The Paris Review

IN OUR PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS...

In August, Udo Berger, a young war-games champion, returned to the Del Mar Hotel, where he used to spend summers as a child. He found the Costa Brava changed, seedier and less welcoming than he remembered; soon he and his girlfriend, Ingeborg, fell among shady company: Charly and Hanna, fellow Germans in a tempestuous—sometimes violent—relationship; two underemployed locals known only as the Wolf and the Lamb; and El Quemado—the Burn Victim—a disfigured young man who rents pedal boats on the beach. 

Udo had planned to spend his vacation developing a new strategy for the war game known as The Third Reich, but finds himself distracted by these new acquaintances. When Charly disappears in a windsurfing accident, Udo resolves to stay in Spain until his body is discovered. After Ingeborg goes back to Stuttgart, Udo embarks on a romance with Frau Else, the enigmatic owner of the Del Mar, whose ailing husband emerges only at night.

To pass his evenings, Udo begins a game of The Third Reich with El Quemado. Udo hardly expects a challenge from the mysterious loner, but El Quemado turns out to be a natural. Udo’s pleased surprise gives way to suspicion as El Quemado (playing the side of the Allies) forces Udo’s troops to retreat on the Eastern front. Even when Charly’s body washes up, Udo stays on in Spain, unable to tear himself away from either Frau Else or the match. And yet, as he haunts the empty hotel, deserted beaches, and shabby cantinas, Udo feels a growing sense of dread, “something intangible, strange, circling around me in a threatening way.” 

By special arrangement with the Bolaño estate, The Paris Review has published The Third Reich in its entirety over the space of four issues. As of this December, a hardcover edition of this translation is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.