Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño

North
American science-fiction writers was a source of sarcastic, scornful amusement
(Borda, as opposed to the majority of his colleagues, had not even a rudimentary
knowledge of science; his ignorance in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics,
quantum theory and information technology was proverbial); that his mere
existence, in short, brought out the basest, most deeply hidden instincts in the
people whose paths he crossed, for one reason or another, in the course of his
life.
    There is, however, no evidence to suggest that any of this demoralized
him. In his
Diaries
he blames the Jews and usurers for everything.
    Gustavo Borda was just over five feet tall; he had a swarthy
complexion, thick black hair, and enormous very white teeth. His characters, by
contrast, are tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. The spaceships that appear in his
novels have German names. Their crews are German too. The colonies in space are
called New Berlin, New Hamburg, New Frankfurt, and New Koenigsberg. His cosmic
police dress and behave like SS officers who have somehow managed to survive
into the twenty-second century.
    In other respects, Borda’s plots are entirely conventional: young men
setting off on initiatory voyages; children lost in the immensity of the cosmos
who encounter wise old navigators; stories of Faustian pacts with the devil;
planets where the fount of eternal youth may be found; lost civilizations
surviving in secret. . . .
    He lived in Guatemala City and in Mexico, where he worked at all
sorts of jobs. His first books went entirely unnoticed.
    After the translation of his fourth novel, Unsolved Crimes in Force-City , into
English, he became a professional writer, and moved to Los Angeles, where he was
to spend the rest of his life.
    In answer to a question about the puzzling abundance of Germanic
elements in the work of a Central American author, he once said: “I have been
tormented, spat on, and deceived so often—the only way I could go on living and
writing was to find spiritual refuge in an ideal place . . . In a way, I’m like
a woman trapped in a man’s body. . . .”

MAGICIANS, MERCENARIES AND MISERABLE CREATURES

S EGUNDO J OSÉ H EREDIA
    Caracas, 1927–Caracas, 2004
    A man of impetuous and
passionate character, the young Segundo José Heredia was nicknamed Socrates
because of his insatiable appetite for discussion and debate on all manner of
topics. He preferred to compare himself, however, to Richard Burton and T.E.
Lawrence, for like those authors, he too wrote tales of adventure, three to
begin with:
Sergeant P
(1955), the story of a Waffen SS veteran lost in
the Venezuelan jungle, where he offers his services to a community of missionary
nuns in permanent conflict with the government, as well as with local Indians
and adventurers;
Night Signals
(1956), a novel about the dawn of
Venezuelan aviation, the research for which included learning not only to fly a
prop plane but also to parachute; and
The Confession of the Rose
(1958), in which, forgoing the vast spaces of the Fatherland, the author
confines the adventure to a mental hospital, and in fact to the patients’ minds,
making abundant use of interior monologue, diverse points of view, and a
forensic-medical jargon that was widely admired at the time.
    In the following years he traveled around the world several times,
directed two films and gathered around him in Caracas a group of young writers
and critics, with whom he founded the magazine
Second Round
, a
bimonthly devoted to the arts and certain sports (mountain climbing, boxing,
rugby, football, horse racing, baseball, track and field, swimming, hunting, and
game fishing) which were always examined from the writer’s or adventurer’s point
of view, by the finest stylists Segundo José Heredia could muster.
    In 1970 he published his fourth and final novel, which he considered
his masterpiece:
Saturnalia
, the story of two young friends, who in the
course of a week-long journey through France are