The Third Reich - Softcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033053579X ISBN 13: 9780330535793

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

Discovered after his death, in 2003, Bolano left this novel complete as a typewritten manuscript - meticulously corrected by hand - it is published in English translation for the first time. Udo Berger, aspiring writer and wargames champion of Stuttgart, decides it is time to take his new love, Ingeborg, on holiday to the Costa Brava. He brings along his new game, The Third Reich, which he plans to practice for the upcoming wargames tournament in Paris, where he will finally meet the sleek American champion, Rex Douglas. However, things take a sinister turn when some shady locals arrive on the scene and one of Udo's friends disappears. Pursued by a shadowy detective who visits his nightmares in quest for the truth; the surrealistic landscape of the Costa Brava and his increasingly feverish dreams draw him further into delirium. Finally, he finds himself locked in mortal combat when he engages in a game of Third Reich with the enigmatic and disfigured El Quemado - a foreginer who lives in a Kafkaesque burrow on the beach. Unpublished in any language during Bolano's lifetime, this story of one man's journey into nightmare will make a welcome addition to this author's already astonishing oevre.

About this title

About the Authors

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

Natasha Wimmer is an American translator who is best known for her translations of Roberto Bolaño’s works from Spanish to English. She grew up in Iowa and also spent a few years as a child in Madrid. Wimmer attended Harvard University and studied Spanish literature. After college she began to work for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, as an assistant and later as a managing editor, where she happened upon Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. Bolaño’s translator was too busy at the time to work on this project and Wimmer was thrilled to take it on herself. Her translation was incredibly well-received. She has since gone on to translate several of Bolaño’s works as well as the work of Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2007 she received an NEA Translation Grant, in 2009 she won the PEN Translation Prize, and she has also received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her translation of Bolaño’s 2666 also won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year. She is a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches translation seminars at Princeton University. She lives in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 033053579X
• ISBN 13: 9780330535793
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288