literary fashion and pretension...

...Or the Peruvian poet Andrés Cepeda Cepeda, who is committed to “A return to the Iron Age, which for him coincides roughly with the life and times of Pizarro...

...Snobbery, narcissism, messianism, and hatred are hardly confined to a particular ideology, as Bolaño knows only too well...

...With wit, spirit, an appreciation of the absurd, and an underlying tragic consciousness, he encapsulates the history of a hemisphere’s worth of mad utopias...

...Almost simultaneously, in neighboring Chile, General Augusto Pinochet ousted the democratically elected head of state and destroyed the country’s Constitution...

...When I’m talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I’m talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general...

...Both of these works were brought out in Argentina under the imprint of The Fourth Reich, a reactionary publishing house to which many of the authors in this volume owe their careers...

...Each generation follows a characteristic trajectory and has concerns specific to its period...

...The possible defeat of both sides, which he prophesies for the 33rd year of the third millennium...

...This work, translated by Chris Andrews, is a “novel” (for lack of a better word) in the form of a fictional encyclopedia of extreme Right-wing South and North American authors...

...The soldiers of the firing squad are the misguided, de-Christianized Mexican people, imperturbably attending their own funeral...

...In an interview about Nazi Literature in the Americas, Bolaño remarked that its focus “is on the world of the ultra Right, but much of the time, in reality, I’m talking about the Left...

...Another is “Santino and Me,” composed of “fragments of conversations between the poet and his parole officer, Lou Santino, relating to sports (which is the most American sport...

...Younger writers pursue more contemporary interests, like Argentino Schiaffino, avant-garde playwright and bard of the Buenos Aires soccer gangs...

...The Mexican Irma Carrasco, for example, who wrote and acted in tableaux vivants intended to raise the morale of Spain’s wounded soldiers, or the effete Colombian aristocrat Ignacio Zubieta and his close friend Jesús Fernández-Gómez, author of The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe and a long poetic text entitled Cosmogony of the New Order...

...But in the last decade of his life Bolaño turned to prose, a move that gave his prodigious gifts for satire and parody a much wider audience...

...Bolaño, who spent much of his adolescence in Mexico, returned to Chile in 1973 to participate in the Allende revolution and was briefly imprisoned by the military government after the coup...

...In the final three lines, he alludes laboriously to the birth of a blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima...

...DESPITE ITS serious subtext, Nazi Literature in the Americas is light in tone until it arrives at its last section, the story of the Chilean Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, who is not merely deluded, utopian, messianic, or stupid, but truly evil...

...Summing up the plot and significance of Irma Carrasco’s apocalyptic novel Vulture Hill, he also shows himself to be a sharp anatomist of literary formulas: “. . . The Vulture Hill of the title, where her brother, Father Joaquín María . . . was executed, represents the future geography of Mexico: barren, desolate, a perfect scene for future crimes...

...Another of Fer nández-Gómez’ works is the erotic, transparently autobiographical The Countess of Bracamonte...

...Though riveting, the chapter does not seem to belong with the rest of the book—as the author probably realized, because he later took the material and fashioned it into a novel of its own, Dark Star, with Ramírez Hoffman reappearing as the murderer Carlos Wieder (wieder meaning “again” in German...

...So far The Savage Detectives (1999...

...This section departs from the encyclopedia-entry convention and becomes a quest, involving Bolaño in his own persona as he interacts with the other characters...

...indeed they made a methodical study of Neruda and de Rokha’s free verse, with its long lines and powerful cadences, and often cited the pair as exemplary practitioners of militant poetry...

...All you had to do was change a few names— Mussolini instead of Stalin, Stalin instead of Trotsky—slightly adjust the adjectives, replace a few nouns, and you had the ideal pamphlet poem...

...the creation of the largest air force in South America...

...the abolition of tax on artists’ incomes...

...Referring to the Pinochet-supporting editors of a literary magazine, it points out that “they did not disdain Pablo Neruda and Pablo de Rokha...