The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño: What Udo’s Diary Gives Away

Part of: The Deep Reader

Reading Note: The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

The Third Reich was a birthday gift. My birthday is August 20, and I opened the book on August 20. Its first diary entry bears the same date. A small coincidence, but a particularly fitting introduction to a novel whose narrator keeps trying to establish what the things around him mean.

Udo Berger, a German war-game champion, has returned to a hotel on Spain’s Costa Brava with his girlfriend, Ingeborg. He spent childhood vacations there, and the opening pages have the comfortable particularity of a place revisited: familiar music, hotel staff, the remembered freedoms of being away from home. He also brings a board game and plans to work on strategies. The diary will record the holiday and improve his writing.

What drew my attention was the feeling that he kept missing something important by design. Bolaño gives Udo enough perceptiveness to make his account absorbing, then lets his explanations lag behind the details he has noticed. We read his assessments alongside the evidence they cannot quite contain. The distance between them can be funny, embarrassing, or frightening, sometimes within the same passage.

Spoilers follow, including the novel’s ending.

The correction inside the sentence

Udo’s reasons for keeping a diary sound promising. Daily writing, he explains, should exercise memory, develop reflection, and cultivate parts of his sensibility that remain immature. The practical motive is less elevated: editors have been cutting and correcting his articles about games. He wants to improve his prose so that its defects will no longer distract from his insights.

The account of one editorial quarrel contains a small demonstration of why we should pay attention to those defects. Udo remembers threatening an editor before hanging up, then interrupts himself: “although in the end it was he who hung up on me.” The qualification is lodged inside the sentence that was supposed to preserve his victorious exit. He supplies the correction himself. We need no witness to expose the discrepancy.

That willingness to correct himself makes the voice more interesting than a continuous lie. His prose can recover an inconvenient fact while leaving his larger estimate of himself intact. The editor remains a pompous enemy, the criticism an insult, the publications that welcome his work confirmation of its quality. Accuracy about who put down the telephone first coexists with considerable resistance to asking why the conversation went so badly.

Bolaño keeps that resistance active when the writing exercise is interrupted by hotel business. Udo demands a table large enough for his game, becomes rude to the staff, and eventually has to apologize to Frau Else, the woman who runs the hotel. Her reprimand reaches us through a narrator absorbed in her face and the possibility that she finds him amusing. The dialogue gives her an independent objection; his surrounding commentary folds it into his attraction to her. Both remain on the page.

Even his attempt at solidarity is badly judged. When Frau Else says she is busy, he points out that she, too, is choosing work over the beach. Her responsibility for a hotel and his decision to spend a holiday preparing game strategies briefly become equivalent in his account. We can hear the awkwardness without Bolaño inserting a second voice to explain it. The diary’s supposed training in reflection has become the place where its unfinished work is most visible.

A hut becomes a fortress

The first sight of the pedal boats establishes that Udo’s attention can be unusually good. Walking back from a club, he notices their arrangement on the beach when his companions see nothing remarkable. He considers the ordinary ways rental boats might be stored, inventories the deviations, and recognizes an intention in what could otherwise look like vandalism. Some boats stand on their sides; one has been overturned. His description makes us examine the construction with him.

The limit appears in the criteria he brings to it. As an arrangement for storing and renting boats, it looks impractical. The question of what else the boats might be doing has not yet become central to his inspection. El Quemado, the badly scarred man who rents them out, sleeps inside the structure. Udo’s fine discrimination of their positions precedes his grasp of the life those positions accommodate.

As he watches the shelter being rebuilt, a change of noun alters its apparent purpose: “A hut can’t; but a fortress can.” Udo has been wondering whether a hut can be said to rise. The sentence solves a problem of expression by promoting the object into his preferred imaginative world. Fortress carries defenses, enemies, possible attack. It also makes a more stirring spectacle of a man putting together somewhere to sleep.

We have already been drawn into that spectacle by the care of the description. Bolaño gives the boats enough visual strangeness to make Udo’s word attractive. The naming therefore complicates our own reading: we may share his fascination before asking what his vocabulary has displaced. The material arrangement stays the same while its imagined uses multiply.

Around El Quemado, even language becomes something Udo tries to police. When the tourists discuss the cruelty of his nickname in front of him, Udo later asks whether he speaks German. The negative answer seems to settle the possibility that they have hurt him. Ingeborg’s discomfort concerns the encounter more broadly. His test reduces it to whether particular words were understood, as though tone, staring, and the fact of being discussed could be excluded from the exchange.

Across these passages, Bolaño distributes perception unevenly. Udo notices a structural arrangement the others overlook; Ingeborg notices a social injury he explains away. We cannot simply replace his whole account with hers, or congratulate ourselves on seeing through every description. His attention has real powers. The novel makes their limited range increasingly consequential.

