Nazi Literature in the Americas

Learn by fire. One of the things that is so striking about Hitchcock is how even his objectively slighter works — taken in isolation, and attributed to some other respected director — would be absolute smash hits. Ten out of ten films. I'm reminded of Hitchcock by Bolaño in reading Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not just because both men are fascinated by formalist structures, nor because both seem to draw from a deep wellspring of what violence against women means — and of the psychic reckoning that violence forces upon a community. But because this book, which is probably correctly described as one of his more middling and trivial works, was (and remains) so masterfully inventive and potent that I'm simply swept away. The book's summoning not just of a bibliography, but of an entire extended universe around that bibliography, is of course fun — evocative of similar jaunts like the filmography of James O. Incandenza in Infinite Jest, or the ever-swelling apparatus of Pale Fire. But…

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