Take Three

My trip through Roberto Bolaño's bibliography has been meandering, to say the least. I'm not following publication order or themes, just seeing what the library has in stock whenever I'm in the mood for another book. The latest I've read, The Third Reich, immediately evokes "Nazi Literature in the Americas," and more broadly his periodic ruminating of far-right-wing violence.

 

MINI SPOILERS

The Third Reich is different from his other books in a lot of ways. Most of them have been set in Latin America and feature Latin American characters, while this one is set in Spain with a German narrator. His books are often populated by poets and writers and artists, while this one features office workers on vacation. And this is the only novel of Bolaño's I've read that centers a nerdy activity: tabletop wargaming.

The narrator and protagonist is a youngish German man named Udo, on holiday with his even younger girlfriend Ingeborg at a Spanish beachside resort town. They are here to enjoy a romantic time together, but Udo also has a specific goal in mind. He has won the German championship for tabletop gaming, and his friend Conrad has convinced him to write a magazine article on his winning strategy for The Third Reich, a game that covers the events of World War II. Upon arriving in their hotel room, Udo immediately sets up the board and commences "working"; that is, playing the game.

Ingeborg seems to genuinely love Udo, but she detests his game, seeming baffled and annoyed at it. While she's out sunning on the beach, he's studying the board, musing about his next moves, or napping after being up too late the night before.

I should pause here to note that Udo might be the least pleasant narrator from any Bolaño novel I've read. By the second or third chapter we've seen lots of examples of his internal thoughts and internal actions that set our teeth on edge: he's incredibly rude and hostile to the hotel staff, seems to dislike almost everyone he meets, has a grossly inflated sense of himself, belittles Ingeborg's interests, and has a tendency towards paranoia. He isn't the worst person that Bolaño has written, probably not even the worst person in this book, but I can't think of another narrator that seems as intentionally off-putting as this one.

The structure of the story is pretty interesting: it starts out small, then expands, and then contracts, growing increasingly suffocating in the second half. But in the early days, Udo's universe consistently expands, much to his frustration and disgust. Ingeborg makes friends with another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who are staying at a nearby hotel. Udo is very annoyed by these people, especially Charly, but is outwardly polite and endures going out with them for dinner and drinks most nights, and often abandoning Ingeborg to their circle while he "works".

Through Charly, Udo comes to meet two Spaniards whose names he never learns, but who he calls The Wolf and The Lamb. They have a more dangerous sheen to them: they're locals, partiers, blue-collar people who talk crudely and lead the Germans off the beaten path into wilder environs.

Through The Wolf and The Lamb, Udo finally meets El Quemado, a badly-burned paddle-boat vendor who Udo has studied from a distance for a while. Udo is disgusted by Quemado's appearance, but there's a weird magnetism between the two, and Udo seems obsessed with getting to know Quemado, despite the latter's reticence and their very different backgrounds.

While Udo spends most of his time by himself closed up in his hotel room, he doesn't seem to be actually doing much: he isn't writing his article, and isn't playing the game, just "studying" it. He eventually invites Quemado to play against him, and pushes hard until Quemado eventually relents. Udo plays the Axis powers, while Quemado plays the Allies and USSR.

As another side note, Bolaño's description of the progress of the game are amazing, very accurate to my experience. (Which is limited, but there was a time of my life when I was very into Avalon Hill games like Bull Run or Axis and Allies.) A lot of Udo's behaviors are strange, but spending over a day to set up a game is not at all unusual. Once Udo and Quemado get into a cadence of playing, they typically do one or two turns per session, with those sessions lasting several hours. Again: that's how these kind of games go!

The specific cadence of Third Reich also matches my experience in every simulation of a World War II game. Germany is always very strong out the gate, romping through nearby neighbors, expanding to the coast of Europe, often surpassing their historical reach. But there's almost always an inevitable apogee to the Axis expansion: the thrilling sense of endless victory fades, the industrial might of the Allies' superior production ramps up. Things reach a stalemate, then gradually shift in the other direction, with the Axis powers pushed further back.

