(This review has some vague spoilers, just as a warning. It’s really tough for me to do a proper analysis without spoilers.)This is a brilliant book. This is a frustrating book.This is due to the brilliance and the frustration of its second section, the largest section of the Chilean born Roberto Bolaño’s debut novel. This, the book’s namesake, is a sprawling and splintered affair that features an array of thrilling locales that would make Roland Emmerich’s budget committee blush. From Mexico to Paris to Africa the section not only traverses three continents, but it’s also told through some forty different first-person perspectives. This middle section bares all, relationships, sexual encounters, poet-critic duels, and personal minutia so specific as to describe the smell of one character’s nether regions in gross detail. Bolaño takes on a swath of different characters to inhabit and flesh out. The number of side plots (given that no main plot exists) is such that one wonders how Bolaño was able to think of so many different events to cram into this opus. I commend Bolaño’s ambition to write in this style and his ability to handle the mountain of material in this book. Given that Bolaño was a poet first and prose-stylist next, it is no surprise that he foregoes linear plot and consistent characters to develop overarching themes among the numerous flash (sometimes longer) sized fictions that populate this second section. By doing so, we start to forget about what is literally happening in each given scene (how many times I read over the name markers at the beginning of each section!) because they are all working together to convey something much great than any of its individual parts. We get a sense for the ether of the times through all these minor vignettes; instead of pursuing any major plot (although the large middle section is couched in the journal of Juan García Madero), we are given a multitude of voices to develop the story of Ulises Lima, Arturo Belano and their poetry movement, Visceral Realism. And it is in this respect that the true genius of the book reveals itself. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the book is about two enigmatic figures, supposed alter egos of Bolaño: Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. The novel tells of the odyssey that these two embark upon. However this is no traditionally told story. Instead of getting any direct insight into their minds, we are told about their adventures and escapades through all the people that they’ve come into contact with. Think of it like this: imagine every person who’ve ever had some contact with, no matter how small. Now imagine that every person were to be interviewed about you and all your foibles. It would be quite interesting, no? Imagine all the positive and negative reactions that you’d get from everyone. (Except for you, spenke. of course, there wouldn’t be any negative interviews of you. That’d be absurd). Reading this book is like coming across the transcript of the collected interviews of your collected acquaintances. It could potentially be the most insightful compendium of your life that anyone would read but it would also be an involved process, sorting through hundreds of tangential threads, wondering what stories were and were not important, what details one should latch onto and give importance to. This about sums up the difficulty and brilliance of The Savage Detectives. Bolaño goes to great lengths to play with his structure. The power that forty different narrators give him is quite impressive. In one story he will portray a situation with such exactness and exquisite detail that he’ll leave you foaming at the literary mouth. He does this, however, only to give you a slap across the face, with another character speaking in direct opposition to what has been previously said. Although inner-subjectivity is well-worn ground, Bolaño doesn’t let that tired post-modern conceit engulf the text. (The conceit of conflicting first person accounts rendering truth subjective). Instead, the different voices gives profound depth to his story. Imagine the condition one single narrator would leave of this story. I can only think of a myopic and horribly limited one. Instead, Bolaño is able to investigate the cultural ethos of latin-american poets and their vagabond lifestyle through several lenses. The result of this multitudinous investigation is not just two fully-fleshed out characters, Lima and Belano, but a book who's reach expands far beyond two characters into much broader territory. Lima and Belano are used to play with the romanticized ideal of a poet in 1970’s Mexico, living a life of free love, free of responsibility. As we learn more about these two characters, we begin to see the broader literary movement that Bolaño is investigating.At its heart, this is a book that investigates the question what is a movement?