Written in 1989, The Third Reich commemorates the end of the post-World War II period in which Bolaño had until then lived his entire life. In play at every level, the associative chain reality=fiction=metafiction figures the aestheticizing complicity of a novelist’s decision to turn the historical Third Reich into the boardgame “The Third Reich” that lies at the heart of The Third Reich the novel. While the accommodations the novel makes to more familiar, popular, marketable modes of narration place it among the least experimental, more conventional of Bolaño’s works, its rendering and making visible of convergent regimes of the aesthetic and political merits the reader’s full attention. The central questions it raises about the legacies of German romanticism, through its rewriting of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, echo in the instrumentalizing reproduction, circulation, and distribution of ready-made commercial genres of all kinds that increasingly organize and shape aesthetic experience according to familiar marketing niches across all media. In its resistance to, but also complicity with, the futility of novelistic gamesmanship, the literary, intermedial game The Third Reich both embraces and contests an instrumentalizing, commodifying aesthetics.

Questions of genre, of the commodification of genres and of genres as commodities, of their specialization and marketability, questions central to the institutionalization of creative writing in the academy over the past several decades, preoccupied Bolaño early on when the idea of making a living from writing appeared beyond reach. Written in 1980 but only published in 2002 (its English translation not appearing until 2010), Amberes/Antwerp has aptly been called the “Big Bang of the Bolaño universe.” Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel’s characteristically dialogical, heteroglossic investments and poetry’s more monological tendencies, Antwerp pursues a consistently dialogic, heteroglossic self-questioning. Oscillating between minimalist narrative and meta-lingual, meta-fictional, meta-textual gestures, it continually stages its own suspension and recommencing. Torn between the pleasure and urgency of a “tax-free” poetic discourse and the commercial viability of the detective novel, the Bolaño of Antwerp aspires to write not “novels that are copies of other novels” but a genreless text in which he can affirm, without reserve, that “‘the only beautiful thing here is the language.’” Positioned roughly halfway between Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Antwerp remains Bolaño’s most disjunctively Rimbaldian performance.