The Savage Detectives, Second Time Around

 

by Pa Rock

Reader

I first read Roberto Bolano's exceptional novel, "The Savage Detectives," in 2008 and wrote about it in this blog on September 7, 2008.  It's a lengthy and complicated read - nearly six-hundred-and-fifty pages plus a 23-page introduction by the translator, but it is a read that is well worth the necessary effort that goes into it.  I knew when I finished the novel the first time, that I would eventually experience it again.  In the interim, between the initial reading and this latest effort, I also read most of the other major works by Bolano.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953.  He moved to Mexico City with his family as a teenager where he ultimately became a founder of the "infrarrealist" poetry movement and spent his early writing career crafting poetry.  Bolano turned to writing novels in his forties and published "The Savage Detectives," the book that put him of the map as a major literary voice, in 1998.  He published several other novels over the next few years before dying of liver failure in Spain in 2003 at the very young age of fifty.  Bolano is widely considered one of the premier Latin American authors of his generation.

In my initial review of "The Savage Detectives" back in 2008 I focused on reasons that I thought it would eventually become a major banned book in North America, with a primary focus on the book's content, a loose set of tales about young people struggling to find their paths in life through a landscape of political revolution, sex, drugs, and poetry.  This time I would like to focus on Bolano's craftsmanship as a writer and the way the story is presented.

First, the introduction by Natasha Wimmer, the translator who  brought the Spanish edition into English, contains important insights into the both the author and his work.   Wimmer's observations and knowledge of Bolano and his work do much to enrich the experience of reading "The Savage Detectives."  Don't skip it.

The primary characters in this novel are two young poets in their twenties who are living in Mexico City when the story opens in early November of 1975.  The men, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, consider themselves adherents to the "visceral realist" poetry movement, a (fictional) collection of young poets who drift through various coffee houses and bars in Mexico City, sharing their work and their lives just below the radar of traditional society.  They are so common to this story that one gets the idea that every young person in Mexico City in the 1970's must have been writing poetry and publishing their own poetry magazines. Belano and Lima are the self-styled leaders of the group - and they are the focus of the novel which extends across thirty years and four continents.

Arturo Belano is the alter ego of the author, Roberto Bolano - both were born in Chile, both arrived in Mexico City as teenagers, and both eventually wound up in Spain.  Ulises Lima was based on Roberto Bolano's good friend, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, who along with Roberto Bolano, helped to found the "infrarrealist" poetry movement.  Both Belano and Lima appear as characters in other works by Roberto Rolano.

"The Savage Detectives" is a story told in three parts.   The first section, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)," spans early November 1975 through New Year's Eve two months later.    It  tells the story of Juan Garcia Madero, a seventeen-year-old who moves to Mexico City to live with his aunt and uncle while he attends the university.  Garcia Madero wants to be a writer, but his uncle is insistent that he study the law and become a professional who is capable of earning a good income.  Early on the youngster comes under the influence of a pair of young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, who spend their days roaming through bookstores where they steal books for their own use, and circulate through he bars and coffeehouses by night.  Soon the two primary "visceral realist" poets and their friends have poor Garcia Madero completely corrupted and he quits going to classes and living at home with his aunt and uncle.

That first section of the book introduces readers to Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima primarily through the eyes of Garcia Madero.    As that section ends that two poets, their young acolyte, and a young prostitute named Lupe who is fleeing her brutal pimp, drive off into night of New Year's morning in a fairly new car that they have borrowed from a friend - and head up into the Sonora Desert.  They are running from the murderous pimp and also on a quest to find the "mother" of the "visceral realist" poetry movement who may or may not still be living somewhere in one of the little adobe towns scattered across Mexico's northern desert.

The first section of the book is arranged chronologically (day-by-day and in order), with the primary purpose being to introduce Belano and Lima to readers through the observations of a young innocent.

The second section is the meat of the novel.  It is entitled "The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)" also tells of the lives of Belano and Lima, but instead of a one-person chronological account, the second part bounces around in time and tells their stories in a wild mosaic of stories and vignettes offered up by people who knew them or even just had slight contact over the years.   Often the stories focused on other things, but somewhere in each tale was a mention of one of the two main characters, something that revealed yet another aspect of their lives.

The third section jumps back to the pre-dawn hours of January 1, 1976, and joins the carload of young people as they flee Lupe's pimp and head off on a quest to find the "mother" of the visceral realist poetry movement.  It provides another view of the poets' Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as they research the subject of their quest, interview people who knew the mysterious Cesarea Tinajero, and travel down roads that were longer roads - while providing the bare minimum of older-brother-oversight to Garcia Madero and Lupe.

And the story ends out on the desert with a shocking climax - but the readers were left with an odd comfort of knowing how the lives of the main characters eventually played out.

Roberto Bolano was a very precise writer who selected his words with great care and arranged them into intricate patterns that rival many of the delicate designs found in nature.   While this story is built around young poets who exist in a milieu of populated by dozens of other young poets, there is almost no poetry included in the text, yet the intriguing prose is awash in the feel of poetry.  

"The Savage Detectives" is a wonderful read.  It was even better the second time around!