That flow of the game parallels the flow of the novel. The turning point seems to be when Charly goes missing; he has previously disappeared and then returned, so the other three aren't as concerned at first, but it gradually dawns on everyone that he has likely drowned. Hanna returns home. Things grow frostier with Ingeborg, and she departs as well. Udo, oddly, remains behind, well after his scheduled vacation is over. He claims that he needs to do this to handle bureaucratic tasks associated with Charly's death, but nobody believes him, and his continued presence after the matter is closed proves that it wasn't a real consideration.

He spends more time with The Lamb and The Wolf, but is put off by their increasingly predatory vibe. One very unpleasant element of this book is repeated references to rape. It's never clear whether anyone is actually raped during the book, but it's one of those ominous hovering clouds that Bolaño is so good at invoking. Charly and the Wolf and the Lamb laugh about the possibility that they will rape someone, there are swirling rumors of rapes occurring, Udo contemplates the possibility that Charly himself was raped, the Wolf and the Lamb seem to be on the verge of raping Clarita before Udo interrupts them, and so on. Of course this all felt really off-putting, and seems more jarring than in Bolaño's other novels, though that may be because of the time since I've read them. I do know that 2666 refers a lot to widespread sexual violence in Santa Teresa, and multiple novels have grimly borne witness to the rape and murder of the sister-poets. Maybe it's the causalness of references to rape here that make it seem particularly wrong.

While most relationships wither away in the back half of the book, there's a sort of undertow with Frau Else. When Udo stayed at this hotel years ago as a teenager, he had a crush on Frau Else. He seems determined to make her remember him, and tries hard to establish a rapport with her. She's generally distant with him, but as the book goes on they spend more and more time together, even spending nights full of passionate kissing. Her husband is dying, which seems to delight Udo on some level. I never really got a bead on Else's deal. She generally turns him down, but remains present and occasionally encouraging: does she harbor some deep-seated feelings for him that she suppresses? Is she overwhelmed by her husband's terminal illness and acting erratically? Or is she just put off by this deeply weird nerd, and trying to fulfill her basic duties as a hostess with as little awkwardness as possible?

MEGA SPOILERS

There are two techniques Bolaño uses in his novels that I absolutely adore and keep me coming back for more: absence and ambiguity. He's possibly the best novelist I know at writing around a subject, pointedly leaving things left unsaid, or making someone's absence loom larger than their presence ever could. And he's also a master at forcing us to examine a subject while considering multiple overlapping and contradictory interpretations of what that subject is or means. Both of those techniques are on fine display here.

There are a lot of absences in this book, but one of the most striking is that of Frau Else's husband. Seemingly everybody other than the Germans knows him and talks with him and sees him, but the tourists never lay eyes on him. It's a bit of a surprise when, in the last few chapters of the book, Udo finally confronts him and has a conversation with him. And what a conversation! As Udo notes, it feels like they're talking past each other: they're using the same words, but seem to be referring to different concepts, each one baffled and vaguely frustrated by the other's inability to grasp what they're saying.

Another odd absence is one of description. After several play sessions, Quemado gifts Udo with some photocopies. This puts Udo into a very odd frame of mind, kind of passively-aggressively-hostile, and he goes out to bully the hotel watchman into giving him some push-pins and then attaches the photocopies to the wall. And yet... Udo doesn't describe just what those photocopies are! Are they photographs of the war? Newspapers? Game rules? Strategy articles? It's as if, by throwing a mini-tantrum in pinning the photocopies up, Udo can avoid having to actually look at them and consider what Quemado is trying to say through the gift.

Quemado himself is probably the most mysterious figure in the novel. Conrad has a premonition early on that Quemado is the Devil. Frau Else's husband is very friendly with Quemado, but also fears him, and has pointed warnings for Udo about the terrible danger Udo faces in his relationship with Quemado: again, there are undertones of sexual violence (explicitly rejected, but poisoning the mood by even being mentioned), as well as bodily harm. Udo had somehow made the (accurate!) leap that the husband was consulting with Quemado on strategy, but it turns out that Quemado didn't need any help, and has the raw intelligence and drive to succeed at the game.