—in the literary and political sense. The entire book swirls around visceral realism in the way that each character views it, ranging from an overblown fascination with it, to its representation as an academic field of study to a view of the movement as complete rubbish and nonsense. The ways in which the term is tossed this way and that made me think of many other literary/political labels we all use comfortably: romanticism, modernism, post-modernism (I’ve already used that one in this review!) But what is it that we are referring to when using such labels? Surely, we all have basic notions of what each term means. We all can cite a few canonical texts that exemplify the essence of each movement. Yet, this is somewhat insufficient. Is the movement a collection of like-minded writers? Is the movement a cultural attitude? Is the movement a representation of a broader human archetype? It is all these things and more. Bolaño deftly exposes all the hundreds of different facets that make up these types of movements. For one character, Juan García Madero, visceral realism is a group of sexy, super-cool students that crash his poetry workshop class. For Cesaría Tinajero, proclaimed godmother of the movement, it is the result of her own poetic experimentations (which can hardly be called poems). For Laura it is nothing more than a fabrication of her lover Arturo, who created the movement just to impress her. For Xóchital García, it’s a negative label that keeps him from being published yet one which he looks back upon fondly. We simultaneously get a feel for our two main characters, Lima and Belano, while coming to a more complex understanding of visceral realism as a whole. The various fractured story lines function to reflect a specific aspect of “movements” and their conception. We intuit a story line through the various different story lines of the novel, posit a plot among all the conflicting interviews. We do this in the same fashion that one would create an abstract notion of a “movement” from the diffuse and complicated set of individual actions and motivations that make up a movement like visceral realism.The book has humble beginnings with its first narrator, Juan García Madero. He is our beginning and end to the story. His journal sandwich the large “savage detectives” section in the middle. The beginning of the book was a bit odd at first. It seemed to me estranged from the “meat” of the book. This was because the beginning reads like a common bildungsroman, very well written, but nothing extraordinary. It took me a while to realize it plays an important role much later on. Through the eyes of the bildungsroman, everything is new, exciting and directly involved in the formation of the narrator’s identity. Our first glimpse of the visceral realist movement is as some fascinating club, which we (via Juan García) have only an outsider’s perspective. From our initial point of view, the movement seems like the end all be all of poetry, the place you end up as a successful poet. The payoff for this setup does not come until a few hundred pages later, as it slowly leaks out, through many different narrators, that the visceral realist movement is hardly any movement at all. It is not recognized by any major publishers and remains almost unknown to the larger latin-american literature scene. It is a bit of tragic end for us, the reader who is guided through the literary movement like Juan is. We develop these excited notions of what the movement is, only to find the quiet tragedy that Lima and Belano’s lives have become, and what has happened to the visceral realist movement. Although, I’ve written quite a bit already, this is only a single aspect of the book. There is a whole lot more to the book. And the pleasure in reading this comes from all the different story lines that Bolaño cooks up. One involves a poet who is so nervous about negative criticism, he challenges a critic to a duel. On the beach, the poet and the critic duel with one another in an odd moment of hyperreality from an otherwise strictly realistic book. Belaño has such affection for poetry and it really shows in this book. It’s an interesting comment upon the tragic nature of the book that Belaño had to give up poetry for prose in order to make a living for himself. In many ways the eventual death of the movement in the book is Belaño’s own lament for the life of poetry that he had to leave behind. It is also interesting the way that the poetry is represented in the book. Throughout its entirety we are not given a single stanza of poetry. It struck me as quite odd that a book dedicated to a poetic movement did not have a single poem in it. At first, I was frustrated that none of the poems that each character describes in length were in the book. But then as the story developed, I began to understand the genius behind it. It is no accident that we are not given Lima or Belano’s voice despite hearing about them from so many others. It’s in the same spirit that we are not given a single line of poetry in a book all about poetry. Bolaño