The Savage Detectives: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.80 You Save: $9.20 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.16 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Savage Detectives: A Novel
Book Review: A Messy, Fascinating Book
Summary: 4 Stars
Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima, the protagonists at the center of this crazy novel, are the Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy of Latin America, poets based on Roberto Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Most of the other dozens of characters are also based on real-life acquaintances of Bolaño, and the story seems to be somewhat autobiographical, though it's hard to tell to what degree. It revolves around Bolano and Lima's quixotic attempts to create a Latin American poetry revolution with a style they dub "visceral realism."
The innovative three-part structure of The Savage Detectives is a precursor to Bolaño's five-part 2666. In the first and third sections, we have a single narrator, Juan García Madero, a university dropout who follows the trail of the visceral realists through Mexico City. At first, he is an outsider who has only heard tales of the visceral realists, but through the course of the first section he begins hanging out with them and learning more about what it means to be part of the self-proclaimed greatest movement in Latin American poetry--mostly a lot of sitting around in coffee shops discussing poetry, stealing books from libraries, dissing the poetry establishment, partaking in a bohemian approach to sex and relationships, and a good amount of drugs and drinking. Madero never quite buys into the hype, but nonetheless finds himself with Lima, Bolano and a prostitute named Lupe as they speed north out of Mexico City at the end of the first section, Lupe's murderous pimp and a crooked Mexican policeman hot on their trail.
The second section is a convoluted mishmash of snapshots of Bolano and Lima, from various narrators who knew them to varying degrees over a thirty-year span. Some of the people knew the young poets well, some vaguely, but what we get in totality are portraits of two wandering, possibly delusional souls. Their stories wander across Europe, Israel, Africa. They sleep on sofas, on boats, in caves. They are loved, admired, detested, celebrated and despised, depending on who is talking about them. This section is sometimes difficult to plow through, because although it's divided up into short chapters, each one offers only a small piece of a massive puzzle. It's an incongruous timeline, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason for the order of the narratives. In a way, though, it's more realistic than a traditional narrative. What is a person if not a set of disjunctive moments and memories?
The third section picks up where the first left off, flashing back to Lima and Bolano's desperate escape from Mexico City. Eventually the thread of the prostitute and pimp is resolved, but most of the third section focuses on the visceral realists' search for whom they consider to be the original visceral realist, an obscure poet named Cesárea Tinajero who lives in the Sonoran Desert.
The Savage Detectives is my second Bolaño. Maybe because of that, I didn't find it as stunning as 2666, although it shares many of the same elements and themes. Or maybe it's because the characters are so full of themselves, sometimes admirably but more often annoyingly so. But in the end I found their youthful spirits infectious. There is a scene where Arturo challenges a critic to a duel, and they stand on a beach with swords, awkwardly swinging at one another. It is a silly moment, surreal and poetic and farcical, but we know that at any turn it could become tragic and deadly. For me, that scene is distilled Bolaño. This is a book that has grown on me since I finished it, and I expect it will continue to do so.
Book Review: The lives of the poets many
Summary: 5 Stars
This was my first Roberto Bolaño book ... and now I'm hooked (just picked up 2666!). He has an amazing storytelling ability--his use of conversation is mastery. He can jump in and out of one hundred characters with distinct voices and mannerisms and sayings, all interweaved with their own separate stories and emotion and tales. Many of these would be classic short stories in their own right.
The novel has three distinct sections. The first and third are narrated by a young visceral realist poet, the 17-year old Juan García Madero. These portions are linear and connected, and tell a specific story. The middle section is nonlinear and consists of a large number of characters (some imagined, some not) being "interviewed" and telling their stories as they relate to Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter-ego in the book) and Ulises Lima. These stories are what I mentioned above, subsisting on their own but coming together to tell a grander tale of life and notoriety and expectation and aging. Note: I DID find the transition from the first to the second section abrupt and jarring--I had a harder time picking up the book as often once I reached that second section. BUT, after getting used to the new format, that section flowed as well as the others, especially toward its second half, when the pieces begin to fall together nicely and the many (many!) characters are recognizable both in their own subsequent interview entries and as the related characters tell their "other" sides of the story.
My writing has been inspired after reading The Savage Detectives. I have the desire to be a more active part of literary "movement," or collective--whatever. The good old visceral realists.
Fantastic book. I will need to read it again, if not only to gain the inspiration again, but to be able to understand the vast multitude of characters, and how such people can relate to the goings-on and relationships within my own life.
--- ---
A quote or two can sum up some themes in the book:
"writing poetry was the most beautiful thing anyone could do on this godforsaken earth" (134)
"Literature isn't innocent." (154)
"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" (185)
"Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? ... That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense." (359)
"a poem doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, except that it's a poem" (397)
"in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer" (406)
"I try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. Life does a find job on its own." (500)
Book Review: A book about everything that matters...
Summary: 5 Stars
Every so often you come upon a book that you can only diminish the more you try to explain what it's about. "The Savage Detectives" is such a book. Ostensibly it's about a couple of wild young poets who revive an old literary movement and go in search of its forebears. Ultimately they grow older, become increasingly disillusioned, never attain their once-lofty aspirations, heading straight for neglect and oblivion...and yet through everything they still hold on to a belief--a faith, if you will--in poetry and revolution.