The last few chapters also bring in the specter of Naziism. Clarita asks Udo if he is a Nazi; he's surprised she would even ask, and denies it, saying something like "If anything, I'm an anti-Nazi." Which... that's an interesting and odd thing to say! Despite living inside Udo's head for the entire novel, I don't think we've ever really gotten any hint of his personal politics. He is enjoying playing the Nazi faction in the Third Reich, but this doesn't seem to be connected to nostalgia for the party or a desire that they had won. But I also can't think of any actions he has taken or thoughts he'd have that would qualify him as an Anti-Nazi. Really, he's mostly defined by a broadly malevolent misanthropy. It doesn't seem racialized, but he dislikes almost everybody. Anyways, I just think that's kind of interesting, given Bolaño's very specific and pointed polemics against far-right movements in his other writings, for him to raise that flag here and let it just sort of flap weakly in the air.

END SPOILERS

After finishing the book, I did a bit of light research, and learned a few relevant things. First, The Third Reich is a real game! On the one hand that makes me slightly less impressed that Bolaño so accurately nailed the lingo and cadence of wargaming, since it's based on a real game; but I also think it's really cool that this literary novelist was secretly a super-nerd all along.

Secondly, like a lot of Bolaño novels this one was posthumously published. I'd assumed that it was a late manuscript of his that was eventually finished after his death. Apparently, though, this was the very first novel he ever wrote: it was written way back in 1989 and just never published. So, while there were several parts in the book where I thought "Ah, Roberto is once again doing that thing he likes to do", but no: this was the first time he did that thing! I think that makes me like and admire this novel even more, since he already had such a mastery of his prose and characterization.

But that factoid also confused me, since there's one chapter where Udo is wandering the street, and realizes that it's September 11 and everything is closed in remembrance. Naturally,  I assumed that this was a reference to the 9/11 attacks in the US, and was a little surprised that a sleepy Spanish resort town would shut down to observe it. But anyways I've done some additional Googling, and learned that September 11 is the date that Barcelona fell, and is honored in Catalonia as a sort of anti-Independence day. Interesting!

Anyways, back to the actual book: As usual, I really loved this. I've read a couple of Bolaño novels that seem like remixes of other pieces: a short story that spins out into a novel, or the same event told from multiple perspectives, or familiar characters resurfacing at different stages of life. On the one hand, The Third Reich stands apart: its setting, characters and concerns seem wholly unique to anything else Bolaño has done (that I've read, at least!). On the other hand, it's a really powerful demonstration of his fantastic writing chops: creating a sense of a kind of heavy, sleepy, humid summer that saps away your dreams of productivity, conjuring up vaguely ominous presences that hover at the periphery of your vision, following along a mind that's obsessed and yet curiously reluctant to make eye contact with its obsession. I do hesitate a little to recommend it as a "first Bolaño book" mostly because the narrator can be so off-putting, but anyone who already enjoys this author will get a lot out of it.

Baldur's Gate 3: Existence Precedes Essence

Before I forget, a major PSA: when searching for Baldur's Gate 3 information, I highly recommend going to bg3.wiki .  This is the community wiki for BG3, and in my opinion is highly superior to the commercial wikis and aggregator sites that crowd the first several pages of Google results. There's maybe a smidge less info on this one than the fextralife one, but also zero ads, no auto-generated repetitive crap ("This is an item. Items are a key mechanic of Baldur's Gate 3. Your character can collect many items in the course of their journey. Items are useful to have. Items may be used in combat or while exploring or traded for coins. The specific item you are looking at has a page on this wiki but absolutely no useful information whatsoever."), a clean UI and a nicely browseable structure. While the plot stuff was a bit thin at launch, it's been filling out nicely, and it's always been a great resource for reading about game mechanics, classes, skills, abilities, and other factual information.

