War games

 The Third Reich, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Picador, RRP£18.99, 288 pages

Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño left behind two unpublished works when he died in 2003. One of them, the hefty 2666 , was acclaimed as a posthumous masterpiece. Now, weighted down with expectations, comes what may well be his final work of fiction to be published.

The Third Reich is presented as the diary of Udo Berger, a German war-games champion, written during a holiday on Spain’s Costa Brava with his girlfriend, Ingeborg. Udo and Inge soon make the acquaintance of fellow Germans Charly and Hanna, and become entangled with some of the town’s shadier characters – a pair of barflies known as The Wolf and The Lamb, and a severely disfigured man known as El Quemado.

Udo recounts one of his early outings with the group: “The atmosphere was festive, lending itself to camaraderie, though with a hint of something dark and murky.” This could well be a description of the novel. The image of tourists and locals “mingling in a way somehow tinged with catastrophe” foreshadows the characters’ own fate.

Udo is hardly a sympathetic character – self-engrossed and obsessed with inventing a “strategic variation” on a board game called The Third Reich, in which players’ moves are based on second world war battles. He is at first surprised, and later pleased, to find that El Quemado is interested in his peculiar hobby. His satisfaction at having found a gaming partner turns into alarm when he realises El Quemado is keen on taking the game to its ultimate conclusion.

It is worth asking why Bolaño, who finished writing The Third Reich in 1989, did not make any efforts to publish it in his lifetime. The book contains many of the themes common to his other novels – from a fascination with detective fiction to meditations on the undercurrents of violence that underpin even seemingly innocuous activities. The result, strange, unnerving and occasionally tedious, confirms that Bolaño’s writing is at its best in his shorter works of fiction.

This being a Bolaño novel, it is rich in startling images and unapologetically literary. Udo’s summing up of game-playing, for instance, might also be an apt metaphor for literature: “We were all essentially ghosts ... forever performing military exercises on game boards ... shadows playing with shadows.”