For those still mourning the untimely death of Roberto Bolaño, the release of a new novel posthumously after the immeasurable 2666 is in itself an event to celebrate . Also because the boom of the Chilean writer in recent years - left the United States where, however, have made an unlikely icon of youthful rebellion very restrictive, as well as philological incorrect, compared to its real literary greatness - has created a real generation of scholars who anxiously awaited the publication of The Third Reich , of the press talked for a long time. The book, published in Italy by Adelphi, is remarkable, and the hand of Bolaño always inspired. However, this is a novel written in 1989, which was still nine years before the great masterpiece published in Life, The Savage Detectives, and shows on some pages not yet completed the metamorphosis into the wonderful and the obscure poet infrarealista Universal Magnetic narrator able to tell as few others the edge of the abyss. Yet, though sometimes ruthless, The Third Reich bolan is a novel in every sense, with some of the characters really well and some phrases that are already see the impending greatness. You can read, for example, on page 29: "As animals of the deep, black shoes formed in an island uniform among the shadows that covered the beach. Sitting on a float in one of those strange vehicles, his shirt unbuttoned and his hair uncombed, Charly was waiting for us. "Very nice, even without context.
How Raymond Carver (and reminded of the memorable final line of the poem drinking and driving : "My brother gives me the elbow. In a minute, maybe, something will happen"), Bolaño is also a master at creating a tense atmosphere around the events that, in large part, in the eyes of all of us would look like normal: a holiday on the Costa Brava, the friendship with the Spaniards idle, the encounter with the mature and charming owner of the hotel the empty beach at night or during a summer storm. But from the beginning, perhaps because the lens always vaguely hallucinatory the narrator - Udo Berger, wargame enthusiast, from which the title is the name of one of these games, but obviously that can not Bolaño also be an entire universe - the novel slides along a boundary that our minds of readers feel bright signposts that mention the word "Danger". The tragedy comes, perhaps , but basically this is not the point, a closer look than ever. What unites
The Third Reich and the greatest novels later Bolaño is the sharpness with which utilizes its epiphanies ("What a stupid thing to die on holiday, I commented") and the intuition that a certain " manner," it said in a tone very flattering, it is necessary to establish a mythology. In the history of Udo, Ingeborg, Hanna and Frau Else (Mrs. fascinating character, but when she is writing Bolaño lose something) the hand of the great Chilean gets to visionary moments, interspersed, however, some weakness. There are still signs of an author who was forming , who had seen the way to go and, with his great talent, he tried to beat a different path, that in a few years he would have devoted the largest narrators of the XXI century.
