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 | PDF Download