No Substance #165: Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas and Other Imaginary Books
I finished Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas on the weekend. I’m a big fan of Bolaño. If you’ve been reading No Substance long enough you won’t find that to be a surprise. If not, well, I think 2666 is one of the best novels of the 21st Century, if not the best (it’s early in the century so who knows how that statement will look in 2200, when I’m 134). I like his other work just fine, as well. Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, Amulet, and Last Evenings on Earth are all great, excellent books. Bolaño died young, but there’s a lot to like in his body of work, though it’s not perfect, and it does have bad moments. But even Bolaño’s bad moments are interesting, especially if you’re a fan of 2666 and other later works. Even in bad pieces, you can see Bolaño working towards those works great works of his.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is a strong Bolaño book, though it also contains that same hint of the future. The book is a small encyclopedia of fictional biographies, a collection of right wing figures who were, by and large, failures. They are in turns vain, violent, arrogant, obscure, and sometimes connected to various real life figures in literature. The last piece, ‘The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman’, steps out of the impersonal recounting that is at the heart of the book and offers a short story rather than a pure encyclopedic entry. It’s the longest and, fortunately, the best piece in the collection and functions, much like Borges ‘Man on a Pink Corner’, to tie the collection together. Bolaño would later take this short piece and turn it into the novella, Distant Star. The novella isn’t as successful, at least in my mind, and sometimes that’s how it is. Sometimes a really excellent short story is just that.
Still, I genuinely loved Nazi Literature in the Americas. It really combined my two loves: Bolaño and fake biographies. I’ve loved fake biographies ever since I read Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy. It was my first Borges. Maybe that’s why I love it over all other Borges, though honestly, I get along with Borges in all his ways. Years ago, I bought Rhys Hughes’ homage to Borges, A New Universal History of Infamy because of how much I loved Borges’. I think Hughes’ book is out of print, but if you can track down the old Night Shade edition, it’s a lovely object. It’s decent, as well. It’s clever and knowing. Sure, it’s not Borges, but Hughes isn’t trying to do that, exactly. It’s a little weirder, a little more fantastical.
Is Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives the modern father of this form, though? Perhaps, perhaps not. I honestly can’t tell you because I simply don’t know. I suspect he might be, but I also suspect that Schwob has his influences as well. Still, Schwob was an influence on Borges. If I remember right, Borges translated some of Schwob’s pieces before he wrote his own. Schwob is great, I might add. Not just this book, but all his others as well. I kind of feel like he has fallen off a lot of peoples radars, which is perhaps what happens to authors whose work was published late in the 19th Century. Still, if you’re interested, Wakefield Press in the US has been issuing new translations of his work in slick, beautiful little paperbacks. They did Imaginary Lives a couple of years back.
Brendan Connell’s Lives of Notorious Cooks is another book of fake biographies and it feels like it was influenced more by Schwob than by Borges or anyone else. Connell’s collection is focused on cooks, and he moves from figures such as Agis, Rufus Estes and Yi Ya in his fifty odd fictional biographies that don’t go beyond a few pages and are weird and sly, like much of Connell’s work. The book was published originally in 2012 by Chômu Press. I don’t know if it’s still in print (I am fairly sure Chômu doesn’t exist anymore) but if it isn’t you might be able to find a copy second hand.
There’s a whole field of these kind of books, of course. I talked a bit about fictional biographies on social media (I am still on Twitter because it’s still best to find new books on, but given a chance I’d switch to Bluesky). Anyhow, I was reminded of Ryan O’Neil’s Their Brilliant Careers and told about C.D. Roses’ The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts, which was reportedly an influence on Bolaño. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t read these books (though I remember looking at O’Neil’s one time in a bookstore and making a note to pick it up later only to forget about it as you do). I haven’t read Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, or Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots either – though this last one isn’t said to be fictional, but rather real. It has a great title, though. But still, after hearing about them, I put them on my list to buy and will because as I said, I love the form. I don’t know. What can I say? Sometimes I’m ridiculously simple to please.
Anyhow, it’s coming on the middle of December now and that means everything and everyone is going on break, including me. I’m going to shutdown No Substance until the 8th of January and then I’ll be back with my usual nonsense. Hopefully you’ll have a nice break and you’ll take care of yourself and those you care for.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)