Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño

Interviewed by a New York television station, he came
across as a fool. Haltingly, he declared that he knew nothing about the visual
arts, and hoped to learn to write one day. His humility was charming for a while
but soon became ridiculous.
    In 1990, to the surprise of his followers, he published a book of
children’s stories, using the futile pseudonym Gaspar Hauser. Within a few days
all the critics knew that Gaspar Hauser was Willy Schürholz, and the children’s
stories were scrutinized with disdain and pitilessly dissected. In his stories,
Hauser-Schürholz idealized a childhood that was suspiciously aphasic, amnesic,
obedient and silent. Invisibility seemed to be his aim. In spite of the critics,
the book sold well. Schürholz’s main character, “the boy without a name,”
displaced Papelucho as the emblematic protagonist of children’s and teen fiction
in Chile.
    Shortly afterwards, amid protests from certain sectors of the left,
Schürholz was offered the position of cultural attaché to the Chilean Embassy in
Angola, which he accepted. In Africa he found what he had been looking for: the
fitting repository for his soul. He never returned to Chile. He spent the rest
of his life working as a photographer and as a guide for German tourists.

SPECULATIVE AND
SCIENCE FICTION

J.M.S. H ILL
    Topeka, 1905–New York, 1936
    O ne of Quantrill’s Raiders
crossing the state of Kansas at the head of 500 cavalrymen; flags inscribed with
a sort of primitive, premonitory swastika; rebels who never surrender; a plan to
reach Great Bear Lake via Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota,
Saskatchewa, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories; a Confederate philosopher
whose fanciful dream was to establish an Ideal Republic in the vicinity of the
Arctic circle; an expedition unraveling along the way, beset by human and
natural obstacles; two exhausted horsemen finally reaching Great Bear Lake,
dismounting. . . . Such, in summary, is the plot of J.M.S. Hill’s first novel,
published in 1924 in the
Fantastic Stories
series.
    Between then and his premature death twelve years later, Hill was to
publish more than thirty novels and more than fifty stories.
    His characters are usually based on figures from the Civil War and
sometimes even bear their names (General Ewell, Early, the lost explorer in
The Early Saga
, young Jeb Stuart in
The World of Snakes
,
the journalist Lee); the action unfolds in a distorted present where nothing is
as it seems, or in a distant future full of abandoned, ruined cities, and
ominously silent landscapes, similar in many respects to those of the Midwest.
His plots abound in providential heroes and mad scientists; hidden clans and
tribes which at the ordained time must emerge and do battle with other hidden
tribes; secret societies of men in black who meet at isolated ranches on the
prairie; private detectives who must search for people lost on other planets;
children stolen and raised by inferior races so that, having reached adulthood,
they may take control of the tribe and lead it to immolation; unseen animals
with insatiable appetites; mutant plants; invisible planets that suddenly become
visible; teenage girls offered as human sacrifices; cities of ice with a single
inhabitant; cowboys visited by angels; mass migrations destroying everything in
their path; underground labyrinths swarming with warrior-monks; plots to
assassinate the president of the United States; spaceships fleeing an earth in
flames to colonize Jupiter; societies of telepathic killers; children growing up
all alone in dark, cold yards.
    Hill’s writing is not pretentious. His characters speak as people no
doubt spoke in Topeka in 1918. His infinite enthusiasm makes up for occasional
stylistic sloppiness.
    J.M.S. Hill was the youngest of four sons born to an Episcopalian
minister and his wife. His mother was loving, given to daydreaming, and before
her marriage had worked in the box office of a cinema in her home town. After
leaving