BOOK OPINION
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolano
English translation by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2007)
A truly original narrative, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano is one of those rare finds: a beautiful, humorous, compelling and unforgettable book that I simply stumbled upon in the bookstore. I had never heard of Bolano before, but the raves on the book sleeve from Susan Sontag, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and others convinced me to give it a try. Plus, I had a Barnes & Noble gift card burning a hole in my wallet, so it wasn't going to be much of a gamble on someone else's dollar.
Within four pages of the book, I was hooked. I have not read the book in Bolano's original Spanish (he is Chilean, but lived in Mexico and Spain for most of his life), but Wimmer's translation is highly regarded. The language is lively, evocative and vivid, gliding in and out of poetic passages with ease and fluidity. However, it is the story and characters that truly drive the book.
The narrator (in the first and final thirds of the book) is Juan Garcia Madero, a disenchanted student who enrolls in a poetry course at the university. It is 1975. A novice writer, Garcia Madero nevertheless attracts the attention of the story's two true protagonists: Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima, a pair of revolutionaries/drug-dealers who have started a new literary movement called Visceral Realism. They introduce Garcia Madero to the fledgling (and loosely organized) members. They smoke, get drunk, have sex, and talk a lot of poetry, fiction and film, clumsily and humorously defining Visceral Realism by what it is NOT. The young poets deify and ravage writes real and invented, but in a way that made me desire to read more and with greater variety. Bolano masterfully recreates this Mexican bohemia with vivid characterization and dialogue, and even though dozens of characters inhabit this world, each one is carefully sketched out from the viewpoint of Garcia Madero. This tangled web eventually gets into trouble, forcing Garcia Madero to feel Mexico City with Bolano, Lima, and young prostitute named Lupe. The poets are in search of the mysterious Cesarea Tinajero, a poet with no surviving poems, yet who is the indisputable founder of visceral realism. Garcia Madero and Lupe are simply fleeing for their lives.
Cut to the long middle section, which traces the wanderings of Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima over a twenty-year period, all told through the recollections of other people. This section frustrated me at first because I wanted to return to the original storyline, but I soon realized that the poets' wanderings were indeed a continuation of a grander storyline. We never hear directly from the two poets, yet they somehow become deeply fleshed-out characters while they remain enigmas at the same time. Their journeys cover Managua, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Tel Aviv, Liberia and the many roads in between. The wandering poets become observers and players in history, not in events of global significance, but in the minor scenes that were more common. Bolano and Lima travel with a weariness of the cursed, yet we never quite find out why until we return to the Mexico narrative.
The third act revisits Bolano, Lima, Garcia Madero and Lupe on their search for Cesarea Tinajero in 1975. Tracing one ghost or mirage after another, the quartet travel the dusty, slow-motion cities and towns of northern Mexico. What they discover is not quite what they had expected, or possibly hoped for, but their fates are determined in that desert. The story concludes with quiet resolve, a mix of tragedy and hopefulness. Quite unexpectedly, Bolano and Lima, Garcia Madero, and even Lupe find themselves leaving behind the world of the Visceral Realist poets. Instead, they choose lives that are poetry incarnated, becoming what the others only talked and wrote about. Their stories have stayed with me.
Sadly, Roberto Bolano died in 2003. His novella, Chile By Night, has been translated into English by Chris Andrews. His final book, 2666, is a thousand-page epic that was writing at the time of his death. Spanish and English versions of 2666 are forthcoming.
GRADE: A
