As the title suggests, the reader will find here a review of a book of reviews of writers and books that have neither existed nor been written, Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. In writing his own book of imaginary reviews, A Perfect Vacuum, Stanisław Lem mused the following:

The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty… In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he enslaved himself – by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another’s (LEM 3).

This being true, writing about people that never existed and reviewing their work takes fiction and criticism to a different level: firstly, one is subject to a set of rules, defined by one’s choice of theme; secondly, one is subject to reviewing one’s own work and theme previously chosen. By putting him or herself in such position, is the writer likely to become less free in writing? Not necessarily. One of the main characteristics of fiction writing and literature is that what stands in an unwritten sheet or screen is the infinite, a writer can write whatever he or she wants. So, this chained position, as determined by Stanisław Lem, in which the writer and the critic are gradually losing their freedom, respectively, is also the way to tame their own creativity. However, when writer and reviewer are the same, and the review is the fiction, this does not apply, because fiction and review interchange as if they were one only.

In Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño offers the reader a biographic encyclopaedia of fascist writers of the American continent. Even if one doesn’t sympathise with their fascist ideas, when reading, one is moved by the fierce idealism in which magazines and journals get published and disdained, poems go unnoticed, novels ignored. Though the book is divided into thirteen parts, where writers are grouped according to their gender, family, genre, this division is not always clear. However, there is a sense of chronology, provided that, as the book unfolds so are the characters, ranging from mid nineteenth century to the final years of the twentieth century, becoming younger. Nonetheless, this chronological evolution is also not clear and defined. After the thirteen parts that deal with thirty one characters characters, Roberto Bolaño presents the reader with an ‘Epilogue For Monsters’ in which he goes to list secondary figures, people who were not worthy of extensive and extended mention; publishing houses, magazines and places; and a list of books, a bibliographical reference. All these add to the coherence of the theme and the encyclopaedic listing provided.

To make the bibliographical notes more credible, Roberto Bolaño mentions writers, poets and philosophers, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante. In the final section, before the epilogue, Roberto Bolaño himself makes an appearance, which can be read as the most autobiographical moment of the book.

Worthy of note is the section about Willy Schürholz, who is born in 1956 and dies in 2029. Given that this book was first published in 1996 and the English translation found its way to USA and Canada in 2008, and to UK in 2010, it is interesting that this character outlives Roberto Bolaño and dies more than thirty years after this book has been published. Willy Schürholz and many other people who both outlived Roberto Bolaño and 2010 – year in which this review is being written – seem to be a bit incongruous, but in the long run, the global overview o history of literature, after 2029 the problems raised here will make sense no more, if only somehow anachronistic.

In another section, whilst detailing the life of Max Mirebalais, one cannot help but to note the similarities with the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. Both develop four main heteronyms: Max Mirebalais unfolds in Max Kasimir, Max von Hauptmann, Max Le Gueule, Jacques Artibonito; Fernando Pessoa unfolded in Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, de Campos, Bernardo Soares. Naturally, the imaginary writer’s heteronyms correspond to the Fernando Pessoa’s. And, as expected, Max Mirabalais dies at the age of forty seven, the same age Fernando Pessoa had when he died.

Unfortunately Roberto Bolaño’s book does not stand as tall as Jorge Luis Borges imaginary reviews stood in the 1940s in Argentina or as Stanisław Lem book did in the 1970s in Poland. By the time Roberto Bolaño was writing his imaginary reviews and writers, the phenomenon of internet DIY and the multiplication of writers’ personal pages and Wikipedia pages fuelled by their egos had mined an extremely fertile genre. Despite all these shortcomings, Nazi Literature in the Americas displays a great inventiveness and literary knowledge that, not being an end in itself, is a great resource material for writers who flirt with the post-modern notion of re-writing.

BOLAÑO, Roberto (2010). Nazi Literature in the Americas. Translation by Chris Andrews. London: Picador.
LEM, Stanisław (1999). A Perfect Vacuum. Translation by Michael Kandel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.