presents us only the effects of a cause. What is the true nature of that cause? It is never revealed to us. In the same way that detectives are never witnesses to the crimes that they investigate, we never directly witness what it is that causes all this hullabaloo, the actual poems of visceral realism. We are only there to clean up after the mess it makes and gather as much information as we can. The only “poem” that Bolaño puts into the book, is not really a poem, but more of a work of art. It is a “poem” entitled “Sión” by Cesaría Tinajero, the supposed godmother of visceral realism. Hardly meeting the definition of a “poem”, it is three pictures. And despite its simplicity, it is absolutely beautiful:My reading is a bit limited and I’m sure many people have conflicting opinions about this poem. But to me, it represented our journey to discover visceral realism. Given that the reader is the boat going along the waves as time passes, it can be seen that the waters which get more and more rough and difficult to traverse, represent our savage investigation. Progression of images mirrors our search to discover the “visceral realist” movement in all that it means, but the book becomes increasingly fractured as we move along the waves of its prose, as we ostensibly get closer to the truth. As is the search for so many things in life which give off the appearance of simplicity, the journey reveals only a lack of knowledge, a failure. As the road is beset by so many different details and digressions, one will eventually lose sight of the journey’s original intention. (I pass the bong back to Bolaño “dude that’s like... profound”). Perhaps even the name Ulises is meant to convey this idea of a journey and a failing—his name lacks the added ‘s’ of its predecessor Ulysses.After such thorough analysis, you might be thinking, why only four stars? Well, I’ve limited my review to all the things that I loved about the book. It certainly does not capture everything about reading it, though. There were little tics of Bolaño’s writing that got to me. For starts, the quality was inconsistent. From narrator to narrator, the stories ranged from brilliant to mind-numbingly boring. A great deal of characters would simply unload about a certain topic (all written in eye-crossing prose blocks) as Bolaño would eschew paragraph breaks in order to capture the “speaking” nature of told stories. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it didn’t make for interesting writing at times. I also took issue with a lot of the character’s attitudes. Although Bolaño is working to dispel the romanticism around the faux-intellectualism of bullshit literary movements and the put-on bohemian life style of its characters, the book still gets difficult to stomach with its never-ending sophomoric and wiser-than-thou speeches from the characters. It was hard to keep in mind Bolaño’s intentions in representing this mindset honestly. I’m sure that many of the speeches and attitudes of the characters are ripped from the author’s personal experiences. (Bolaño’s personal life has many parallels to the book). But I’m quite glad that I had the reading group to keep me going throughout the book. Bolaño rewards his readers with an absolutely brilliant ending. In one scene, he completely destroys a crucial part of the Visceral Realist movement. Curbing any spoilers, I’ll just say that we learn a certain devastating truth about a figure that had been heavily alluded to throughout the book. It this bit of simple and powerful writing that casts a whole new shadow upon the book. It further deconstructs the movement that Belano and Ulises believed that they were championing. And although the last scene occurs almost at the beginning of the book’s chronology, it makes Belano and Ulises’s struggle a tragic one. A very sad ending it is.Yet despite all this meaning is still elusive, as it should be in any good book. I was left quite puzzled by the last few pages. It is not much of a spoiler to say that it ends with symbols instead of text. And it still leaves me scratching my head. I don’t know how to make heads or tails of it. But this confusion only contributes to the beauty of this book. I would say that everyone should read The Savage Detectives if it weren’t for my own frustrations with the text. But I can say that despite it all, if you maintain steadfast against all the different first-person narrations, and maintain steadfast against many un-introduced characters, then there is a whole world of strange connections and beautiful aspects of life buried in this wonderful book.Brian does a better job than I have in this entire review of calling this a "messy, sprawling jackson-pollock-painting of a book". Well goddamn if that doesn’t capture the beautiful mess of this novel, clashing colors and impressions that would otherwise be spilled paint on a canvass is rendered by the extraordinarily talented author into something to admire, something to puzzle over.
