Roberto Bolano's The Third Reich: Part I Spring 2011 issue
In Library Use Literature RPL
"By special arrangement with the Bolano estate, The Paris Review will publish The Third Reich in its entirety over the space of four issues (making it our first serialized novel since Harry Mathews's The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, forty years ago). A hardcover edition of this translation will be published at the end of the year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux." -Paris Review
from Slate:
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Roberto Bolaño’s Lost Manuscript Coming to The Paris Review
Posted Thursday, February 10, 2011 10:33 AM | By Nina Shen Rastogi
"If only all fans of dead authors could be so lucky. The Paris Review has announced that, over the course of four issues in 2011, it will be publishing Roberto Bolaño's novel The Third Reich, which was discovered among the Chilean writer's papers after his death in 2003. (It will then be published as a hardcover edition by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.)
The first-person novel appears to have been written in the late 1980s, before Bolaño began the novels that made his reputation here, The Savage Detectives and 2666. A blogger at the Independent summarized the new book as follows:
It concerns Udo Berger, a German war-gaming champion holidaying on the Costa Brava before a big tournament, who finds himself sucked into a paranoid battle with an enigmatic local figure, El Quemado. There was, in fact, a real strategy board game, Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, which Bolaño seems to have used as his model.
Natasha Wimmer, who translated both The Savage Detectives and 2666 into English, told Granta that the new book is "a buoyant novel, ominous at moments but mostly just funny." Spanish-speakers can read the first chapter of the novel here; for anyone else who's curious, the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog has a brief excerpt of Wimmer's translation.
Until the first chunk appears in the Paris Review's spring issue, you can get excited by reading Paul Berman's Slate essay on The Savage Detectives ("a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it inspires") and Adam Kirsch's review of 2666 (which "has the confident strangeness of a masterpiece")." -Slate