 

Baldur's Gate 3 has less-drastic transitions than the earlier BG or Divinity games did. In the original Baldur's Gate and its sequel, when you reached a certain point you would see a new slide for "Chapter 4" or whatever, and a narrator would intone the latest exposition while you looked at some nice imagery. Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 were divided into major Acts, with massive loading screens separating them. For BG3, there's a ton of online discussion about "Act 1", "Act 2" and "Act 3", but those terms don't appear anywhere within the game itself. Instead, there are sort of transitional mini-zones that occupy the space between the major portions of the game, and even after advancing forward you still have some time to retrace your steps to tie up loose ends or even kick off quests you may have missed.

 

 

All that to say, I think I'm done with Act 2, and I think I'm in Act 3 now, but might be like in Act 2.5 or something. I'm sure all will become clearer later on.

 

 

Some random mechanical thoughts before starting to chat about characters and plot:

 

 

I would be pretty tempted to roll a Monk for a future play-through. There's a lot of cool equipment that seems to be tailored for monks, particularly unarmed combat, and none of the companions can really use it. (Though I suppose Karlach might be a good candidate to respec or dual as a monk.)

 

 

Similarly, I wish I was playing a proper thief/rogue in this game. My PC Bard handles locks and traps just fine, and I don't really want Astarion in my party, but there is a lot of really cool gear that interacts with stealth in an interesting way. Similarly, there are some really cool mechanics that trigger directly off of shadows and light, which I haven't seen much of before. 

 

 

I've been thinking of light a lot, in large part due to some Act 2 stuff. In my limited tabletop D&D experience, light is pretty important: a DM will often try to keep track of who's carrying a torch, what characters can naturally see in the dark, etc. In CRPGs, these visual mechanics are usually implemented but very unimportant: you can just switch to a character with night-vision and you, as the player, can see everything fine, even if the humans in your party are theoretically blind. Anyways, BG3 is one of the only games I've played that gets back at this classic D&D focus on light and dark, in a way that works pretty well mechanically and is compelling thematically.

 

 

I'm playing as a Bard, which plays very differently in BG3 than in BG1/BG2. In the earlier games they tended to be more passive, hanging in the very far back and singing songs to buff the rest of the (6-person party); occasionally you would use a wand to shoot fireballs or something. In BG3, I have a chunk of pretty good arcane magic: I've been leaning towards loading up on Rituals that help with gameplay outside of combat, but as I reach higher levels I'm getting more spells that are good in-combat as well. I'm also a pretty decent archer, although at 1 attack per round I'm way less effective than dedicated fighters; but, much like the D:OS games, special arrows can be extremely tactically useful, like knocking someone back over a ledge, blowing up an explosive barrel, dispelling an effect, healing someone, teleporting somewhere, etc. Also, in BG1/2 bards could only Pick Pockets, but in BG3 you can pick locks, stealth and disarm traps, making you a full-on thief replacement.

 

 

I almost never use Bardic Inspiration, the most bard-like ability of the class, which buffs a companion. Instead, I almost exclusively use Cutting Words, a College of Lore-specific Reaction. This uses a BI charge, and allows you to apply a D6 or D8 malus to any enemy's roll. So, if they would have hit someone, you can use CW to make them miss instead; if they would have saved against a spell, you can use CW to make them take the effect. This is a crazy good ability, more than making up for the slight squishy feeling of my actual combat actions.

 

I'm enjoying the game a lot more since I stopped trying to pick up every piece of trash to vendor later. There's some decent stuff to buy, but as of the end of Act 2 no real money sinks and I have way more gold than I know what to do with.

 

 

There's definitely not a pacifist route through the game, but I've been pleasantly surprised by just how many boss-type encounters you can complete just through dialogue. It's pretty cool!

 

 

For the most part, it's best to handle dead companions by paying Withers to raise them. Revivify scrolls are more expensive; you can almost always go back to camp between combat encounters, and if you revive someone mid-combat, they raise with 1 HP and will almost certainly die again. Late in the game your clerics can learn Resurrect, but that slot is usually better spent on offense, buffing or a utility spell. But anyways, it is worth carrying a couple of scrolls, because sometimes you'll be stuck in an area without fast-travel or Camp access, and Revivify will keep you from needing to carry the deceased's hundred pounds of gear back to safety.

