" ... Bolaño's wit is afire already in the title: Nazi Literature in the Americas. This 1996 book is not a novel, though it is the work of a novelist's imagination. It's an encyclopedia presenting the biographies and works of dozens of South and North American poets and novelists who devoted themselves to, or dallied with, ultra-right-wing causes. Yet all the writers and all their novels and poems are sheer invention.
[ ... ]
The jugular that Bolaño particularly goes for is the literary sensibility and talent that seduces itself with grand political fantasies. Consider Pedro González Carrera (1920–1961): "The poem was a far, far cry from the blandishments of Campoamor; in thirty precise and limpid verses, it vindicated Il Duce's vilified armies and the derided courage of the Italians (who, at the time, in both pro-Allied and pro-German circles, were assumed to be a race of cowards . . . ), while also, and here lay its originality, denying Italy's flagrant defeat, and promising an ultimate victory, to be achieved 'by novel, unexpected, marvelous means.' " Or the Haitian Max Mirebalais (1941–1998), who used pseudonyms and plagiarism to create "the half-German, half-Haitian poet Max von Hauptman": "From the manipulated, made-over, metamorphosed texts rose the figure of a bard who even-handedly explored and sang the magnificence of the Aryan and the Masai races. . . . Mirebalais, it seems, was excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet while continuing to espouse a certain kind of négritude." ... "
~ from Roberto Bolaño: To Have and Have Nazi ~
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