A book so good I had to get it tattooed onto me.


‘Youth is a scam’

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) created a very special novel with The Savage Detectives. The novel is constantly moving, grinding slowly across the years steady and sure as a freight train, carrying the baggage of our existence towards the inevitable finality of life. During the course of my reading, people would misinterpret the title and tell me they enjoyed a good crime thriller and inquire into the plot of the book I clutched lovingly in my hands. While this is no ‘whodunnit’ novel, it is still an investigation of sorts formed primarily through a series of interviews that leave the truth up to the reader to deduce. These various perspectives provide anything from glowing reports to unflattering dismissals of the major characters as their lives intertwine. These perspectives form an ever-expanding collage of lost souls floating across Europe and the Americas. They occasionally collide and leave their mark upon one another and redirecting the course of their lives for better or for worse.

The novel begins with the youth and youthful aspirations of young Hispanic poets. As is the common folly of youth, they believe firmly in their still-forming convictions and have yet to embrace the truths of their own mortality, thus believing in an impenetrable immortality that they will construct of themselves by etching their mark upon the literary scene and politics of Mexico. As the timeline expands, we see often these lofty ideals falter, the bonds of friendship fizzle and their efforts fail, and the reader is reminded of their own mortality and the uncertainties that lie ahead of them. That sharp flint which we would plunge into the beating heart of the world is chipped through our battles for selfhood and dulled by the temoltous seas of life – seas comprised of changing tides and hostile currents that toss us about at will, shattering dreams, friendships and romances upon the rocks. Not only is it the personal lives of the characters, but the whole of Mexico itself is thrashed and ravaged as time marches on. The sad state of the characters are representative of the state of their nation, and vice versa. We are all connected through each other, and through our homeland. We can all be dragged down together if we are not careful.

Life is fragile and our goals are even more fragile. Yet, still we have to press on. We must adapt and produce in order to not be effaced from the memory of the world. Many of these characters are able to, and we are treated to the advice and stories of those who make it in the literary scene. However, it is those who never reach the peak that are ultimately the heroes of this novel. Through poetry, they attempt this immortality, this cup of eternal life they so seek. If it is not through poetry, then they strive towards criticism and translations. Is reaching for immortality through the arts the answer? Inaki Exhevarne offers this discouraging impression on the arts and criticism:

’For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.’

This ultimately makes one feel awkward even writing a review of this book, as it acknowledges that I too must become a permanent fixture in the trail of bones. The only way out is to hitch a ride on the Work, to be the name attached to the eternal manuscript even though we still must face Death.

Despite all this bleakness, Bolaño offers a bright outcome. It is curious that a novel about poets is relatively devoid of poetic works. There are a few samples of older, famous pieces, including an extensive reference to Theodore Sturgeon’s short story When You Care, When You Love, but the reader never gets to sample the actual poetry of the Visceral Realists. Then, the true poetry is the actual lives of the characters. Life itself is the poetic beauty in the world, and it is through our interactions with others that we find immortality. Those we encounter become our readers, and through their stories and perspectives they carry on our legacy. They interpret our proverbial footprints in the sand for all those who would seek them.

Felipe Müller's recounting 0f the Sturgeon story told to him by Belano gives us a glimpse into the sort of immortality granted by the encounters with others. It is an exercise in infinity. The number of people we encounter is constantly growing, hurtling towards an infinite number of people our simple existence affects. Many of the characters stories in Savage Detectives have only small references to the major players, Belano and Ulises, but even they take something away from these encounters that will pass through them and their actions into the people they subsequently interact with. We occasionally play a large role in the lives of others, but even our smallest roles can be told. Think of the cashier you annoyed by buying cigarettes in all change (guilty), or the waiter you left an extra generous tip to. They may have later told of the small encounter later (especially in the case that you annoyed or enraged them, but hey, if Bolaño is accurate, it’s just a step towards immortality or at least unflattering notoriety). Each individual perspective is unique from everyone else’s of a person, Each encounter bounces off, sometimes revealing positives and sometimes revealing flaws, and the summation of these perspectives, this penumbra of those around us, form the picture of a person. The more perspectives, the more accurate and clear the image. In a way, it is pixels in a picture. The novel could have been told from a perspective closer to Ulises and Belano, but through all the various perspectives we get a well rounded idea of who they are, and also learn the lives and aspirations of all those they meet.

Bolaño does a magnificent job creating a diverse cast of characters whose eyes the reader can peer through. The voices don’t ever become stale, however when compared to more chameleon- writers such as David Mitchell of which I’ve been gushing over for months now and can’t help but use as a yardstick for all other authors, a bit more diversity in the voices would have been a nice touch. Still, the effect is pulled off expertly and there are a number of unique voices to soak up. Quim offers a truly surreal depiction of the world around him, Barbara is hilariously vulgar, the optimism of the hippy hitchhiker and the amazing chapter of Heimito told in an obfuscating style that reminded me of Faulker’s Benjy. The rotation of these voices keeps the novel fresh and exciting, and the multiple vantage points on key situations, such as the duel, help pull the reader into the situation and make them feel as if they were there in three dimensions smelling the surf and feeling the sand beneath their feet.

