Posted on September 21, 2009 by Scott Esposito

We’ll be doing two events with Natasha Wimmer on October 6 and 7. (Wimmer will also be editing an anthology of translated literature for the Center, due out next year.)

In addition to reading from and discussing 2666, at these events Wimmer will be talking about some new Bolaño projects she currently has ongoing. To give readers an idea of what to expect, I chatted briefly with Wimmer about these books.

Scott Esposito: First I wanted to ask you about these new Bolaño texts they’re digging up, particularly El Tercer Reich (”The Third Reich”) and the supposed sixth book of 2666.

Natasha Wimmer: I’ve read “The Third Reich” (and in fact, it looks like I’ll be translating it, though I have yet to sign on the dotted line). It’s about an elaborate board game called “The Third Reich” (Bolaño was a great fan of war games), it takes place on the Costa Brava, and it pits a German tourist against an enigmatic South American who rents paddle boats on the beach. I loved it.

I haven’t read the purported sixth section of 2666, or even really heard much about it. Maybe it will remain forever ghostly—the spectral answer to all our 2666 questions.

SE: That seems preferable to its publication, in my opinion. You’re currently translating Antwerp and Entre parentesis (”Between Parentheses”) for New Directions, due out in 2010 and 2011, respectively. First I wanted to ask you about Antwerp, which is a novel but actually predates Bolaño’s “first” novel (The Skating Rink, just published in English translation) by a good 13 years.

NW: Antwerp is Bolaño intensified and condensed—the Big Bang, as Bolaño’s friend and literary executor Ignacio Echevarria referred to it. It was written in 1980, which makes it his first novel, though it wasn’t published until 2002. It’s a very short book, with short chapters, each of them like a prose poem, but there is a semblance of a crime plot, and the action (such as it is) takes place on the Costa Brava.

SE: And then Entre parentesis is Bolaño’s nonfiction?

NW: Entre parentesis (translation of the title still to be decided) is a collection of nonfiction, almost all of it written during the last five years of Bolaño’s life. In effect, it’s a kind of literary autobiography—intense, funny, scathing, moving. Bolaño isn’t bound by many conventions in writing about himself or about other writers, and he’s in full oblique-lyrical sail in lots of these pieces. It’s the kind of book that actually makes you gasp in places—at Bolaño’s daring, at his honesty, and at his skill.

SE: And lastly, I wanted you to weigh in on talk of Bolaño being the next great thing in Latin American letters, in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

NW: It’s hard for me to be objective on the subject—I’m too close to the books to get the proper perspective on them. And it’s probably too early for anyone else to judge definitively, either. All I can say is that Bolaño’s voice echoes in a very persuasive way.