The Third Reich

I was remarkably disappointed that the board game at the center of The Third Reich appears to be a real one, and that Bolaño has rendered the rules essentially faithfully. While the story does work with the real game, it doesn't need the game to be real. (With a different author, the game gets more elaborate, more complex, more involved, until Udo actually is commanding the armies of the Third Reich. But that's a novel that would be a lot different than this one, and more than likely, appreciably worse.)

In this novel, Bolaño explores the boundaries between constructs and reality, responsibility for history, and the hold memory (both cultural and personal) has on us.

Udo, our protagonist, is a bright guy, but he's not quite that bright. He doesn't seem to grasp the history here (at least he's on holiday in Spain, rather than another country), or that he's not always two moves ahead of everyone else. Sure, being the German champion of this particular wargame does mean you're a bright guy, but Udo seems to think it means he's always the smartest man in the room.

This meanders in a bit of a dreamscape for awhile, but it doesn't really come to a climax -- it just kind of peters out. The framing device of the novel (that this is a diary the protagonist is keeping so his writing will be better in the future) is transparently funny, given that this is something written earlier in the author's career.