If I may, I’m going to switch from intellect to inebriate for a moment (intellect being a term I’ve shamelessly and unwarrantedly bestowed upon myself, but it made for some fun word play). This novel came at the right time in my life, and allowed me to examine the bonds that tie us to reality. A novel this makes one question their lives, their choices, and really evaluate themselves and value those around them. It may be a bit clichéd now, but this novel felt to me similar to how On the Road did to me as an impressionable teen. I credit many of the traits of my silly-puddy teenage personality to my experience with that novel. One look at my young college days at MSU, arriving at parties with a cigarette between my lips, guzzling a jug of wine while wearing a flannel shirt and drunkenly ranting about Buddhism, poetry, and the inescapable sadness that provides the true beauty of life, and I might as well have the books title tattooed on my spine. It worked at the time, but this is the sort of life we have to let go of lest we become pathetic. Savage Detectives takes this sort of ideals and displays them further on down the road. The book is rather sad in that it shows how fickle people are towards their goodtime friends. Once Ulises and Belano take off, the ‘tight knit’ group relatively forgets them. Some could care less when they return. The ephemeral moments we with could last forever are just a brilliant burning flame that will be extinguished. We can keep it in our heart and immortalize it through epic retellings, but we can’t expect time to stand still. If we do, it will trample us on its march to the future. I miss my old friends, but I have good ones now too, just a lower number of them due to societal constraints on my time. In the past few years I’ve left behind my home, my friends and family, to live several hours away and have noticed how true this book is. There are good friends I’ve now lost touch with, and people that I’m sure have forgotten me. We all have lives and responsibilities, and when someone isn’t immediately present, it is understandable that current issues will elbow their way into the vacant spot. The reading of this book in a GR group made a sort of ‘metagroup’ considering the ideas expressed in the book, and made me really value the discussions and friendships that have been formed on this site. Thank you everyone. There was a time when I took trains around the Midwest and crashed on couches in Tennessee, but now those are just stories that I hope when others tell them that I appear as a positive and amiable figure in. The Kerouac days are over, but what Road was to my youth, Savage Detectives is to my present state in my mid-twenties. I hope to learn from this book and always remember that our immortality comes through our interactions with others. I want to live to the fullest, and to strive to be a positive figure in the stories that will one day be told. If you made it this far, thank you for listening to me vomit up some overly sentimental ramblings. Don’t judge too harshly?

Savage Detectives is an incredible investigation into the lives of the Visceral Realist, a group based upon actual people in Bolano’s life. It paints a well-rounded portrait of these key figures and reminds us that life is always fluctuating, for better or for worse, as it inches closer to our inevitable deaths. This book comes together quite nicely. He leaves us with an empowering message that the world outside our window is ours to shape. It is a world of infinite possibility. Just don’t let it shape you. Also, it was moving to see the mother of Visceral Realism defend the later generations a lion to her cubs. Despite all the frailties of friendship, the human bond will not break or shake in the face of death, and we see good always strive to conquer evil. We all end up as the bones that the eternal Works will step over, but even bones have their story to tell. May we all face the stars and the depths of eternity together. Everything that begins as comedy ends as as bittersweet memories

Best enjoyed with a bottle of Tecate or Modelo on a hot summer's day.

5/5
(my original posting of this review years ago was 4 out of 5, but as time goes on this one has grown so much in my heart that I had to give it the full five).

Thanks to everyone in the Cabbage Detectives group led by Don Juan Ian. I would encourage anyone to please read their wonderful , as each perspective brings this novel into clearer focus.
In no particular order:
Ian
Ifer
Kris
Scholar Mike
Mary
Ja(y Rubin)son
Sean
Praj
And more to come...bolano favorites road_map_of_life521 s5 comments Jessica594 3,337

I'll bet a lot of us walk around with some real concrete ideas about just who it is we could possibly fall in love with. Maybe the specifics of our ideas change over time and even become less rigid, but still we maintain that we know on some level what it is that we want. Maybe when we're nineteen, we're convinced we could only ever truly love a man with a neck tattoo who sings lead in an Oi! band and has great feminist politics and knows how to cook. Or maybe our criteria are purely negative, and we know for a fact that we could never love anyone who voted for Nader, who has facial hair, or is a Yankees fan, or knows about wine. Perhaps once we get a little older we insist we're not picky, and maintain it is just simple common sense that we could not under any circumstances possibly fall in love with someone who uses emoticons, smokes clove cigarettes, diss children, has a barcode tattoo, or watches too much television.... We will fall in love with a person who's got great taste in literature, who has beautiful arm muscles, who also can't dance, who's memorized Repo Man and is useful in a bar fight and knows how to sign. We say we're open-minded, but we have these ideas. We know what we want, what we are capable of falling for. We sense what it is that we can love and what we cannot, in the abstract, without even trying and waiting to see.

Pretty much same thing goes for books: I tend to think that I know what I'll get into, just as I'm pretty sure that I know what I won't. I hate On the Road and shy away from what I perceive to be "dude books" or "dick lit" or anything too scenestery or self-consciously literary. For these reasons and more, I really wouldn't think that I'd particularly go for a longish, fairly plotless novel about a group of drunk, shaggy-haired, pot-smoking poets hanging out and getting laid all the time and bouncing around Latin America, Europe, and other sundry continents. In fact, this thumbnail description is sort of the book equivalent of the right-wing, cigar-smoking pharmaceutical rep blind date who loves jam bands. I would not have gone out with Roberto Bolaño in a million years based on my google-stalking his myspace page, if my friend's girlfriend and my coworker and my roommate's friend and the chick who cut my hair hadn't all happened to know him in one way or another and all universally insisted that I give this guy a shot.