The game’s calendar

The board game supplies a language in which Udo can be exact. Once El Quemado becomes his opponent, troop movements, supply, resources, and successive turns occupy substantial stretches of the diary. The precision has a genuine use: a position can be inspected, a move reconstructed, a threat met with a countermove. Expertise earns Udo authority within those boundaries.

Bolaño also gives the game increasing control over the diary’s organization. A section headed “SUMMER 1942” places us inside its historical calendar, where an offensive can be described through named cities, hex coordinates, and redeployed units. The holiday and the reconstructed war share the same notebook. The heading asks us to adopt the game’s time before the paragraph explains what happened to the players.

In that entry, Udo can follow El Quemado’s preparation in considerable detail. He recognizes that the offensive has been arranged a turn in advance and reconstructs the earlier placement of an air base. His opponent has thought ahead. Alongside this exact recognition, however, Udo imagines reading pleasure in the creases of the other man’s scarred face. The account shifts almost imperceptibly from a demonstrable sequence of moves to a much less secure reading of a person. The same confident narrative voice carries both.

The section on Udo’s favorite generals extends the discrepancy into his relation to history. He arranges military careers into a private collection of faces, nicknames, temperaments, victories, and imagined victories. Accumulation does much of the work. The names grow familiar through repeated handling, and the commanders become figures who might smile down from clouds and offer comfort. “Sympathetic figures, despite everything” is the compact permission on which this affection rests. The unspecified everything accommodates whatever would disturb the collection without requiring him to dwell on it.

His ability to recognize cruelty elsewhere prevents this from becoming a simple portrait of universal blindness. In the September 12 entry, he presses a hotel manager about a rape and records the evasive denial that follows. He can register someone else’s protective account of the resort. That capacity makes his own exclusions more troubling: a person may detect a convenient explanation in one conversation while continuing to live by another.

The diary sustains these differences because it has room for incompatible kinds of attention. Technical competence, moments of concern, vanity, fear, and historical evasion retain their particular occasions. Calling Udo unreliable names a problem we still have to read closely enough to distinguish.

What remains after defeat

Late in the novel, Udo expects the game’s consequences to overtake him physically. Defeat seems to be preparing a punishment. When El Quemado leads him toward the pedal boats in the storm, the light inside the shelter becomes part of the feared arrangement. Udo imagines a presence there and anticipates drowning. His understanding of what is happening grows more definite as his ability to verify it diminishes.

Bolaño has prepared the scene through an object whose ordinary use we already know. The shelter has been observed, renamed, feared, and watched from the hotel. Being forced inside it puts Udo in a space that his descriptions have repeatedly transformed from a distance. There is a lamp and El Quemado’s sparse belongings. Udo realizes that “there never had been anyone beside the lamp.” The anticipated hidden presence was supplied by his reading of the light.

The scene makes the apparent inevitability of punishment unstable without requiring an implausible rescue. A sleeping place constructed from rental boats has supported the terror all along. El Quemado’s force is real, and being dragged into the shelter is frightening; the sequence Udo expects that force to complete is his own. The distinction preserves both the physical encounter and the uncertainty of its meaning.

It also limits our confidence. We can identify a mistaken expectation without possessing a complete explanation of El Quemado. His motives and history cannot be recovered simply by reversing Udo’s judgments. The diary has brought us close to a life that remains partly inaccessible, and a triumphant explanation from the reader would repeat something of the narrator’s impulse to settle it.

Small acts of care complicate the confrontation further. Before the final defeat, Udo dries El Quemado’s hair and gives him a dry T-shirt, even while recording the thought that he could strike him. Concern and hostility occupy the same encounter. Bolaño permits a bodily need to interrupt the imagined conflict without declaring a moral conversion.

After returning to Germany, Udo retains the habit of revising his account. At a convention, he says he chose not to greet an admired game designer, then admits that he failed to make the effort to approach him. The correction resembles the earlier one about the telephone, but the old appetite for professional recognition has weakened. He has to persuade himself that the enthusiasts around him are harmless, accepting the reassurance “for lack of a better option.” Even consolation now records the conditions under which it was obtained.

The last gesture is modest. Udo straightens a few magazines and games at the Stuttgart booth and leaves the convention hall quietly. We have no final statement that resolves what he learned in Spain. His continued ability to arrange the objects sits beside his withdrawal from the activity that gave them their importance. Bolaño lets that change remain observable while the diary falls short of explaining it—a final, exact use of the distance between what Udo writes and what his writing gives us to consider.

For another concentrated encounter with Bolaño’s narrative voice, continue with By Night in Chile, or choose your next book through the Bolaño reading map.

Sources

Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Hamish Hamilton, 2011). Close readings refer to the August 20, August 21, August 24, September 12, September 23, and September 24 entries, and the sections “Summer 1942,” “My Favorite Generals,” and “The Convention.” Quotations are from Wimmer’s translation. Publisher’s book page and opening excerpt.