The late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's newly translated novel The Third Reich is an homage to film noir. It's set in a resort town on Spain's Costa Brava, with paddleboat rentals, sunsets over the ocean, and tipsy European tourists trying to cram their holidays full of fun. Yet, as this is an ominously titled Bolaño novel, we can expect that death and evil in some form will rise, vaguely, and prevail. In this regard, the book doesn't disappoint.
As with many of the stories found in the Bolaño short story collection The Return, a book with a similar tone, the dialogue in The Third Reich is peppered with ominous sentiments that hint at larger themes simmering within the plot. "The way you remember tourists is different from the way you remember normal people," says the manager of a hotel called the Del Mar, where much of book's action takes place. "It's like snippets of film, no, not film, photographs, snapshots, thousands of snapshots and all of them blank."
The book, including the above quote, is presented as the daily journal of Udo Berger, a young German tourist from Stuttgart travelling with his girlfriend, Ingeborg. Udo claims to adore her. "A life at Ingeborg's side: could I ask for anything more in matters of the heart?" But with each chapter, a journal entry, Udo adds details to his growing sense that his life is being erased while on holiday in Spain, as his reality changes due to mysterious forces that may be entirely imagined.
The title of the book is the name of a vast and detailed Second World War board game that we learn has grown from a mere hobby for Udo into the centre of his world. The game is not an absurd invention of Bolaño's, it seems to be based on a pair of actual board games called The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, and Advanced Third Reich, in which each player's turn advances the game time by three months.
We learn that Udo is actually the star of a shallow universe, a master of the Third Reich game who's never lost a match. "The federation of war games players might be the smallest sports federation in Germany," Udo says, "but I was the champion and no one could claim otherwise. The sun shone for me alone." He's a less interesting example of a figure common to Bolaño's work: the dangerously obsessed intellectual, like the group of Archimboldi scholars in 2666 whose shared mania sickens their lust for life.
Bolaño went to great lengths studying war history to make the game-playing scenes sound like authentic geekspeak as Udo sweats over each move on the hexagonal game board: "Of the fourteen infantry corps ... at least twelve should cover Hexes Q24, P24, O24, N24 ... one should probably be in Hex 022 ... replacement units will be in Hexes Q22 ... Situation of the Axis armies in the Mediterranean: unchanged; Attrition Option." There are dozens of such robotic, tedious passages. Even as examples of Udo's madness and a metaphor for mankind's fascination with war, Bolaño stretches the joke beyond usefulness in dozens of needlessly detailed passages like the one above.
For broader plot, he employs a series of mysteries to keep Udo trapped at the hotel, playing Third Reich and slowly eroding his sanity. The first mystery is established when Udo and his girlfriend Ingeborg meet another German couple named Charly and Hanna. Hanna is beautiful and innocent. Charly likes sports, especially windsurfing, and drinks excessively. They all party every night. Charly's carousing soon attracts a pair of locals known only as the Wolf and the Lamb. The German tourists are from then on saddled with these two creepy characters, who ogle women and act like petty criminals.
Udo also develops a fascination with Frau Else, the German woman who manages the Del Mar hotel, and, in a twist that strains suspension of disbelief to near-breaking, he befriends a maimed homeless man called El Quemado (the burn victim) who lives on the beach near the hotel under a "fortress" of paddleboats. He is covered in terrible scars, which Udo describes in callous terms as "dark and corrugated, like grilled meat or the crumpled metal of a downed plane". Meanwhile, Udo grows increasingly suspicious of all these people's motives, imagining they're all in cahoots to do far worse than bully tourists into buying their drinks, as the Wolf and the Lamb often do when the group spends time together.
Sadly, at the hands of his author, poor Udo is in for one of the kookiest, most depressing holidays in literature. Charly soon vanishes while windsurfing. But it's no great loss, as Hanna is by this time covered in facial bruises thanks to him. Ingeborg is horrified by it all. Udo is indifferent, and tries to distract her with talk of his board game. "I hate it," she says, and her remark indicts their entire holiday at that point.