And whaddaya know: old spinster Jessica, swept off her feet!

This was when you find a guy who's cute but wearing sandals and a really ugly Hardrock Cafe tee shirt and has long, scruffly hair and listens to Latin Jazz and is really into capoeira and rock climbing -- really into capoeira and rock climbing -- and you go over to his house and realize he owns no books, except three Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks and maybe The Outlaw Poetry Anthology and a hardcover of Guns, Germs, and Steel that his aunt gave him for Christmas six years ago and which of course he never opened because he hasn't read a book since high school.... but then you go out into his backyard and both climb up into the tree there, and he makes you laugh a lot for some reason, and then you stay up until 6 am drinking ginger ale and talking about life, and then awhile after the sun comes up you both go to bed, and he doesn't even have blankets he has a sleeping bag even though he's actually almost thirty years old, but suddenly you don't care about that anymore, and pretty soon you're walking around in his baggy Hardrock Cafe tee shirt and sandals because you lost one of your shoes and your own clothes are too dirty to wear anymore since you haven't been home in a week and you're so stoned out of your mind just from being around him that you start to think that tee shirt is actually kind of cool, and anyway, it smells him, and him is the best smell that you've ever smelt, the best idea you've ever even thought of, if that makes sense, which of course it doesn't, because at this point you're gone....

I already lent my copy out to a friend, which makes getting into specifics more difficult but should recommend the book on its own. If I remember correctly (the affair is already a bit of a blur), this book has three main parts. The first and last are the diary entries of a seventeen-year-old student with incredible stamina who's living in late seventies Mexico City, who gets caught up with the emerging "visceral realist" poetry moment. The huge middle portion sandwiched by the kid's diary entries is a series of depositions (or anecdotes, or monologues, or whatever they are) taken over three decades from characters whose paths have crossed, on one continent or another, those of the founders of visceral realism: the infamous poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

The quantity of characters here is a bit Dickensian/Russian (i.e., ridiculous), and I'd actually started making a list of them in the back flap, which I sort of recommend doing because it can get slightly confusing at times. However, the fact that making such a cheat sheet isn't strictly necessary is a testament to this guy's skill as a writer. His characters are distinctive from one another, and all speak in the author's style and yet also in their own recognizable and totally enthralling voices. Ay, those voices! This book changed the way I felt about that whole talking-to-the-camera device in fiction. This can work, and moreover, its effect can be incredible. This is how people honestly are, or maybe it's just how I want them to be.

The way Bolaño writes about women is one of the reasons why I was able to give myself over so fully to this novel. While the world and characters described are far from egalitarian, I felt that the author took his female characters very seriously, and was equally adept at writing from a male or female perspective. This is a gift I maintain is fairly rare, and it really helped counter my impression that this was a dude novel. At the same time, I really d the way he wrote about sex from a male perspective. This book is hot! I mean, parts of it are. This guy can write a sex scene, that's all I'm saying. I mean, you might not agree, in which case you'll probably think I'm weird. But whatever, I'm just calling it I see it.... Jeez! Leave me alone!

In any case, The Savage Detectives restored my somewhat agnostic faith in narrative, fictional characters, and humanity in general. This book was incredibly beautiful. It really was. I know I should come up with a better way to put that, but unfortunately that's all I got: if you want to read something wonderfully phrased, I suggest you jump ship on my review and grab yourself some Bolaño. Again, I wish I had a better way to say this, but The Savage Detectives caught some breathing, squirming, hot-blooded aspect of the experience of living, and bottled it for convenient distribution and mass consumption during dull moments such as train rides. For me, this book justified the importance of language by reminding us of the reason why it exists: as a form of expression and communication, as the medium which makes sense of our experience and helps the pain of living seem something worth freaking out about in a grand and desperately passionate fashion.

If I were more the type of girl to hand out five-star , I'd have given one gratefully to The Savage Detectives. This novel singlehandedly transformed the way I felt about commuting, and I'm a little terrified by the prospect of returning to the subway (not to mention my life) now that I'm done with it. It's been awhile since I was this instantly and consistently caught up in a book. There was no getting-to-know-you period: I was immersed right away in the first few pages, and my interest never waned all the way through to its thoroughly satisfying close. There were no missteps in here, no off notes or dull parts or things that I felt were wrong or missing. Was it high passion? It wasn't high passion. I don't think this is the greatest thing I've ever read, and I'm still really not sure what was so wonderful about it, or why everyone else on here went so bananas over The Savage Detectives..... I just know that for some reason, I did kind of fall in love with this book.

I think falling in love is the answer you get when you solve for a special, specific equation of familiarity and surprise. Falling in love is the recognition of yourself in someone else, shot through with a foreignness that shocks you with something beyond what you'd ever be capable of doing or imagining alone. Reading this book felt just that to me. Falling in love, reading great fiction, means trusting someone enough to let that person take your hand and then lead you gently, firmly, adoringly, right off a cliff. The Savage Detectives did exactly this, and at the end of the day, that's all I want.arturos favorites groups-of-people ...more491 s1 comment Glenn Russell1,418 12.3k



Since there are so many fantastic of The Savage Detectives, I thought I would offer a slightly different approach as per below.

