The Third Reich - review

Robert Bolaño has been more published in death than in life. Before the Chilean novelist died in 2003, at the age of 50, his work was unavailable in English. The Third Reich is the 10th of his novels translated since, along with several volumes of poetry and short stories.

This is a very early novel, written in 1989 but discovered only after his death. It lacks the polish and ambition of his masterpiece, 2666, but many of the familiar Bolaño themes are present: obsession, a delight in absurd fictional worlds, and a persistent, dreamlike sense of anxiety and impending violence.

The story is presented as the journal of Udo Berger, a twentysomething German war games champion, on holiday in Spain with his girlfriend, Ingeborg. They befriend another German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to several dodgy locals, including "El Quemado" ("the burned one"). The enigmatic El Quemado is disfigured by horrific burns; Berger is fascinated by him. When Charly disappears, Berger ends up staying, during which time he teaches El Quemado to play his favourite game, The Third Reich.

Trapped in the stifling atmosphere of a Costa Brava hotel, Berger plays a single game of The Third Reich for days against an increasingly confident El Quemado. Berger's descent into squalor and paranoia is plotted against and mixed up with the relentless progress of the game ("Autumn 1941. Battles in England.") It is the only certainty left - but even the game starts to slip from his grasp.

Most of the characters remain only partially sketched. Berger himself is an unlikeable figure, feckless and self-absorbed, unable to connect with others even when he wants to. His semi-autistic focus on wargaming provides most of the humour, as he details a fictitious world of gaming magazines and expounds on his favourite Wehrmacht generals and games counters ("the First Parachute in Anzio, the Lehr Panzer and the First SS LAH in Fortress Europa")

As elsewhere in Bolaño's work, this deliberately absurd Nazism co-exists with a queasy sense of brutality and violence lurking just below the surface of events - the near-gang rape of a teenage hotel maid, the rumour of another rape, El Quemado's burns. Even Bolaño's language conveys nightmarish confusion and menace: better weather is heralded by "a dark red cloud - the color of dirty blood - taking shape in the east".

Yet despite the build-up of tension, the novel ends in anticlimax. The claustrophobia subsides, the seaside town sinks back into mediocrity, and there is a kind of epiphany for Berger. All just a bad dream? As ever, Bolaño is much more stylishly unsettling and haunting than that.