Hanna returns to Germany alone. Ingeborg pleads with Udo, but can't get him to leave Spain with her, even though their reservation at the hotel has expired. Udo claims that someone must stay behind to identify Charly's body for the police, if it ever washes ashore. But we know that he's really eager for Ingeborg to leave so he can cheat on her, having become infatuated with the beautiful hotel manager Frau Else. Even more importantly to Udo, he's also started to play a game of Third Reich with, of all people, El Quemado, who lo and behold proves to possess skills far beyond those of the novice Udo took him to be. "The Faust of war games," jokes Udo's best friend back in Germany, when Udo explains that for the first time ever it looks like he's going to lose a game of Third Reich.
With that, we settle into the tedium of Bolaño clumsily trying to weave together the threads of an accidental death, the mysterious siren and the monstrous opponent into a compelling narrative. But it's fatally hobbled by Udo's crass, narrow mind, unlikeable from the book's earliest chapters. "Hanna is a pretty girl," he writes, "but it didn't take much effort for me to imagine her covered in burns, screaming and wandering blindly around her hotel room."
The story plods then repetitively through Udo's dreary diary of dream sequences, drunkenness and days feeling ill. Bolaño interjects dark, campy poetry from time to time - "I felt observed ... by nobody in particular: observed by a void, an absence" - but Udo's ennui and mania are tiresome. Bolaño's goal might have been to make Udo's obsession seem like a spiritual poison illuminating the nothingness around him. "Now that the tourists are gone the bar is gradually returning to its true sinister self," Udo says at one point, and Bolaño makes it clear that we're meant to wonder if Udo has somehow lost his soul in all of this. But long before the book's end, not even Udo seems able to muster the energy to care.
The most convincing aspect is that Udo is surrounded by the casual violence that often occurs in holiday destinations. We see people using each other for money and companionship, testing each other's patience while fighting to keep the facade of civilised equality alive. This is one minor point, though, not enough to carry a novel.
The Third Reich is a posthumous find, supposedly written in the early 1980s, decades before the long novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 made Bolaño an international brand. Given the profit motive, a publisher had to pounce on the chance to offer the latest Bolaño discovery. But the Bolaño estate could be chided for making a carrot of the author's lesser works and dangling them in front of publishers. This novel shows hints of Bolaño's concerns about violence against women, and the evils of apathy, but overall it is a slight example of Bolaño's early style, in which devout fans and scholars can see the author unwisely trying to prop up an entire book with the sort of tone that serves more properly as stylistic icing in his later, better works.
Matthew Jakubowski is a fiction judge for the Best Translated Book Award.
Company profile
Company: Rent Your Wardrobe
Date started: May 2021
Founder: Mamta Arora
Based: Dubai
Sector: Clothes rental subscription
Stage: Bootstrapped, self-funded
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
THE SPECS
Engine: 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V12 petrol engine
Power: 420kW
Torque: 780Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh1,350,000
On sale: Available for preorder now
Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
Managing the separation process
- Choose your nursery carefully in the first place
- Relax – and hopefully your child will follow suit
- Inform the staff in advance of your child’s likes and dislikes.
- If you need some extra time to talk to the teachers, make an appointment a few days in advance, rather than attempting to chat on your child’s first day
- The longer you stay, the more upset your child will become. As difficult as it is, walk away. Say a proper goodbye and reassure your child that you will be back
- Be patient. Your child might love it one day and hate it the next
- Stick at it. Don’t give up after the first day or week. It takes time for children to settle into a new routine.And, finally, don’t feel guilty.
Globalization and its Discontents Revisited
Joseph E. Stiglitz
W. W. Norton & Company
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
COMPANY PROFILE
● Company: Bidzi
● Started: 2024
● Founders: Akshay Dosaj and Asif Rashid
● Based: Dubai, UAE
● Industry: M&A
● Funding size: Bootstrapped
● No of employees: Nine
Sui Dhaaga: Made in India
Director: Sharat Katariya
Starring: Varun Dhawan, Anushka Sharma, Raghubir Yadav
3.5/5
Places to go for free coffee
- Cherish Cafe Dubai, Dubai Investment Park, are giving away free coffees all day.