In Part 1, the first-person narrator, seventeen-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 enters the 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 forest 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 this make for rich, provocative reading.


Poetic Novelist RB

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 seventeen-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 multiple characters within a novel.


Roberto Bolaño - The Poet and Novelist as a Young Man

And, thank goodness there are some sensitive seventeen-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 thirty 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 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 book. The Savage Detectives, a novel about 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.360 s Jim Fonseca1,118 7,449

Edited 1/3/21
In this quasi-autobiographical story, a group of intense young poets, men and women, knock around Mexico City in the mid-1970s. Their lives revolve around poetry: reading it, writing poems, trying to get their poems published in fly-by-night literary magazines that only they read. The intensity of their love for poetry is disarming.

The young people exist in odd hours, wandering aimlessly through the city, drinking, making love, stealing books from bookstores, and talking poetry constantly. As they get older they become émigrés in Europe, mainly in Paris and Barcelona, but also in Germany, Israel and Africa. This is Jack Kerouac’s story if he had been a Latin American.

The book is structured in three parts. The first part is their youth in Mexico City as described above. A group of them free a woman from her pimp and flee to the northwestern Mexican desert in search of a perhaps-mythical woman poet. They are chased by the pimp and the police. The third section of the book is the conclusion of this story.



The middle of the book is a series of 4- and 5-page vignettes by folks who knew these poets throughout their lives. Some parents, friends, acquaintances and distant relatives who fed and housed them. Some are ex-girlfriends and boyfriends. A couple are wealthy Latin Americans who lived in Europe and maybe knew their parents, and found them on their doorsteps. There are old poets who welcomed them into their homes and book dealers who knew the poets were sealing books from them.

Bolano is master of the startling, flat statement:

“I don’t get many visitors, just my daughter and a woman and another girl who said she was my daughter too, and who was remarkably pretty.”

“But most of the time she didn’t have serious problems.”

“For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but suddenly, before he said anything, I realized that I’d be the one who cried…”

“…I thought that if I died … Arturo would know everything I hadn’t told him and would understand it without having to hear it from my lips.”

“…it’s as if I’m still dreaming and I can’t wake up, although you might think that Latin Americans were less affected by horror than anyone else, at least in theory.”

In one scene a woman chases her would-be rapist with a knife, stops at a cemetery to watch a child’s casket lowered into a grave, and then goes to meet a friend for drinks.



Bolano was a Chilean who lived mainly in Mexico and Spain. He died at age 50 in 2003 while waiting for a liver transplant. After his early death, Bolano’s fame skyrocketed and this book, in particular, has contributed to what his fans have called “Bolanomania.” He was a writer of the second generation that arose after Latin American literature burst onto the international scene after World War II thanks to the work of Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also reviewed Bolano’s short novel, The Skating Rink, set near Barcelona.

Photo of Mexico City in the 1970s from time.com
The author from newsweek.com

chilean-authors mexican-authors poetry ...more211 s Steven Godin2,550 2,675


There is no doubt that as a debut novel this really is quite something, and has one of the greatest opening sections of a novel I have probably read. My sheer enthusiasm for these characters and their setting was just unprecedented. I was so enjoying the first third so much and kept thinking to myself that if it carries on this then I could be looking at a novel that gets into my top 5 of all time. In the end though, it was the last third that took away the chances of that (this would still end up probably getting into my top 20 novels though). Damn, I thought, where are we going now? - all over the bloody planet by the looks of it. NO! I want to go back to 1975, Mexico, to the visceral realists. Sitting around all day, drinking, smoking, reading and having enough sex you'd think they had rabbit genes or something. I mean, come on, up to fifteen orgasms a night - really?. Was Bolaño trying to break some sort of record of how much intercourse you could stuff into a single page!

Once we got over the early sexual escapades, the moving around in time and places ended up being a really clever idea, and I soon realised this narrative change was only going to add and expand on the story, turning it into one of those epics that completely suck you in. Although it would seem Bolano has written a novel solely about poets, his interest in poets is not so swaying towards their intellectual side, but rather how easily make they can make such a mess out of their lives. The two key poets in this case, Arturo Belano, a Chilean, and his Mexican friend Ulises Lima, call themselves visceral realists. Their enemy is the grand Octavio Paz, a character in a bizarre scene about walking in circles in a park. These neo-surrealists meet in bars, steal books, sell drugs, have lovers, run a magazine, excommunicate members and feud with Mexican poets. Bolaño is funny and cruel about this in-fighting, which stretches to Barcelona and Paris (this is where the story really is stretched out). Belano and Lima truly stand out, they are the heart and sole of the novel, and predominantly live a fast-paced and drugged up life on the run. As they hunt the vanished Cesárea Tinajero, we try to make sense of their obscure motivations. Bolaño amusingly mixes up real names and literary movements, the estridentistas, with invented ones. A reader unaware of these minor poets may miss the deadly humour about literary self-satisfaction and oblivion.