MINI SPOILERS

One of my few complaints about the game so far has had to do with the companions, or more specifically, that they seem to skew evil: other than Gale, most folks you can recruit seem to fall squarely into the "Evil" camp. After playing much further into the game, I have a much better idea of what Larian is going for here, and am really enjoying it.

 

 

First off, there are characters like Karlach who just weren't a big presence in Early Access. She's great. One of those characters who looks evil: a literal devil! With piercings!!! But she's big-hearted, loyal, brave, has a good sense of humor, just a delight to be around.

 

 

More impressively, though, the "evil" companions are "evil" when you meet them, but don't necessarily stay that way! At least for two of the companions who I've been traveling with, there's a great, long, slow-burn effect where, based on your actions and choices and conversation, they may actually start to question some of their beliefs and rethink their self-conception. Which, honestly, is way more compelling than "This person is evil all the time, now and always!" or "This person is good all the time, now and always!"

 

 

Which, now that I'm writing that out, is not totally unprecedented. There are some games with shifts in the other direction, like Alistair potentially "hardening" in Dragon Age: Origins, or Leliana turning into the murderpope in Dragon Age: Inquisition. And one of the best arcs in Baldur's Gate 2 is Viconia undergoing a similar evil-to-much-less-evil transition through the course of a romance. So I'm not totally sure why I was so convinced that we were "stuck" with these "evil" characters in BG3. Anyways, it's been a real delight to discover that these people get their own meaningful arcs, and aren't just there to help define and guide the player character.

 

 

I'm not sure if everybody follows this description - it would be funny if, say, Astarion remains a cheekily selfish bastard no matter what - but as long as at least some do, I think that's a sign of A Good Game.

 

 

While on the topic, I'm also deeply loving how BG3 has completely removed the traditional two-axis alignment system from the game UI. I don't play D&D 5E, but from what I understand alignments are now considered optional, and I personally find it very liberating to describe characters rather than sort them.

MEGA SPOILERS

Writing a bit about my own journey thus far:

 

 

My "Tav" is a Drow Bard named Triel. I thought I came up with the name, but apparently it's also the name of a city in Forgotten Realms, whoops. It was funny and mildly disorienting the first time it popped up in a book. I'm curious if I'd read that name before and buried it in my mind or if it's just a coincidence.

 

 

Triel has reluctantly embraced at least some of her tadpole powers, picking up some handy passives but avoiding over psionic abilities. She has been resolutely on the side of good, defending the Tiefling refugees against the druids and then defending the grove against the goblins (by slaughtering all the goblins). For the most part she tries to use diplomacy to advance her goals; when that fails, she'll switch to subterfuge; what that fails, murder.

 

It's been a pretty completionist playthrough so far. I've probably missed some companion-exclusive things since I tend to travel with the same core group, but for the most part I've done everything to pop up in my journal. The major exception was quietly failing a bunch of kidnapping-related quests in Act 2 due to doing some stuff in the wrong order.

 

My party has shifted a bit. Early on I was the probably-canon group of Shadowheart, Lae'zel and Gale. I really liked Karlach, but at that time was kinda romancing both Shadowheart and Lae'zel, so I reluctantly swapped out Gale. The big hurt there was losing access to a bunch of AOE damage spells, which are game-changing on fights with large numbers of small enemies. Still, this isn't a crazy-hard game, and I've had decently-optimized builds, so the overall loadout has still been working fine.

 

 

I was kind of trying to romance three ladies all at once, but "locked in" with Lae'zel and have been rolling forward with it. It's a cool romance; she is very different from Morrigan, but the arc of this romance reminds me a little of that one, starting off as a purely physical connection but gradually growing closer together emotionally. That said, Lae'zel is literally alien, and I like how she retains a bit of strangeness throughout, instead of just transforming into a pliant waifu.  

 

In Act 2, I saved the Last Light Inn, reloading after Isobel got snatched during the fight. I raced to get the faerie protection from darkness, then went back east and cleared out all of the wilderness outside the town.

 

 

Once in town, I followed a mostly pacifist route through the Thorm children, using my bard's superior Persuasion and Deception to defeat them. I could have squeezed out some more XP by initiating fights against their followers, but, eh.