- La Terrace, Four Points by Sheraton Bur Dubai, are serving their first 50 guests one coffee and four bite-sized cakes
- Wild & The Moon will be giving away a free espresso with every purchase on International Coffee Day
- Orange Wheels welcome parents are to sit, relax and enjoy goodies at ‘Café O’ along with a free coffee
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
Book%20Details
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Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
More from Neighbourhood Watch
Off-roading in the UAE: How to checklist
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Mamo Year it started: 2019 Founders: Imad Gharazeddine, Asim Janjua Based: Dubai, UAE Number of employees: 28 Sector: Financial services Investment: $9.5m Funding stage: Pre-Series A Investors: Global Ventures, GFC, 4DX Ventures, AlRajhi Partners, Olive Tree Capital, and prominent Silicon Valley investors. UAE squad to face Ireland
Ahmed Raza (captain), Chirag Suri (vice-captain), Rohan Mustafa, Mohammed Usman, Mohammed Boota, Zahoor Khan, Junaid Siddique, Waheed Ahmad, Zawar Farid, CP Rizwaan, Aryan Lakra, Karthik Meiyappan, Alishan Sharafu, Basil Hameed, Kashif Daud, Adithya Shetty, Vriitya Aravind
'Cheb%20Khaled'
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EArtist%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EKhaled%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ELabel%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EBelieve%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%204%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
At a glance
Global events: Much of the UK’s economic woes were blamed on “increased global uncertainty”, which can be interpreted as the economic impact of the Ukraine war and the uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Growth forecasts: Cut for 2025 from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. The OBR watchdog also estimated inflation will average 3.2 per cent this year
Welfare: Universal credit health element cut by 50 per cent and frozen for new claimants, building on cuts to the disability and incapacity bill set out earlier this month
Spending cuts: Overall day-to day-spending across government cut by £6.1bn in 2029-30
Tax evasion: Steps to crack down on tax evasion to raise “£6.5bn per year” for the public purse
Defence: New high-tech weaponry, upgrading HM Naval Base in Portsmouth
Housing: Housebuilding to reach its highest in 40 years, with planning reforms helping generate an extra £3.4bn for public finances
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The Transfiguration
Director: Michael O’Shea
Starring: Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine
Three stars
In-demand jobs and monthly salaries
- Technology expert in robotics and automation: Dh20,000 to Dh40,000
- Energy engineer: Dh25,000 to Dh30,000
- Production engineer: Dh30,000 to Dh40,000
- Data-driven supply chain management professional: Dh30,000 to Dh50,000
- HR leader: Dh40,000 to Dh60,000
- Engineering leader: Dh30,000 to Dh55,000
- Project manager: Dh55,000 to Dh65,000
- Senior reservoir engineer: Dh40,000 to Dh55,000
- Senior drilling engineer: Dh38,000 to Dh46,000
- Senior process engineer: Dh28,000 to Dh38,000
- Senior maintenance engineer: Dh22,000 to Dh34,000
- Field engineer: Dh6,500 to Dh7,500
- Field supervisor: Dh9,000 to Dh12,000
- Field operator: Dh5,000 to Dh7,000
Getting there
The flights
Emirates and Etihad fly to Johannesburg or Cape Town daily. Flights cost from about Dh3,325, with a flying time of 8hours and 15 minutes. From there, fly South African Airlines or Air Namibia to Namibia’s Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport, for about Dh850. Flying time is 2 hours.
The stay
Wilderness Little Kulala offers stays from £460 (Dh2,135) per person, per night. It is one of seven Wilderness Safari lodges in Namibia; www.wilderness-safaris.com.
Skeleton Coast Safaris’ four-day adventure involves joining a very small group in a private plane, flying to some of the remotest areas in the world, with each night spent at a different camp. It costs from US$8,335.30 (Dh30,611); www.skeletoncoastsafaris.com
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