Actual poetry rarely ever comes into it, instead, we have reports on their activities, their readings, and lovers' accounts of them in bed and on the road. The Savage Detectives after the first 100 pages or so is broken up into a multi-fractured open diary, of various characters who may or may not have links to the pair, some by fellow travellers and others back in Mexico. Bolaño has a perfect ear for the Mexicans, Argentines, French and Spaniards who tell us about their brief encounters with the two poets. It's as if he went globetrotting with a microphone and film crew in tow.
Best remembered, for would-be poets fed on extremists Rimbaud and Marx (a couple make love with Sade as a manual). But they did not take these mentors to the conclusions Belano and Lima do, by giving up art for something never defined that seems to be willed failure and uprootedness. Bolaño can be savagely comic as he mocks his generation, yet is equally tender when dealing with family issues and growing up. Apart from the novel taking place Mexico, we have the European settings too, and I did enjoy the Parisian part quite a bit because I used to live there and have such great memories.

Bold and hugely ambitious, this is one novel with just so much to chew over. But boy, I'll admit, it was hard going at times. And yet, I'm sort of glad that it was. It consumed my thoughts, day and night, and I couldn't wait to pick it up again every time I put it down (I know that's a bit of a cliché, but how else can I put it?). Just so pleased to have gone on a journey into Bolaño's stunning literary world. A Latin-American masterpiece. Makes me want to read everything he ever wrote. favourites latin-america postmodern-fiction173 s Kris175 1,496

I am struggling over writing this review. The Savage Detectives has become an important book to me, and I’m trying to find the best way to put a whole series of associations, emotions, and thoughts into words about how it has entered into my life and mind and heart. I have a tendency to hide behind a lot of formal analysis when I am writing, but I don’t think that approach is good enough for this review.

I just met a close friend from graduate school for dinner last week - he now lives in San Francisco, and we don’t get to see each other all that often. We entered the restaurant soaking wet from a tropical-style thunderstorm that hit just as we got out of the cab. As we were drying off (courtesy of a pile of extra napkins that the sympathetic host gave us), we reconnected with each other as if no time had passed since we navigating the highs and lows of graduate school together. It was the 1990s, and we were sponges, soaking up ideas and books and movies and good meals together. We were politically active too, campaigning together to elect Clinton, writing a parody of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to try to shake off the sting of the 1994 US elections that swept Gingrich and a wave of other Republicans into the House, and commiserating with each other over the latest offensive legislative initiative. It was an exciting, scary, enthralling time to be alive.

As I was talking with my friend over old times and new, our conversation kept resonating with The Savage Detectives. In our mid-40's, we were looking back across our lives, with affection for our younger selves, but also with understanding over how we had grown and changed over the years, and how the world had changed with us. In The Savage Detectives, as Bolaño pays homage to his younger self and his comrades in poetry, there’s a maturity and wisdom mixed in with the affection, humor, excitement, and sadness that he brings to his exploration of the Visceral Realists, who came together to form an artistic-political-counter-cultural movement in Mexico City in the 1970s, similar to the Infrarealist movement that Bolaño belonged to. Bolaño represents himself through two characters in the novel - Juan García Madero, a young, naive student who navigates sexual, artistic, and emotional transitions and rites of passage, and Arturo Belano who, along with Ulises Lima, heads up the Visceral Realists, a group of young poets who are striving to forward political and artistic aims through their poetry.

The novel is structured around three sections: a first and a third section narrated by Juan through diary entries, and a long second section, in which Visceral Realists and their friends, family members, associates, and enemies come together to tell their story through interviews or oral histories. There are many themes you can explore through the novel -- the Latin American poetry scene, the formation of youth cultures and countercultures, gender relations, sexuality, and rites of passage, the split between ideals and reality, how friends grow up, grow apart, and sometimes re-connect. To me, though, what I take from the novel more than anything else is a re-immersion in the excitement of youth, with its discoveries, explorations, complications, and questions. There’s a dynamism throughout the novel, and while Bolaño is willing to poke gentle fun at himself, he also recaptures the excitement, energy, and ideals that fueled the Visceral Realists.

There is another personal and special meaning of The Savage Detectives for me. I joined a Goodreads group read moderated by Ian Graye (see http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/7... ). In a short period of time, through discussions of the novel, posts of music we loved, and some very creative collaborative interviews, we formed a tight-knot group of fellow adventurers. I am grateful that everyone was so welcoming to me, a relative newcomer. The group exhibited camaraderie, warmth, creativity, intelligence and humor; I can’t imagine a better group to have read The Savage Detectives with, or a better novel to have read with this group. Many thanks to all of you for a truly special experience. It’s worth coming out from behind my barrier of academic analysis to say that! 1001 chile contemporary ...more169 s Guille828 2,088

Parece que lo que siento ahora con la primera parte de 2666 es algo muy parecido a lo que sentí en su día con “Los detectives salvajes”, la cual terminé igualmente sin saber muy bien qué pensar. La novela me fue interesando y gustando por fragmentos, casualmente coincidiendo casi siempre con las voces femeninas. Al final me pareció un conjunto de cuentos caóticamente enlazados que disfruté, incluso mucho, solo en contadas ocasiones. Con Amuleto, que bien pudiera haber formado parte de esta novela, no por nada Belano y Lacouture proceden de ella, estos detectives salvajes habrían llegado sin dificultad a unas cuatro estrellas muy bien servidas.161 s RandomAnthony395 109

My interpretation of 90% of the passages I encountered in Savage Detectives

I walked around Mexico City for a while. And then I sat in a coffee shop and wrote poetry for seven hours. And then I saw a crazy poet I know and we argued about Octavio Paz. And then I read (name drop about 30 Latin American poets of whom I've never heard). And then I wanted to see Maria.


