Bibliofreakblog

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Guess what this book isn’t about?  Detectives.  It’s about an avant guard poetry movement in 1970’s Mexico.  The characters are all loosely based on the author’s friends, and the author himself, who…je ne sais quoi…O.K., indulge me for a second here:  Jack Kerouac and Johnny Thunders had a romantic tryst in Mexico and Roberto Bolaño, or as he is known in the book, Arturo Belano, is their love child.  

The back of the book describes Arturo Belano and his bff Ulises Lima as two modern day Don Quixotes.  Sounds like a great set-up, huh?  

Unfortunately it drags on and on and on.  This was Bolaño’s breakthrough novel, heralded in the Spanish-speaking world.  I have know idea why.

Maybe one has to have a familiarity with Spanish literature, and in particular, Spanish poetry.  There are no poems in the entire book by any of the visceral realist (infrarealist in real life) poets.  They reject Octavio Paz, they reject the Peasant Poets, but what they do themselves…I have no clue.  As someone whose background is in poetry, though I rarely write it now, I was curious to understand what the fuck they were writing about.  

They quote poets.  They quote Rimbaud especially.  But never is there anything of their own.  

I’m going to have a hard time with my list of recommendations because snippets of interviews in the forward list all of the Spanish writers that Bolaño hates.  And it’s pretty much everyone.

This might be intentional.  Part of the visceral realist/infrarealist movement included rejecting not only Paz, et. al, but also their lifestyle (being paid by the government).  Bolaño/Belano lived hand to mouth off of menial jobs his whole life in a conscious attempt to not devote his life to poetry, and thereby actually devoting his life to poetry.

Something that non-Spanish speaking readers have to realize, the forward by the translator points out, is that literature and politics are intrinsically tied together in the Latin Americas & Spain.  Which literary camp one is in and which political camp are one in the same.

The book itself is divided into three parts.  The first is a journal by a 17 year old University kid in 1975 who meets Belano and Lima and leaves the University, his life having been changed forever by his new friends.  The next part is a series of interviews from ‘76 to the 90’s about, but never by, Belano and Lima, chronicling their travels in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.  At first they keep up with the poets back in Mexico City, hearing how their lives change, they grow older, they get published, or they stop writing.  But after a few years, we lose touch with them.  

The last part goes back to 1976, and the diary entries of the kid from the first part, telling of their crazy adventure in the northern deserts of Mexico, which inevitably sheds light on who Belano and Lima become when they leave Mexico and why.

I liked the first and last part (if you put aside the fact that I still don’t know what kind of poetry they wrote).  The middle part dragged on and on and on.  It should have been cut in half, at least.  

I’ve not read any of Bolaño’s other books.  I’d like to read 2666, which I hear is great, if long.  I think that having read this book, the part about the critics, for instance, will make sense.  However, I suggest that readers do it the other way around.  Read the rest of his collection, and then read this book.  By then you’ll have a sense of his writing style, at least.

Well, at least I got one down for my Summer Reading Challenge.

If you like this book, you might like:

Don Quixote (F) by Miguel De Cervantes
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (F) by Oscar Hijuelos
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (F) by Mark Twain
On the Road (F) by Jack Kerouac
And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (F) by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral Biography of Punk (NF) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (F) by James Joyce
Girl (F) by Blake Nelson
The Brief and Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao (F) by Junot Diaz

Other works by Roberto Bolaño:

Distant Start (F)
2666 (F)
By Night in Chile (F)
Last Evenings on Earth (F)
The Romantic Dogs (P)
Nazi Literature in the Americas (F)
Amulet (F)
The Skating Rink (F)
Monsieur Pain (F)
Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (CNF)