Goodreads customer service, how may I direct your call?I'd like to phone in a review, please. Reason? I don't know how to do it myself.I'm sorry sir. As part of Goodreads terms of service, I could have accepted: illness, vacation, out of body experience, picking vegetables in a garden, working overtime, mission control for the Mars rover program, -- -- That's it, that's it, mission control. I'm working mission control. It's -- -- Be serious, sir. Alright, fine. I'll work on it myself.Now we want you to enjoy your Goodreads experience, sir. Look, why don't I help you.Help me?Yes. Let's start with whether you liked the book or not. Did you like the book?Oh yes, I loved it. How many stars would you rate it?Isn't that getting rather personal?Cute, sir. Be serious. How many stars?Well, it's complicated.And why is that, sir? Well, from the beginning, I would've said this is five stars all the way. That's good, sir. So five stars?Hold on a minute. I said from the beginning, from the beginning I thought it was going to be five stars. And in the middle, I thought so even more.So what seems to be the problem?Well, that last part, part three.What about it, sir?I wasn't blown away by it. Why not?It just didn't - didn't - it didn't move me. And why not?I don't know. That's what makes this so hard. I see, sir. So what star rating would you give it?Can we talk about something other than the damned stars??Fine, sir. No need to get snippy. Tell me, what was the book about? Maybe that will help us figure out why you're so confused about the stars.Enough with the stars!Heh, heh. Even we customer service reps can have our fun, sir. Now, tell me about the book.It starts off with this teenage kid. He's telling us things about the visceral realist poets.Visceral realist poets? What are they?Have you seen Easy Rider?Yes, sir, and I didn't like it.Neither did I.So why did you like the book? I don't know. You know The Beats.I'm a customer service rep, I'm not illiterate. Okay, so you know Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac, and ---- I'm familiar, sir. I don't like the Kerouac guy. Me neither. Hey, you're pretty cool!Te he. So these poets are kinda like The Beats, even though I, we, don't like all of The Beats. Okay, so why do we like them? They're just so...cool. I guess that's what you'd say. I think it's the way Bolano ---- Bolano?The author of this book. What is the name of this book, by the way?The Savage Detectives.Oooh. I've heard of that. It's supposed to be good. Right. The way Bolano writes, you'd swear you were right there with them all, hanging out, contributing to these cryptically named, self-published magazines, rubbing shoulders, the whole thing.Sounds like the indie rock scene.That's what I thought, too!So what else happens?Well, the two ringleaders of this group of visceral realists --And who are they?That would be Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.Bolano? Like the author? No, no. Belano. The author's alter ego. That's nice. How postmodern of him.I thought so too!So what do these two want? Their names in lights?I dunno. I don't think so. I think they want to be recognized, but I don't think they want to be part of the "establishment." The indie rock, Beat argument again?It would seem. That's nice. I can see why you'd be intrigued by this. So you're a writer too?I like to try. Good for you. Everybody needs a hobby.Thanks. So that's why you connected with this in a big way at first?I'd say that's one of the reasons, yes. But the characters!What about them?They're so alive!! Bolano --Which Bolano? They sound the same over the phone.Oh, oh. Bolano. The writer Bolano. Didn't that get confusing sometimes?You'd think, right? But not really. Not unless you were discussing it online with friends and you had to remember which way to spell it so they'd know what you were talking about. You read this with friends? We at Goodreads strongly encourage our readers to make reading buddies.I had some great buddies for this one!So you were a collective? A reading collective? Heh, kinda like your own little visceral realist movement, eh?Ha. That would be COOL! (And I don't even like that word!)There's nothing wrong with that word.You don't feel it's overused?Well, yes. It is. But there's nothing inherently wrong with it.Okay, okay, we're getting off topic. How postmodern of us, heh heh.Good one! So anyway, these guys go looking for this lady, the founder of the visceral realist movement. That sounds -- wait, these two you told me about, they're not the founders?Er, they are, but. It's complicated. It's like they're the new visceral realists. Like New Coke? Wasn't a fan.No, this is better. A lot better. So you get to read some of the visceral realist poetry in the book?Uhhh. Actually, I can't remember. You do get to read some samples of the old visceral realists poetry. That's nice. Was it any good?I liked it. So what's the problem then? You liked everything but??It was that last section. I didn't really think it said anything. I mean, it did. But I didn't think it said it as strongly as the other two sections of the book. And why not?I really can't say. It just seemed so random. Like it was just a bunch of driving around, without even really getting anywhere. Life can feel that way sometimes, too.Yes, that's true. It's just -- it wasn't the most exciting thing to read.And the rest of it was?Oh yes!! The other two sections were wonderful! I felt like I was talking with the characters myself. See, it's in an interview format.Postmodernism, again?Don't say it like that. Some postmodernism is good. You know, when form meets function. Okay.Oh, hey. Do you skateboard? What? Where did that come from?Do you skateboard, or have you ever??Uh, yeah, sure. But it was forever ago.Okay, great. Look, do you remember the Powell Peralta skateboarding company?The guys who sponsored Tony Hawk? Sure.Did you ever watch any of those early Tony Hawk skateboard videos?I remember seeing them on the rental shelves, right next to the Dario Argento and Evil Dead movies, but no, I never watched any of them.Look, sometime, go on YouTube and look up this movie, The Search For Animal Chin. Search For Animal Chin, got it. Why, may I ask?It's fantastic! And the clothes!! Hahaha. And the haircuts!! HAHAHAHA. Oo, and the music. The music rocks!I assume this has some bearing on the book?Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry, nostalgic moment there for a second. S'alright?S'alright. In this movie, the Powell Peralta team goes in search of this legendary skater, Won Ton Animal Chin and --Oh, I see. So it's sorta like the book and this movie parallel.To me they did. Cool.Don't get cocky! You can't see it, but I'm sticking my tongue out at you.Mm too! Mm too! This movie sounds pretty good. I'll try to check it out.I think you'll like it! And the thing is, that movie has this super badass, philosophical ending. And??Annnnnnnnnnnnnd. I fear I'm projecting my predilection onto this book. Because of the similarities?Yes. But do you think that's fair?I don't know. But I can't shake it. At least, not right now. So what are you thinking?I.... I..... I -- well. I think I'm leaning more towards four stars, in the final analysis. Haha, final analysis. I haven't heard that since -- WatchmenWatchmenJinx!Jinx!Buy me a Coke!Just not a New one. -- I'm sticking my tongue out again.Mm too, mm too.
What do You think about The Savage Detectives (2007)?
Since there are so many fantastic reviews of The Savage Detectives, I thought I would offer a slightly different approach as per below.In Part 1, the first-person narrator, 17 year-old Juan Garcia Madero, tells us right off he is reading the erotic fiction of Pierre Louys (incidentally, one of Louys's novels was made into a Luis Buñuel film – That Obscure Object of Desire). Also, the way Juan speaks of the visceral realists, a group of wild avant-garde poets where young Juan is a member, reminded me of another group -- the League, a secret society in Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East. I enjoy how Juan will list the authors -- various poets, novelists, short-story writers, essayists -- he comes across as his meanders through Mexico City. For example: when he goes into room of one of the visceral realists, Luscious Skin (what a name!), he spots a stack of books, one by Auguste Monterroso. Turns out, this author wrote one of my favorite short-stories -- Mr. Taylor -- about an American anthropologist who goes to a Central American country to live with a tribe. He sends the tribe's shrunken heads back to the US and makes a fortune. The demand for shrunken heads skyrockets but the tribe runs out. Well, the government finds out and, along with the anthropologist, comes up with some great plans to cash in on shrunken heads. How? Let me just say that if you are a poor person living in that country, you had better watch out! Anyway, associations like this make for rich reading, at least for me. Young Juan's life in Mexico City is filled to the brim with young women and sexual encounters, conversations about poets and poetry and magazines, lots of coffee and marijuana, but through it all Juan is a kindred spirit to that narrator of Journey to the East, when Hesse's seeker says, "For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country or something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times." Juan has a strong sense his true home is his poetic voice and, in a way, the visceral realists is his 'league'. I must say reading about the two worlds of Juan's life: the nitty-gritty of everyday Mexico City and the light-filled realm of poetry is most refreshing.Then, at one point, when Juan goes into a café. We read, "After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chelean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena, Arturo Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group." You have to love a 17 year old who is having sex left and right but still has his eye (and poetic soul) on his ray of light, his league of fellow questers, the visceral realists. And you have to admire an author who can splay himself into a number of characters within a novel.And, thank goodness there are some sensitive 17 year-old souls who experience life as an artistic odyssey. The printing of this novel could have been set in gold. And perhaps a few pages coated with hallucinogens so the reader could lick the pages from time to time. -- this is one of the techniques used by a short-story writer in Moacyr Sclair's The Short-Story Writers.When we come to Part 2, there are multiple adult men and women first-person narrators who relate their experience with the visceral realists and Latin American poetry. The more I turned the pages, the more I was drawn into a mythic dimension of time. Such an uplifting, energizing experience to enter a world where the spirit and power of poetry is the polestar. And not only a poetic reaching up, as if the night sky contained a thousand poems for every star, but deep, deep down into the earth. Here are a few of my favorite lines, where Venezuelan poet Amadeo Salvatierra relates a conversation