But somebody who cares a lot about the history and insider references of Latin American poetry might love it. I only managed 150 pages.149 s2 comments brian 248 3,387

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Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.
The Savage Detectives ~~ Roberto Bolaño


5/5
Selected by Aesaan for
May 2021 Big Book Read

I’d vaguely remember first hearing of Roberto Bolaño while living in San Francisco. Those discussing him weren’t readers, but were instead those pseudo literary snobs who read only certain authors because it made them look hip. You know they type ~~ I could never read Woolf; she’s too plebeian.

Fast forward to this lifetime. I decided it was time to read Bolaño after reading all the rave of his work written by friends here on Goodreads. I chose The Savage Detectives as my first foray into Bolaño’s universe. Having read The Savage Detectives, I am eager to read Bolaño's other novels ~~ both long and short.

The Savage Detectives is a stunning novel; books this are why I read. Un other novels it deals with a highly unly subject, poetry, and its heroes are all poets. But all great novels it really is about life and what it means to live.

Back to the task at hand ~~ how do I review The Savage Detectives?



The Savage Detectives is made up of three sections. The first 100 or so pages are a coming-of-age novel in the form of a series of diary entries by the 17-year-old student and aspiring poet Juan García Madero, spanning the period from early November until the end of December 1975. He is introduced to a group of poets, led by two young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, who call themselves visceral realists, a term coined by Cesárea Tinajero, a woman poet of some decades earlier, whose work appears to have been lost and which Lima and Belano search for all over Mexico City. The term is never really defined; all we know is Belano and Lima reject all other poets.

Bolaño revisits familiar themes here, but attacks them from a fresh perspective ~~ what drives people to create, and what happens to those people when the things they create are pushed, themselves, to the margins of society. Garcia Madero’s drive to write forces him to confront his everyday reality as he attempts to shed his innocence. He loses friends, loses his virginity ~~ both literally and figuratively ~~ quits school, moves in with a waitress, falls in love, has his heart broken, has his cherry popped again ~~ he wasn’t certain the first time counted. He writes when he eats, he writes when he should be doing something else, he writes about writing. He assumes that he and his comrades are on the verge of fame; he sees himself as being bold and profound. Why then, Bolaño asks, is Garcia Madero satisfied with reading his poems to others when he dreams of placing his work in well-regarded anthologies? What happens when we realize that immortality is ultimately an illusion?

For the most part the aspiring poets spend their time having sex ~~ lots of sex ~~ both gay and straight, measuring their cocks ~~ machismoism is alive and well in this world, and size does matter, discussing poetry, smoking pot and going from one odd job to another ~~ pimping, prostituting, pushing. Garcia Madero falls in love with Maria Font, who is some kind of a muse to the visceral realists, and whose father, the Spanish architect Quim Font. Font offers his house as shelter to Lupe, a prostitute and friend of Maria, who is being harassed by her pimp. The pimp soon finds out where she’s hiding and together with his accomplices quietly waits outside the Font’s house for Lupe to come out.

At this point the diary entries suddenly end. The great chase begins.



The second section ~~ over 2/3s of the novel ~~ consists entirely of testimonies covering a period of 20 years by people who used to know Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. We don’t get to know how these testimonies were collected or who is collecting them and why. We learn a lot about Lima and Belano, but we don’t get to know them. We never read a single line of poetry that either has written. The reader is told they weren’t poets, as much as they were drug dealers who dabbled in poetry. The novel jumps back and forth through time ~~ from one narrator to another. Bolaño brilliantly gives each narrator a voice of their own.

The novel’s third section resumes with the great chase as Lima, Belano, Madero and Lupe flee Mexico City in search of traces of Cesárea Tinajero.

Every section contains at least one plot point that is left unexplained but this is essential for the unfolding plot. When Lima, Belano, Madero and Lupe flee Mexico City they are pursued all the way into the Sonora desert by Lupe’s pimp and an accomplice. Why would a pimp go through all this trouble to get back one of his prostitutes? Who knows? Bolaño never tells us why. Why are Lima and Belano are in pursuit of a poet who sought to unify life and art in her poetry and who in turn gives up poetry for life? Bolaño is silent on this as well. Perhaps, this is their visceral reality?



So … what makes The Savage Detectives a revelatory work to me? I think it is the visceral realists awareness, often times too late, that brief and startling connections between people are always possible and love may be found anywhere. Old friends meet unexpectedly on strange bridges in Paris, condemned men revisit their lives in the moment between a gunshot and death, and poor, unpublished poets will continue to read, and despite derision and hardship, will continue to express their own vision of hope and possibility. They persevere.

big-book-reads-2021 bolaño classics ...more142 s Valeriu GherghelAuthor 6 books1,638

Detectivii s?lbatici reconstituie dou? decenii (1975 - 1996) din biografia aventuroas? a poe?ilor Arturo Belano ?i Ulises Lima. Cei doi protagoni?ti nu vorbesc la propriu niciodat?. Dar despre ei se vorbe?te neîncetat. Vie?ile lor sînt relatate de 53 de naratori-martori. Nu i-am num?rat eu. Cifra trebuie luat? cum grano salis. Wikipedia a num?rat doar 52.

