All this is in evidence in Nazi Literature in the Americas. The book is presented as an encyclopaedia of an imaginary extreme right-wing literary tradition that grew up organically in South and North America between 1880 and 2029. Thirty writers have their individual entries, divided into 13 different groupings with names like "forerunners and figures of the anti-enlightenment" and "magicians, mercenaries and miserable creatures". There are also appendices for "secondary figures", associated periodicals and publishing houses and a full bibliography. In terms of content, the brief sketch of Bolaño's early life above would not be out of place among them, except that all these writers are vaguely connected to some idea of the extreme Right. Bolaño is gently brushing against the military dictatorships of Latin American history and perhaps the continent's resident real Nazis-in-exile, but there is no direct political statement here. Nazi Literature is equally a satire of the Left and of literary life in general. The entries are essentially short stories, written in the detached, biographical format familiar from Borges — to whose early collection, A Universal History of Infamy, Bolaño is nodding.

The back flap of my proof asserts that this book will have the same effect on critics as did 2666, but that is doubtful. The part of 2666 that it has most in common with is the fourth of that novel's five internal novellas, "The Part about the Crimes", 300 pages given over to narrating the repeated discoveries of women's bodies in ditches. In that section, Bolaño's prose goes numb; there is almost nothing to alleviate the dull horror. Phrases like "as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an aspect of the situation that until now he'd overlooked" cause the reader to emerge gasping for breath, begging for the poet-novelist to return to full flight. And in 2666, it is a wish that is magnificently granted. "The Part about the Crimes" is an inhuman, primeval monolith that serves as the foundation block for a huge structure of intricate, very varied but very coherent, artistry. Nazi Literature doesn't have the same unrelenting, oppressive content, but the prose is similarly stunted, because it is, in a similar way, posing as something other than (and less than) a novel. There is almost no pure description, and nothing like this, from 2666: "The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower."

The payoff in the case of Nazi Literature is humour. Bolaño plays with the formulas and clichés of literary criticism; the reader is constantly hearing about how "the reputation...[of so-and-so]...rests on a series of works..." or about someone else's "steely sonnets fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity". Perhaps there is something of Machado de Assis in the absurd style of this entry for the Brazilian writer, Luiz Fontaine da Souza:

In 1925, as if to fulfil the hopes generated by his first book [A Refutation of Voltaire], Fontaine da Souza published A Refutation of Diderot (530 pages), followed two years later by A Refutation of D'Alembert (590 pages)...In 1930, A Refutation of Montesquieu (620 pages) appeared, and in 1932 A Refutation of Rousseau (605 pages).
In 1935 he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in Petropolis.

Elsewhere, we read about novels like the American Zach Sodenstern's Revolution, which "consists basically of dialogues between O'Connell and his dog Flip plus various secondary episodes of extreme violence set in a ruined Los Angeles". Another Brazilian, Amado Couto, 

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. 

Violence lurks beneath the humour, but the sense of dread found in his other novels is muted here. Bolaño has the capacity to be both beautiful and terrifying, and when the last story breaks from the rest by being considerably longer and introducing Roberto Bolaño as first-person narrator, the reader thinks, "This is it." But it is a slightly unsatisfying story — near-obsolete, in fact, because in the same year, after switching to a more remunerative publisher, Bolaño expanded this story into Distant Star, a novella with almost exactly the same plot.

Borges later distanced himself from his Universal History of Infamy, saying of it, "Under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing." Here, perhaps, the problem is that there isn't enough storm and lightning. But Nazi Literature in the Americas appears as an excellent companion to Bolaño's other novels, with the literary detective story aspect of 2666 and The Savage Detectives in this case unfolded and laid bare. For readers looking for a sample of Bolaño without the commitment that those long, dense books entail, By Night in Chile would be a better introduction. As for those looking for an introduction to Latin American fiction in general, it would probably please Horacio Castellanos Moya if they tested their paternalistic assumptions instead on Borges and Julio Cortázar, Bolaño's two great heroes.