Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano is best known for his diverting, absurd and surreal use of narratives that traverse distant lands and times. Though these seem to go off the track and into different trajectories, they almost invariably serve to push the reader to stretch his imagination. That you can never really guess where Bolano will take you next is a different matter.
In the posthumously published The Third Reich, Bolano follows the travails of a group of vacationers in the coastal town of Costa Brava in Spain, chronicling their anxieties through a series of journal entries by Udo Berger, a German war-games champion who, together with his girlfriend Ingeborg, returns to Del Mar, the summer resort he had once visited with his parents. At the resort, the two meet another German couple, Charly and Hanna, that joins them in the vacation revelries of swimming, drinking and frequenting clubs. Bolano also introduces a couple of locals, the Germans Wolf and Lamb, and El Quemado.
Despite the idyllic setting, the reader is made well aware of a sense of menace, a foreboding that something sinister will soon disrupt the holiday. This feeling is accentuated when Udo, after Lamb tells him that El Quemado is actually South American, begins to feel somewhat “disturbed” and threatened. El Quemado slowly begins to gain a hold on Udo, who senses something in the South American that he is unable to comprehend. This void, this yearning to decipher and make sense of him, in a way inexorably draws Udo towards El Quemado. “He could hypnotise me and ruin my life forever,” Udo says at one point.
Tragedy strikes when Charly is lost at sea while windsurfing. All attempts to locate him fail, and Hanna heads back to Germany. Ingeborg follows. But Udo decides to stay back. This is inexplicable since Udo didn’t think much of Charly. His reasoning that Charly’s body hadn’t been recovered so he wanted to see the case through to the end is clearly an excuse. The question of why Udo stays back in Costa Brava begins to haunt the reader. The tone of the book is now almost Kafkaesque.
So Udo stays, and is embroiled in an epic game of The Third Reich with El Quemado. From here, the war game assumes dramatic proportions. Though there are no hints of Nazi ideology in the text, but the associations are too many to be missed. Udo becomes obsessed with military formations and operations, which the game demands. His mental instability is, in some ways, reflected in the fact that he retains his “pale” hue, in sharp contrast to everyone else’s suntan. It is as though Udo fights against his opponent for his very identity.
Udo is aware of the fact that he is rapidly losing his grip on reality. At one point, he considers raping a hotel maid, though this thought terrifies him. He says, “I’m a nervous wreck…. But my face remains unchanged. And my pulse is steady. I scarcely move a muscle, though inside I’m falling apart.” Later, thoughts of Goethe and the Axis armies fill Udo’s mind. His descent into instability is complete when dehumanising thoughts (“people are like sheep”) fill his mind. He is now Goethe’s “sullen guest on the gloomy earth”.
The Third Reich, both as a game and as an analogy of the Nazi regime, is not entirely disconnected from the historical facts and the devastation it caused. It is a clash of cultures. Udo Berger himself can be seen as the Nazi regime, descending into madness and ultimately losing the war to his opponent. One may also read the book as portraying the inherent brutality in man, which is only revealed in the face of a crisis.
There is, however, no seemingly logical conclusion to the book other than the long confrontation between Udo and El Quemado. Though this may seem odd considering the tempo and the build-up in the text, it is of a piece with the book’s undercurrent, that of the purposelessness and futility of war.
Bolano succeeds in creating multiple worlds. At one level, the game’s tactical moves and strategies can be read as Udo’s version of conflict and how he braces for it. At a different level, The Third Reich is not merely a game played between Udo and El Quemado. It is a depiction of Udo’s internal strife, one that is ignited by the South American and one that is tearing Udo apart. Bolano’s use of military operations and strategies to portray struggles is exemplary. He makes fear and suspicion key and integral players and uses these to look at the most mundane of events.
“All war is deception,” said Sun Tzu. The Third Reich offers us a glimpse into the heart of the deceit.
THE THIRD REICH
Roberto Bolano
Picador
277 pages; Rs 499