Printre multe altele ?i mai grozave, am un mare defect: admir mai presus de orice scriitorii ironici. Neîndoios, Bolaño a fost unul dintre ironici, foarte înzestrat, cu un umor feroce. Stilul s?u simplu, direct, lipsit de metafore (sau aproape), colocvial, mi-a adus aminte imediat de prozatorii nord-americani, de aceia care au scris texte scurte, dar ?i de Raymond Chandler, s? zicem.

Nu v? l?sa?i du?i în ispit? de titlu. În Detectivii s?lbatici se trage un singur glon? ?i acela dintr-o întîmplare, dar mor trei oameni dintr-un foc, un proxenet care tocmai a scos cu?itul, ajutorul lui, o „goril?” inexpresiv?, ?i Muma real-viscerali?tilor, legendara Cesárea Tinajero, femeia care a scris un singur poem în toat? via?a ei ?i acela vizual (din linii frînte ?i puncte). Crea?ia ei se nume?te Sión, cu accent ascu?it pe o, ?i constituie fundamentul curentului poetic real-visceralist.

Roberto Bolaño a scris odat? aceste rînduri hiperlucide:
„În?eleg c? ar exista oameni care cred în nemurirea sufletului, pot în?elege ?i c? sînt unii care cred în rai, în iad ?i chiar în acea sta?ie intermediar? ?i îngrozitoare care e purgatoriul; îns? cînd aud un scriitor vorbind despre imortalitatea anumitor opere literare, îmi vine s?-l pocnesc. Nu s?-l bat, doar s?-i trag una în figur?, dup? care s?-l iau în bra?e ?i s?-l lini?tesc”.
Un mare prozator...130 s Fernando698 1,102

"La verdad es que a mí no me interesaba hablar de Encarnación Guzmán sino de Cesárea. ¿Qué va a ser de tu revista?, le dije. ¿Qué va a ser del realismo visceral? Ella se rio cuando pregunté aquello. Recuerdo su risa, muchachos, les dije, caía la noche sobre el DF y Cesárea se reía como un fantasma, como la mujer invisible en que estaba a punto de convertirse."

