What I Am Reading: "The Third Reich" by Roberto Bolaño

This book isn't about the Third Reich the Reich, it is about the Third Reich the tabletop wargame. I know a little bit about wargaming - I was in a wargaming club at GW, Strategic Crisis Simulations, and a few of my friends went on to the professional wargaming community. This book is about how a wargame enthusiast - the champion of Germany in the game Third Reich - deepens his interest in the game into an obsession during a beach town vacation.

I was introduced to/reminded of Roberto Bolaño from the list of postmodern novels that I have linked to elsewhere, and I had intended to do a few of his in a row. In fact, 2666 is sitting at this moment in a closed library, since I could not take possession of it before the quarantine began. In its place, I went for this shorter book about a familiar topic. The first half of the book is spent following Udo around as he and his girlfriend visit a beach town in Spain that he vacationed in as a youth, and as they and a boorish fellow German couple get involved with some seedy locals and carry out some desultory clubbing and partying. In the second half of the book, after the other German man has been lost at sea while windsurfing, Udo's girlfriend goes home as he stays in town to challenge a strange local, El Quemado, to a game of The Third Reich. El Quemado is a burn victim, and his background is only hinted at, but it is implied that his injuries came from the war. He rents paddleboats to tourists, and lives in a beach hovel made from the boats.

Udo sinks into melancholy as he stays to game and is chased around by various parasitic locals he had befriended, and unsuccessfully pursues the hotel's proprietress, a fellow German. The book doesn't always keep a good handle on exactly what is gripping him or why, and he seems to me to be one of those literary characters who acts out in ways that the reader just has to roll with, filling in the psychological motivations on their own. Normally this would be fine, I am a fan of off-season beach towns and of wargames, but this book was a little too hazy for me, and the main character a little too opaque for a shorter work. From what I can tell it has some middling reviews, and was published posthumously; hopefully Bolaño's more famous works improve on this one. It did make me want to get in on a game of Diplomacy, though.