Michael Wood writes:

Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes. This book is not a satirical attack on the right-wing imagination in North and South America: it is a darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible.

(LRB 26 February 2009)

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a darkly comic novel masquerading as a dictionary of the literary far right in North and South America. None of the writers described here existed; Bolaño’s concern is to anatomise a particular kind of (mainly) Latin American intellectual. Merciless, and sometimes very funny, satire.

New Directions | hardback |ISBN: 9780811217057