The Third Reich (novel)

The Third Reich (El Tercer Reich in Spanish) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño written in 1989. It was discovered among his papers following his death and published in Spanish in 2010. An English translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in November 2011.

Plot

The novel concerns Udo Berger, a German war-game champion, who returns with his girlfriend Ingeborg to the small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. When one of his friends disappears Udo is forced to play a strategy game with a mysterious local.

Serialized publication

By special arrangement with the Bolaño estate, the Paris Review plans to publish the complete novel in four installments over the course of a year with illustrations by Leanne Shapton. Thus far the magazine has published two installments, the first in the 2011 spring issue and the second in the 2011 summer issue. This is the first serialized novel published in the magazine since Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, forty years earlier.

Critical reception

The introduction to the first installment published in the Paris Review sees the novel as a precursor to Bolaño's later works:

From the first sentence, The Third Reich bears his hallmarks. The irony, the atmosphere of erotic anxiety, the dream logic shading into nightmare, the feckless, unreliable narrator: all prefigure his later work. The young novelist must have been exhilarated, and possibly alarmed, to discover his talent so fully formed.^[1]

Michael Schaub, reviewing the novel for NPR, stated that it was "compassionate, disturbing and deeply felt...in Udo Berger, Bolano has created someone complex, sometimes frustrating and absolutely unforgettable."^[2]

References

External links

• "Lost Roberto Bolaño novel to be serialised this spring". The Guardian. 14 February 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/14/lost-roberto-bolano-serialised-spring.