with his father and a friend riding through the country outside Mexico City:“He said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land . . . deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn’t say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn’t answer. Then we started to talk of other things but I kept wondering why he’d say that about the pyramids.”Of course, there were pyramids at Teotihuacan, the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city 30 miles outside present-day Mexico City. I wouldn’t want to press the point too hard, but pyramids bring to mind inner depths of the psyche. The Jungian analyst Robert Moore talks a great deal of the archetypal pyramid each of us carries in our collective unconscious – the four sides are king/queen, warrior, lover and, magician, the magician being that part most directly connected to imagination, creativity, the inner quest and spiritual transformation. In traditional societies, those profoundly in touch with magician energy would be chosen to be shamans; in our modern, ‘civilized’ world, the role of shaman is inhabited by, among others, artists and poets. It is this magician power the narrators are in touch with as they move through their days and nights, their conversations and writing and reading of poems. Here is a reflection from one of the narrators, an Argentinian poet, as he is walking in Mexico City with a Mexican poet and a Chilean poet:“The three of us were quiet, as if we’d been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent.”Young Juan makes his return in the Part 3. After all the poetic voices and multiple journeys across many lands in Part 2, we have a deeper appreciation of Juan as a member of the visceral realists. And, my word, what a novel. The Savage Detectives, those wild, ferocious, half-crazed men and woman driven to mythic, intoxicating summits by the carnival of words and the Latino rhythms of their poetry. 650 pages of breathtaking magic.
—Glenn Russell
I wish there was a proper way to splutter in written form. I mean, it's not that I didn't like this book, really. I certainly didn't not like it. I just... just... I dunno, I guess I just didn't get it like everyone else seems to've. As I said somewhere else, given that everyone really lost their shit over this book (I mean, did you see brian's review? Or Andrew's? Or freaking Josh's??), I guess I was really expecting to have my whole brain rearranged by it, like when I first read Cortàzar. And that definitely didn't happen. I think that part of it was the format. First of all, for those who don't know, this book is told as kind of an oral history of these two poets. Spanning several decades, seemingly everyone who ever knew Ulises Lima or Arturo Belano, even for just a little while, tells a story about his or her own life, usually featuring one of the poets prominently. Which is interesting as a technique, but makes necessarily for a very uneven flow. Some of the passages were incredibly moving, lasting pages and pages and telling terrible or wonderful stories with great emotion, exploring fascinating ideas or just recounting incredible discussions or moments of thought. But others were really short, or really boring, or really confusing, or hard to mesh in with what I thought I was beginning to know about Lima and Belano. There were a lot of names to keep track of, which always gives me trouble (my fault, not Bolaño's, of course), and I may as well mention that I was chewing through this book for an awfully long time, so that also makes it harder to keep a somewhat ragged storyline straight. But the biggest problem with the 'oral history' angle, for me, is that you have a million people talking about our main guys, but you never hear them actually speak. That makes me just incredibly frustrated. They are the protagonists! They have led more or less epic lives! They have done a lot of questionable — and downright stupid — things! And of course amazing things too! I want to hear them speak!! Does this make me crazy? It just seems so unfair to have to always view them through a thick filter, or a million over-layered thin ones. I have said elsewhere that reading, for me, is a matter of getting as close as I can to a story, a character, a feeling. And so keeping me at arm's length for six hundred pages... well, it's just not going to keep me entranced, or (sometimes) even focused. I also (and this is a much smaller complaint) found the main characters and most of their friends to be kind of a bunch of narcissistic jerks. They all sleep around like crazy and cheat on their spouses and sell or do drugs and let their parents support them and their children get taken care of by someone else, and then they just leave, regardless of who is depending on them for what. Saying that probably makes me sound rather maudlin or conventional (and I'm not saying that it doesn't also describe my friends), but whatev, it's how I felt. Just another way that I was unable to really give myself over to this book.So that's my main speculation for my reluctance to droolingly adore this book, which so many others have done, and which I am usually so eager to do. So I'm sorry, brian. Sorry Andrew and Josh. Sorry Bolaño. I feel such guilt when I don't like a book that I've really been primed to adore. But it just didn't happen for me this time. Sigh.(and p.s., since I'm referencing all my GoodReads friends who reviewed this so glowingly, check out Ryan, who reviewed this back in March and basically told my review how stupid it is before I even wrote it.)