 

 

My big mistake in Act 2 was clearing the Gauntlet of Shar prior to visiting Moonrise Tower. The game does helpfully display a warning popup window when you're about to progress things, but I had thought that it only referred to the actual Gauntlet of Shar area, not the entire Shadow-Cursed Lands, and thought the only thing I was giving up was a chance to fight Balthazar in the crypt. After completing the very challenging Balthazar fight and completing some very risky die-rolls to persuade Shadowheart to renounce Shar, I noticed that half of my quests involving Moonrise Tower had failed, but was not willing to redo all that gameplay.

 

 

As a side-note: I alluded to this above, but I love the arc Shadowheart has so far in this game, it's so darn well-written and earned. I honestly felt a little choked-up and emotional during this section, which also leads into the beautiful and heartwarming reunion of Nightsong and Isobel, which in turn adds another big layer of pathos to Ketheric Thorm's story.

 

 

In Moonrise Tower, I was able to briefly trick a guard outside, but was forced into combat as soon as I entered the basement. I gradually cleared the tower from the bottom to the top, fighting alongside Jaheira with her Harpers and the Flaming Fist. That's another fight I reloaded a couple of times, mostly because it triggered when I was in a very awkward position and was playing out in real-time to the detriment of my allies while I was running around the exterior looking for a way in. The fight itself was crazy fun, though, with tons of bodies on the battlefield, great use of elevation and terrain: a bunch of archers were stationed on the rafters, so Lae'zel used her Athletic Jump to boing up there, then her Battlemaster Pushing Attack to knock them down and make them go "splat".

 

 

Fighting alongside Jaheira was so much fun. That character gets some grief from the BG community and isn't as universally beloved as others like Minsc and Imoen, but I think she's great, and it felt so fun to fight by her side again. It's a new voice actress performing her, but it's a convincing likeness, and I think the writers did a great job at her character: it's recognizably her, with her fiery spirit and stubbornness and slightly haughty sheen, but at the same time tempered through two centuries of additional living, more experiences giving her a bit more patience and flexibility.

 

For the assault on Moonrise, I brought along Wyll and Halsin, because they had mentioned specific reasons for wanting to be there. Wyll was a pretty good choice; you never see his dad the Duke, which was a bummer, but he does get a good long scene with the devil that advances his story. Halsin was honestly kind of a bust though, it sounded like he had some major unfinished business with Ketheric, but they don't have any meaningful dialogue together. There's some minor chatter between Halsin and Jaheira, but basically just "Oh, I've heard of you!" "Oh, that's cool, glad to finally meet you." After finishing this section, I realized that I should have brought Gale: I hadn't realized that we would actually come face-to-face with the Absolute in this section. Oh, well!

 

 

Like I said before, I just started Act 3. Between starting this post and now, I did the bit inside the Astral Prism with the big reveal about who the Dream Visitor is. It's a pretty cool plot; I'd been wondering if the Dream Visitor was an Illithid, but hadn't predicted the specific background and connections between the Gith and Ilithid and all that. I initially tried to turn down the mega-tadpole with a... I think Insight? Or maybe Wisdom throw; but failed that, even with burning all 4 Inspiration points, so I reloaded and just squashed it. That said: I really, really love the mechanical impacts of this choice. From what I can see and the little I've read online, there's absolutely no mechanical reason not to take the tadpole: it unlocks a bunch of really cool new abilities, and doesn't force you into any particular endings. But there's still the choice to turn it down, following a harder path because you think it's the right thing to do. I absolutely adore these sorts of asymmetrical choice in video games, where it's an actual sacrifice to do the "right" thing, and not just two different labels for equivalent outcomes.

 

Also, I really dig Shadowheart's new hair!

END SPOILERS

Steam says that I'm about 100 hours into the game, but it's hard to know for sure. I think that includes my Early Access playthrough three (!) years ago, and also a lot of time that I've left the game up and running while I'm away doing something else. In any case, I assume that I'm about 2/3 of the way through. Feeling really stoked to finally get to Baldur's Gate and see how things wrap up!