You have to question the detective skills, to say nothing of the clerical skills, of Roberto Bolaño’s literary executors. The job they did of sifting through his unpublished writings in the immediate aftermath of Bolaño’s death in 2003 can’t have been especially thorough, for every other week, it seems, they find themselves tripping over another stout stack of papers, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a new thousand-page opus on pornography, obscure minor poets, and the end of the world. If you’re a Bolaño neophyte, this must look intimidating. Where to enter?

Probably not through the latest lost work to surface, “The Third Reich,” a moody and uneven novel about a German war-games champion published by FSG at the end of last year. “The Third Reich” should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit “Antwerp,” “Monsieur Pain,” “The Romantic Dogs,” “Between Parentheses,” and “The Skating Rink.” Although “The Third Reich,” which seems to represent Bolaño’s first attempt at novel-writing, is not without certain characteristic charms—black comedy, idiomatic vigor, a looming and ineffable sense of doom—its power is only intermittent and its prose (“Her sweetness, her charm, her soft gaze, put everything else—my own daily struggles and the back-stabbing of those who envy me—into perspective, allowing me to face facts and rise above them”) is often as flat as old seltzer water.

As it happens, prose-flatness is not atypical of Bolaño (whose story “Labyrinth” appears in this week’s issue of the magazine). He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence. Indeed, Bolaño seems to disdain Jamesian refinement and polish, and this disdain is of a piece with his broader skepticism toward literary people, or merely literary people—those whose hunger for books is unmatched by a hunger for life.

The narrator of “By Night In Chile,” for example, one of the most morally execrable characters in the Bolaño oeuvre, sits out the great political struggles of his time—Allende’s experiment in socialism and Pinochet’s ensuing coup—and instead devotes himself to rereading the Greeks:

I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often)…

In Bolaño, it is always the moral toad who expresses himself like a prince.

Bolaño is unliterary, anti-literary. In 1976, in his early twenties, after publishing a book of poems, he left Mexico, where he was surrounded night and day by writers, and embarked on years of dissolute and impecunious wandering around Europe. He wanted, he said, “to live outside literature.” But literature wouldn’t let him go that easily. He finally settled in a resort town on the Costa Brava, and appears to have spent the last decade of his life convulsed by inspiration. It was a supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores. Not all of the many novels and stories he wrote are keepers, but the best are very good indeed. Here, then, are some suggestions for navigating the Bolaño labyrinth.

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