—Oriana
I'm writing this, sadly, not while sitting atop floatwood scribbling into the salty breeze of some nameless sea, but rather staring into my computer screen at a metrosexual Budapest café with expensive lamps and wi-fi. It's exactly the type of café that Roberto Bolaño pleaded his fellow poets to abandon in the 1976 infrarrealist manifesto "Leave it all behind once again, throw yourselves to the roads."There is no reason for me to copy and paste Wikipedia's biography of Bolaño's life. The man was a wandering poet, a bohemian, a lover of women, a confidant of men. Bolaño was the Spanish-speaking world's Jack Kerouac. Mario Santiago was Allen Ginsberg, or maybe Neal Cassidy. And the Infrarrealistas were, undoubtedly, the Beats.Just as Kerouac's bestsellers On the Road and The Dharma Bums offered a public portrait to the eccentric activities and philosophies of the Beat poets, Bolaño's The Savage Detectives is the accessible, almost addictive, account of a roving group of bohemian Mexico City poets in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. The fictionalized characters based on the poets gave reason for disgruntlement in both groups. In the United States, Gary Snyder will always be known as Japhy Ryder, a character from The Dharma Bums that Kerouac based on Snyder, rather than the Pulitzer prize winning poet of Turtle Island. Similarly, the poet Juan Esteban Harrington will now forever be remembered as Juan García Madero, the character who narrates the first and last 100 pages of The Savage Detectives.Unlike Kerouac's relationship with the rest of the Beats, however, were it not for Bolaño, the Infrarrealist poets wouldn't be known at all. Which, according to Natasha Wimmer's introduction to The Savage Detectives, seems to be what some of them would have preferred. One of the core tendencies, if not tenets, of Infrarrealismo seems to be fetishizing the obscure.Imagine writing down your entire life. Not through your eyes, but the eyes of those whose lives have for one reason or another intersected your own. What would they have to say about you? No, wait, that's not right. What would you choose for them to say about you?This is fundamentally the exercise that becomes The Savage Detectives. The first 150 pages of the novel is told by Juan García Madero, a narrator who you might not care for - slightly arrogant, but also appealingly honest. The first 150 pages of the novel, they actually annoyed me. Or maybe it's more honest to say that all of the raving review of the novel annoyed me. Why do we have to celebrate poets who smoke to many cigarettes, have read the Marquis de Sade, and constantly think about sex? What makes them the celebrities of the literary world?But then the second part of the book, which shares the title of the novel itself, begins and everything transforms. From page 143 to 588 we hear the multiple accounts of over 50 distinct narrators all giving their impressions, relaying their memories, of the novel's two main protagonists, Arturo Belano (Roberto Bolaño) and Ulises Lima (Mario Santiago). The fact that Bolaño can so convincingly write in over 50 different voices is a feat I've never before seen. (Natasha Wimmer should also be applauded for maintaining each narrator's unique voice so well in her translation.)There is so much more I could say about The Savage Detectives, about how Bolaño most definitely succumbs to the universal mistake of assuming we are more important and more talked about than we are, about the last drawing of the window on the last page of the book, about how he writes women's voices compared to men's, about Octavio Paz and Nestor Parra, and about the sublime search for one Ms. Cesárea Tinajero, but really, when it comes down to it, I most agree with Bolaño's conviction that literature is meant to be read, not discussed. And this is a book I highly recommend that you read.
—David
