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    The Third Reich: A Novel
    The Third Reich: A Novel
    The Third Reich: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Third Reich: A Novel

    Written by Roberto Bolaño

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town.

    Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real.

    Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    TranslatorNatasha Wimmer
    Release dateNov 22, 2011
    ISBN9781427214232
    Author

    Roberto Bolaño

    Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

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    Reviews for The Third Reich

    3.5/5

    149 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent reading of a remarkable book from a great author. The audiobook is Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      Engaging. My first Bolano ? I’ll find another. Then I’ll have more of an opinion
    • 4/5
      29. The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño (2011, 288 pages, read June 24 - July 2)translated from Spanish by Natasha WimmerI stumbled across this in the spring 2011 issue of The Paris review. The novel was found posthumously among Bolaño’s papers (and only partially typed). The writing is dated to 1989, which makes it Bolaño’s first novel. (He had previously published poetry.)This is my first look at Bolaño, who I’ve been interested in but also intimidated by. Based on his titles, what I know of the plots, and what I think I know about South American writers, I was expecting something difficult to read and understand. So I was surprised how gentle the writing is here. This is a complex and interesting novel, which touches on some dark and serious things, but it doesn’t read that way. The story opens with a Udo and his girlfriend on a beach vacation in Spain, from Germany. They are young. Udo narrates and brings up his history of vacations in Spain, and then his obsession with a game based on World World II, titled The Third Reich. He considers himself something like the master of the game in all of Germany. It’s pretty clear early on that Udo is on some kind of mental edge and we expect him to collapse somewhere along the line. But...they’re lovers on the beach and Bolaño softens the atmosphere so the book slows down. It pulled me in. I was relaxed reading this, fully escaping my own real world and was able to just hangout in the book and enjoy watching Udo’s quirky collapse. Much to think about here. I don’t imagine this is Bolaño’s best or most powerful novel, but I’m very happy to have read it.
    • 3/5
      Somehow weird and kafkaesk - I had this constant feeling of there being a secret message hidden message that I just didn´t get. Also had the constant feeling that the protagonist just not behaves like he should regarding his age. Mixed feelings overall!
    • 5/5
      This is a book so strange, yet conventional, yet transcendent. Bolano has a strange motif of Germany and Germans running through all of his works. This book is the apex of this motif, a brilliant sort of death and rebirth in Del Mar. I am baffled by those who call this a throwaway, published only of the strength of Bolano's other masterpieces. This work stands alone and is arguably Bolano's most hopeful and optimistic vision.
    • 5/5
      This was my third Bolaño novel, (the first two being "2666" and "The Savage Detectives"). Familiarity with where he would eventually end up as a novelist makes reading "The Third Reich" an eerily fun experience. It also illuminates the central themes of his later works. "The Third Reich" is the name of a strategic board game that mirrors the battle chronology of World War II, and Bolaño has made the champion player a young German on vacation in Spain. It's worth noting that Bolaño had a special interest in the ineffable qualities of evil that seem to pass through time and space in a steady, yet unknowable, way. The real-world migration of Nazi war criminals to South America seems connected in an almost spiritual way to Bolaño's fictional portrays of German war veterans and Nazi mystique."The Third Reich" is a surprisingly good novel, even though it often feels like it was written a century ago. I know that doesn't make sense, but I kept thinking about Thomas Mann while I was reading this. Some plot points and characters don't appear to make sense, but they somehow fit. It's a gloomy, old-world novel that keeps reminding you that it is actually rather contemporary.
    • 5/5
      This early Bolaño novel is self-consciously immersed in the world of wargames. "The Third Reich" of the title seems to be the game "The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich", and the gaming session that the book narrates seems to make sense and to be mostly reproducible on a real board.Although I found it revelatory that Bolaño was a gaming enthusiast (he had to be, considering this novel), and that he could capture so well the mix of dedication and embarrassment that is so prevalent in the hobby, this is not one of the main strengths of his novel. The Third Reich is even better as an exploration of our relationship with violence and authoritarianism, even in our most seemingly trivial acts. As is usual with Bolaño, this intense exploration implies going down a descending spiral into darkness; there seems to be little happening in the surface, but the nightmares lurk beneath. Great characters, powerful images.
    • 4/5
      Not long after finishing the impressive "The Savage Detectives", yesterday I finished reading "The Third Reich", Roberto Bolaño's posthumous book that was launched this year.The book was written in 1989 (therefore prior to "...Detectives" and to the monumental "2666", his last oeuvre), but it is possible to see in it the unique characteristics of Bolaño's mastery - the literary references, the unforgettable characters, the total domain of writing and narrative.The story starts slow, intentionally mimicking the apparent boredom of the Costa Brva town where the action takes place, but everything soon builds up to a tense, suffocation and surreal psychological tale of war, politics, love, literature, and everything else we came to find and love in Bolaño's works.