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

confronted with the most
horrendous acts they have ever witnessed, without being able to tell for sure
whether or not they are dreaming. The novel includes scenes of rape, sexual and
workplace sadism, incest, impaling, and human sacrifice in prisons crowded to
the physical limit; there are convoluted murder plots in the tradition of Conan
Doyle, colorful and realistic descriptions of every Paris neighborhood, and,
incidentally, one of the most vivid and spine-chilling female characters in
Venezuelan literature since 1950: Elisenda, the enemy of the two young men.
    Saturnalia
was banned for some time in Venezuela, and later
reissued by two South American publishers, before lapsing into oblivion, with
the author’s apparent consent.
    In the sixties he founded the short-lived Aryan Naturist Commune (or
“nudist colony,” as its detractors called it) near Calabozo, in the state of
Guárico.
    In his final years he attached little importance to his day-to-day
life and none at all to his literary works.

A MADO C OUTO
    Juiz de Fora, Brazil, 1948–Paris, 1989
    C outo wrote a book of
stories, which all the publishers rejected. The manuscript went astray. Then he
began work with the death squads, kidnapping, participating in torture and
witnessing the killing of certain prisoners, but he went on thinking about
literature, and specifically what it was that Brazilian literature needed. It
needed avant-garde, experimental writing, a real shake-up, but not like the
Campos brothers, they were boring, a pair of insipid professors, and not like
Osman Lins, who was downright unreadable. (Why did they publish Osman Lins and
not Couto’s stories?) No, something modern but more up his alley, a kind of
crime thriller (Brazilian, though, not North American), a new Rubem Fonseca, in
a word. Now there was a good writer; he was rumored to be a son of a bitch, but
Couto was keeping an open mind. One day, while he was waiting in a field with
the car, he had an idea: why not kidnap Fonseca and give him a going-over. He
told his superiors and they listened. But the idea never came to fruition.
Couto’s dreams were clouded and illuminated by the possibility of making Fonseca
the focus of a real-life novel. The superiors had superiors in turn and
somewhere up the chain of command Fonseca’s name evaporated—disappeared—but in
the chain of Couto’s thoughts, the name continued to grow and accrue prestige,
opening itself to his thrust, as if the name Fonseca were a wound and the name
Couto a knife. He read Fonseca, he read the wound until it began to suppurate;
then he fell ill and his colleagues took him to hospital, where they say he
became delirious: he saw the great Brazilian crime thriller in a hepatology
unit; he saw it in detail, the plot complete with set-up and resolution, and he
saw himself in the Egyptian desert approaching the unfinished pyramids like a
wave (he
was
the wave). So he wrote the novel and had it published.
Entitled
Nothing to Say,
it was a crime thriller. The hero was called
Paulinho. Sometimes Paulinho worked for certain gentlemen as a chauffeur,
sometimes he was a detective, and sometimes he was a skeleton smoking in a
corridor, listening to distant cries, a skeleton who visited every dwelling (no,
in fact only middle-class dwellings and those of the seriously poor) but never
came too close to the inhabitants. The novel was published on the Black Pistol
list, which was made up of North American, French and Brazilian thrillers, the
proportion of local titles having risen as funds to buy foreign rights ran
short. His colleagues read the novel and almost all of them found it
incomprehensible. By then they were no longer cruising in the car or kidnapping
and torturing, although they did still occasionally kill. I have to dissociate
myself from these people and be a writer, Couto wrote. But he was conscientious.
Once he tried to meet Fonseca. According to Couto, they looked at each other.
And Couto thought: He’s so old;