the savage detectives by roberto bolano

january 13th was the day i started reading the savage detectives in earnest. until now. this isn’t to say that the novel is a particularly difficult one to read; bolano always slows my reading down, forcing me to focus on each word.

what i have to say on the savage detectives may come across as not enjoying the work – on the contrary, i enjoyed it. but!

the novel greatly reminded me of my experience with 2666. i loved 2666 – all of its dreams, all of its violence, its strong sense of setting and even the bouncing narrators. i couldn’t easily pull my reading experience of 2666 away from the savage detectives. it’s also broken up into sections where the narrators shift. one of the parts of the novel has a constant shift of narrators (comparable to the “narrators” in the part about the crimes). having gotten that out of the way, the books felt very different.

the savage detectives felt much more personal, with arturo belano meaning to represent the author and ulises lima meaning to represent his best friend. the viscaral realism in the novel is the literary equivalent of his experience as a founding member of the infrarealist movement. it felt like an homage to his generation, to his friends, to youth and meandering. like here:

If he comes back to see me, I thought, I’ll be justified, if he shows up here one day, without calling first, to talk to me, to listen to me tell my old stories, to submit his poems for my consideration, I’ll be justified. All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.

(Manual Maples Arce, speaking of Arturo Belano, page 161)

it was also the less serious of the two works. i don’t mean that in a derogatory way, i only mean to say that he’s very funny, particularly in the first part where juan garcia madero, a teen poet aiming to be a visceral realist, is the narrator. in parts, he pokes fun at himself in an illuminating way, telling us through the eyes of a man in an asylum about the kind of literature that belano and lima set out to write:

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther.

(Joaquin Font, speaking to no one in particular, page 184-185)

many of the aspects i loved in 2666 show up here:

the dreams that the characters have
the violent act that is rarely if ever addressed by the characters
the strong sense of setting
the “quest” to find a hidden literary figure

there’s an article i read a while ago that is meant to be a “user’s guide to reading bolano” and to help you choose which order to read his books in. they take quite a harsh view of 2666 but regardless of this, i do agree that starting of with it may not be the best option.

for me at least, it feels like nothing else can measure up.