The Third Reich

I hang around a lot of board gamers. Grognards, train gamers, heavy euro gamers... folks who would look at you over their glasses if you mentioned Monopoly (full disclosure: I would, too). There's a certain toxic quality to this group, an underlying aggression and self-aggrandizing instinct which might come from focusing too steadily on a single perspective, their own. The authenticity of Bolaño's writing around Avalon Hill's Rise and Decline of the Third Reich (later reimplemented by Advanced Third Reich, then by GMT Games as A World At War) makes me think he must have played at least for a little while, though he tends to parallel gaming with Academia a little too much for me to believe he has ever attended a convention.

How right he gets the culture of a grognard doesn't matter at all, of course, but Bolaño's instinct to draw Udo's particular cloud of evil from that arena shows off his great talent for finding metaphor. He was primarily, after all, a poet.

I highly recommend this sneaky little novel. It is no less important than Bolaño's heavier works, though maybe a little rougher around the edges. I would love to put it together with Hawkes' The Blood Oranges in a class titled: "What I Learned Over Summer Vacation."

Finally, for anyone interested in a recent take on the current version of the game played in this novel I HIGHLY recommend the following essay. It is both humorous and poignant and shows what a phenomenon The Third Reich has evolved into: boardgamegeek.com/thread/940888/life-altering-game-deserves-kind-session-report

I returned The Third Reich yesterday, as I was kind of stuck on it. I enjoyed the beginning of it, as the writer talks about wargames in a very intelligent fashion. Set in the mid-80s, this would have been the height of wargame popularity, such as it was. The main character is an expert in the eponymous Avalon Hill game. I personally have never played it (not really big on strategic World War 2 games, even back when I was playing longer games), but I know of it and about it and the book does a good job of describing it. I really loved the part where he is a bit embarrassed to talk about his hobby in public, as many of us wargamers are. Most people think we are weird or nuts to be pushing pieces of cardboard around that simulate some of the bloodiest battles in history. At least those few who do know what it is. Most have no idea.

The translator has some problems with some of the terms, even the most basic one of 'wargamer'. She translated it to 'war games players', when just plain 'wargame players' would work. And she also talked about soccer teams as 'sections' - they watched a soccer game that had the "East German section" playing, which was really odd.

But I ran out of steam about halfway through the book, on page 126. The narrator, who was writing a journal about his vacation to the Spanish coast with his girlfriend, wasn't really all that attractive. Kind of a narcissist and really not all that likable. Makes you wonder how he would have ever hooked up with a very good looking girlfriend. And they meet up with another German couple who have a bad relationship, as well as a couple of other pretty bizarre sounding local characters. And when one of them disappears, many of them act in very illogical fashions. After I couldn't really bring myself to read it for a few days, I decided it was time to move on. I think it could be finished if I was in the right frame of mind, so I'm not going to give it the bottom score that I usually reserve for books that I give up on. I still might try it again.