Qué cosa sorprendente es la literatura. Justo cuando uno piensa que lo ha leído todo, se cruza con Roberto Bolaño y esa misma literatura, supuestamente acabada, adquiere otra relevancia, otro sentido y otra significación.
Fueron tantos los lectores que me recomendaban leerlo que no me quedó otra que comprar una de sus novelas emblemáticas, "Los detectives salvajes" y comenzar a leerla. Aunque tuve momentos de zozobra y de aparente cansancio, sobre todo al llegar a la mitad de la lectura no claudiqué y avancé hasta el final.
Este es un libro enorme, extensísimo, que abarca una serie interminable de situaciones y escenas en las que los personajes principales se van multiplicando sin cesar, engrosando la complejidad de la historia, algo que me hizo recordar al famoso "Rayuela" de Julio Cortázar.
La novela está dividida en tres partes muy claras. Primeramente, nos sumergimos en la historia que nos cuenta las aventuras de Juan García Madero, que leemos desde su diario y que considero está narrada muy al estilo "Bildungsroman" o novela de formación y aprendizaje, aunque en el caso de García Madero, este no es un niño sino un joven en la etapa final de su adolescencia y para ser sinceros, en distintos pasajes la lectura me remitió en muchos de ellos a "Retrato de la vida del artista adolescente", más allá de no ser la única que se encuadra en este estilo, de hecho hay muchas en la literatura.
Si nosotros tomáramos la primera parte de este libro, "Mexicanos perdidos en México (1975)" y la tercera, "Los desiertos de sonora (1976)" lo que obtendríamos sería una novelita interesante, muy bien escrita, con un sinnúmero de situaciones generadas de manera espontánea por los personajes principales, y la terminaríamos con agrado y una buena sonrisa en los labios.
O también podríamos tomar la segunda parte cuyo título es el del libro "Los detectives salvajes" agregando 1976-1996, que es la más extensa (413 páginas en mi edición) y en donde nos encontramos con una enorme cantidad de anécdotas, testimonios, recuerdos, y hasta monólogos interiores del tipo "stream of consciousness" joyceano que se extienden por 20 años y continúan hacia adelante e incluso hacia atrás en el tiempo lo comenzado en la primera parte.
Estos selvantan a la manera de un documental escrito lo que sucedió con dos de los personajes principales, los poetas real visceralistas Ulises Lima y Arturo Belano en su búsqueda por encontrar a Cesárea Tinajero de la que comentaré más adelante.
Es indudable que este bloque que conforme el grueso del libro adquiere un tratamiento que aunque en algunos casos puede equivaler a aquellos "capítulos prescindibles" de "Rayuela", en su mayoría aportan a la complejidad de la historia disparando múltiples caminos en la búsqueda que los detectives salvajes, encaran en la tercera parte del libro. Las conexiones con otras novelas son sorprendentes, de hecho, el final primera parte en donde García Madero narra los festejos de años nuevo en la casa Joaquín "Quim" Font me recordaron instantáneamente a la tertulia a la que asiste Adán Buenosayres en la novela homónima de Marechal en la casa de los Admunsen.
Analogías y similitudes como estas las hay muchas más, pero me detendré aquí.
Es indudable que cuando Roberto Bolaño se sentó a escribir esta novela, lo hizo sin parar, acumulando seguramente una cantidad exorbitante de papel y anotaciones, pero que fueron indispensables para darle forma a todo el conjunto y apuntalan la coexistencia narrativa de las tres partes.
Otro punto muy importante en todo el proceso creativo es la inclusión de mucho material autobiográfico que el autor incluyó, dado que es innegable que en gran parte, juega a dos puntas entre García Madero y Arturo Belano, sobre todo en éste último, un chileno en México, al igual que él, ya que Bolaño vivió en ese país en dos oportunidades, 1968 y 1974. Su juventud, sus días de preparatoria y sus experiencias juveniles son aumentadas considerablemente en la ficción de esta novela y de esa manera, Bolaño va construyendo y deconstruyendo esa época.
Si hasta parece que Arturo Belano es su alter-ego, con ese pelo largo y gafas muy feas, como lo definen en un pasaje de por ahí.
Este muchacho, que cuenta cómo conoce a estos dos jóvenes poetas mexicanos, creadores del Realismo visceral (no intentaré explicar este movimiento poético literario) que están en pie de guerra con otra vertiente el "Estridentismo" y de su obsesión por seguir los pasos de otra fundadora del movimiento, la poeta Cesárea Tinajero.
De este modo, se embarcarán en toda una serie de enredos y aventuras inevitables por México, varios países de Europa e incluso Nicaragua, y para ello contaremos con un gran número de personajes secundarios que abarca prostitutas, poetas, novias, escritores, editores, estudiantes, pintores, etc.
Algunos que desfilan en la novela que son María y Angélica Font, Joaquín Font, padre de estas y ya nombrado anteriormente, Amadeo Salvatierra, Rafael Barrios, Lisandro Morales, Felipe Müller, Hipólito Garcés, Perla Avilés, Laura Jáuregui, Jacinto Requena, Bárbara Patterson, Piel Divina (vaya nombre) y muchos, muchos más.
Como se podrá apreciar, el libro adquiere un tamaño descomunal que le proporciona la segunda parte con los testimonios de las vidas de los personajes principales en esos días. Los real visceralistas han batallado para innovar en la poesía mexicana y ven en Cesárea Tinajero a su mesías y de esta manera encaran su búsqueda.
La parte central de la novela se transforma en un puzzle gigantesco. Bolaño introduce en esta novela absolutamente todo lo que la literatura le dio para darle vida propia a su libro, que por momentos es hilarante y en otros conmovedor, cómico, trágico, tragicómico, escatológico, cargado de sexualidad, con personajes disímiles que pueden ser marginales, revolucionarios, violentos, sensibles, enfermos, depresivos, intelectuales, arrogantes e inspiradores.
Mención especial para el contrapunto creado por los real visceralistas en contra del gran escritor mexicano Octavio Paz, a quien varios de ellos odian (de hecho, se narra un posible secuestro del escritor), pero que en realidad es un homenaje de Bolaño a quien seguramente ha sido uno de sus ídolos literarios como también gran influencia inspiradora.
Los conocimientos de Bolaño en cuestiones de poesía son totales. Disfrazado en el personaje de García Madero hace un despliegue contundente acerca de su sabiduría total en términos literarios, mientras que en otros pasajes la narrativa empleada o los diálogos son sencillamente brillante.
Si hasta se da el lujo de hacerle un guiño a la páginas 218, 219 y 234 del Ulises y 175 a 179 del Finnegans Wake de James Joyce cuando escribe una lista interminable de escritores, poetas y máximos exponentes de la literatura mundial
Su temprana muerte a los 50 años privó a la literatura de seguir disfrutando todo aquello que podría haber seguido escribiendo, pero afortunadamente dicen que dejó una vasta obra que incluye cuentos, ensayos y por supuesto, abundante poesía.
Me faltan muchísimo por descubrir de Bolaño, pero tengo todas las intenciones de seguir.
Los que saben, siguen considerando a Roberto Bolaño como unos de los más emblemáticos escritores hispanoamericano del siglo XX y lo ubican al lado de otros insignes como Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar y eso no se da por que sí.
Según ellos, Roberto Bolaño es LA literatura y yo, luego de leer esta novela, me digo ¿cómo contradecirlos?100 s2 comments Jenn(ifer)184 951


I want to sum up my thoughts about this book using a quote from its pages…

“…What a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

But that seems insufficient. How about a song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLx__X...

That doesn’t quite do it either. How about a poem?

SELF PORTRAIT AT TWENTY YEARS
I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don't know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don't, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death's cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.
~ Roberto Bolaño

Damn it. I have no way of telling you about this book. My words fail me. I went full of fear, my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing. This book fills me with regret. I heard that mysterious and convincing call. You either listen or you don’t. There are so many things I wish I had done and did not do. This book makes me want to write poetry. This book makes me want to wander around the globe. It makes me want to make friends, make enemies, make love. This book makes me want to rethink my life. This book!

5-f-ing-stars game-changers gr-friends-recommend ...more100 s Ana Olga232 227

Hace algunos 11 años la leí, es una verdadera master piece
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