“Later, after closing the curtains, I turn the lights back on and study one by one the various elements of my situation. I’m losing the war. I’ve almost certainly lost my job. Every day that goes by distances me a little further from an improbable reconciliation with Ingeborg. As he lies dying, Frau Else’s husband amuses himself by hating me, assaulting me with all the subtlety of the terminally ill. Conrad has sent me only a little money. The article that I originally planned to write at the Del Mar is set aside and forgotten….. Not an encouraging panorama.”
(Roberto Bolano The Third Reich p236 trans. Natasha Wimmer)
I love Roberto Bolano. Since first discovering him a couple of years ago I’ve come to love him more and more. He sits up there alongside Vladimir Nabokov in my personal pantheon of genius, and with one crucial difference: Nabokov’s work is a distant summit of perfection that can be worshipped and admired but never approached, whereas with Bolano you can kind of imagine – almost – how his effortlessly beautiful novels came to be made.
No one seems to know quite what to make of The Third Reich. Published posthumously only last year, it was actually completed in the late eighties, and was one of Bolano’s first attempts at writing a novel. For Adam Mars Jones in The Guardian, this seems to have been the signal to fixate on what he perceives as the book’s imperfections – being written without a foreknowledge of 9/11, for example, or its quaintly old school gamers with their boards and dice. I was baffled by Mars Jones’s review, which seemed determined to relegate The Third Reich to the category of literary prentice pieces, interesting failures. He tends towards the belief that it is only Bolano’s untimely death that grants the work its scant validity. I would argue the opposite, that it is Bolano’s tragically early departure from the literary scene that has given critics such as Mars Jones a false perspective. Suddenly there are all these ‘new’ Bolano works flooding the market – they can’t all be good, surely? This early stuff – interesting for the scholar perhaps, but not for the general reader. Stick to The Savage Detectives or By Night in Chile…..
I think that if The Third Reich were to appear in print tomorrow, by a new young writer (Bolano was just thirty-five when he wrote this, remember) it would be hailed as extraordinary, whether it had mobile phones in it or not.
It’s an odd, odd story. Udo Berger, a young German and champion gamer, is on holiday with his girlfriend Ingeborg on the Spanish coast. The hotel they’re staying at is the same hotel Udo used to come to as a teenager with his family a decade before. It hasn’t changed much – and neither has his adolescent crush on the hotel’s owner-manager, Frau Else. Udo is planning to use his time away to complete an article he’s supposed to be writing for one of the gaming magazines. Instead he finds himself getting sidetracked by the tempestuous to-ings and fro-ings of another young German couple, Charly and Hanna, diverted by the weird indolence of the resort itself and increasingly obsessed by his relationship with El Quemado, a disfigured beach hermit who turns out to be his gaming nemesis.
The story is told as a series of diary entries, and it’s this discursive, naturalistic style – so typical of Bolano in general as well as the diary format in particular – that is part of what makes this novel so compelling. The story emerges for us as it emerges for Udo – inextricably interwoven with the greater and lesser minutiae of each passing day. There is no sense that this novel is plot-driven – but as Udo himself is a driven character, we are driven, as we follow his thoughts, to share his obsessions.
Bolano was a poet long before he was a novelist – indeed, he always viewed his career as a prose writer as a necessary second best – and this is evident in everything he writes. There is an unhesitating appreciation of the weight of words, their relative values, their positioning within a sentence. He will write of love and philosophy with as much commitment as he will write of a walk to the chip shop – and vice versa – but in Bolano’s hands it is hard to notice where the merely descriptive begins and the reflective leaves off.
With Bolano, it is all about voice. His is the voice of art, with just enough of artifice to hold it in place. The Third Reich should become a bible for any writer.
Last week sometime I overheard M. John Harrison talking online about the difference between what he calls ‘desk fiction’ and ‘notebook fiction.’ ‘Desk fiction,’ he says, ‘is more plotted and manufactured. Found material is used but doesn’t directly generate the story.’ He cites his 2002 novel Light as his best ‘desk job.’
As his best notebook job he cites Climbers, and in his blog he describes the process of writing notebook fiction thus:
I made rules which enabled me to play a game about generating the story from the found material, rather than using the material as dressing for an already-made-up story. The idea is that your armature for any given story is its emotional and/or “philosophical” theme, & that theme is expressed initially as an arrangement of the found material. After a lot more operations, the found material ends up as a thematically driven narrative.
I got that idea from the early cinema documentarists, who never used a script but shot millions of feet of footage around their subject then spent two years editing the story into view. They would allow the observed material to tell them what it wanted to say. Flaherty used the image of an Inuit carver, whose greatest effort goes into seeing the subject already implied by the shape of the piece of bone he is going to carve.
I found all this both remarkably inspiring and a penetratingly useful way of thinking about fiction – both what it’s like when you read it and what kind of fiction you want to be writing. Reading this entry by MJH and thinking about it over the past few days it seems to me that the category of ‘desk fiction’ or ‘notebook fiction’ could be gainfully applied to most any novel, whether it was actually created from found material or not, that it’s a matter of feel, as well as method.
I don’t know how The Third Reich was written, but it has the feel of the ultimate notebook novel scratched into every page.
I don’t know how Nabokov’s Ada was written either (on index cards though, probably) but it has the feel of the most glorious desk job. Ever.
If I’m applying this to myself at all, I reckon I’ve been pretty much a full-time desk writer up until now. I aspire to notebook fiction though, I ache for it. And Roberto Bolano’s going to teach me how to write it…..