Okay, that's, in a nutshell, what the novel is "about."
But the experience of reading "The Savage Detectives" is one that cannot be described in words other than those Bolano himself used to create this passionate and poetic adventure of heart, mind, and soul. This is a book that follows two characters--through the eyes of a dozen or so other characters--who take literature seriously, as a matter of life and death, not as a mere pastime, not as simple entertainment. If you don't share something of the same conviction, you're likely not to get the point of this novel; actually, you're likely to conclude that there isn't any point to it at all.
This is a novel that cannot be contained, nor can it contain itself. If it's difficult to say precisely what it's about, that's in good part because it's about everything--about life and death, about love and art, about beauty and squalor, corruption and violence, humanity and inhumanity. "The Savage Detectives" has the tone and authority of a summing up of all that Bolano had seen and thought in his abbreviated life--a message he was desperate to get down, if not in the most symmetrical of forms, than in a far more honest, if messy, explosion of urgency.
This novel throbs with life and intensity--it manages to be both unbearably sad and irresistibly inspiring. Bolano writes as if he's running only a step or two in front of the burning fuse, which, as it turns out, he was. In the end, though, we all share the same fate. And it seems a good part of Bolano's intent to get us to realize, viscerally, as his fictional "visceral realist" poets do, that time is short and the world is big. Let's live while we can.
It's tempting to call "The Savage Detectives" the best book I've read all year, but such an assertion would no doubt be suspect because of the fact that it's the most recent book I've read. It is, however, at the very least, among the best books I've read in this or any year.
Take the negative reviews of "The Savage Detectives" under advisement. So many of them complain precisely about those things that make this novel so unique and so powerful. Like his even more ambitious "2666," "The Savage Detectives" simply isn't everyone's favorite slice of pie. There are people, after all, who hate coconut custard. Go figure.
Book Review: Get in the Impala
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a massive, ambling book. For the most part I'm at a loss as far as why or even what happened in it. There's a huge cast of characters and a span of time that weaves back and forth. Generations of characters fold into one another, children act as parents and vice versa. Time stretches and contracts; time lies or at best is irrelevant or should I say airrelevant in the same sense that the characters are amoral? This is an epic journey a la Don Quixote and his side kick Sancho Panza though these Detectives aren't enamored of Chivalric literature but, perhaps, their related genre of Visceral Realist Poetry. Were either of these, Chivalry or Visceral Realist Poetry, ever valid codes to live by? Of course Visceral Realism is an invention of Bolano's but Chivalry, at least to
Quixote, was his own personal invention that only vaguely tied in with the main King Arthur traditions. Did either Bolano or Cervantes traditions ever exist? Suspend believe, get on Rosinante or into the Impala, and head off into the sunset with either of these authors. It will be more comfortable that way trust me.
There's also an element of a spiritual coming of age. This multitude of characters seek enlightenment by wandering in the Sonoran, or sometimes the Kalahari, desert however on their quest there are rumors that they've seen and performed deeds in various guises in variously places. Are ALL these characters really one person trying on each mode of being, each code of belief? They're certainly not doing their wandering in a straight line but are at once son/father/brother, author/student/prisoner, criminal/savior, to those they encounter. Rosinante/the Impala are stolen, retrieved, used for good and ill. The women are alternately madonas and whores, friends and lovers, daughters and wives, high born and low, etc. just as in Don Quixote. It depends on the character du jours' perceptions.
The writing is lush and enmeshed, confusing when taken as a whole but almost simple when taken bit by bit. There are lists of people and places that recur throughout the book like a Greek (Latin American?) chorus that feel like they have great importance but they don't seem to fit into the storyline. Are they recitatives, musical happenings that join one big aria to another?
As you can see I have more questions than answers after reading `The Savage Detectives'. I have a sense that's what Bolano intended. Just get in the Impala ok? It's a sweet ride.
Book Review: A Literary Adventure Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
I first discovered The Savage Detectives almost by accident. I was probably killing time
before work in a bookstore in downtown Berkeley and its cover was striking, not to
mention the title! After glancing at it several times and flipping through its pages
over the course of a few months I finally decided to buy it. It is rare that I buy a book
I've never heard of, simply out of curiosity. Usually I choose books based on friends'
recommendations or because the author is someone I've heard a lot about and have
been meaning to read.
I had never heard of Roberto Bolano before I bought "The Savage Detectives" about
six or seven months ago. Which, now, I find odd, because there is no doubt in my
mind that he belongs in the upper echelons of writing with all of those writers that
have simultaneously educated and entertained me along the way.
One striking feature of "The Savage Detectives", and the most obvious I suppose,
is that, despite its length of 649 pages, it is cleverly broken down into short diary
entries, from a paragraph to six pages in length, making it easier and more enjoyable
to read. This also exposes one of Bolano's greatest talents, that of perspective.
The novel is told from the point-of-view of at least twenty or thirty characters,
including its two quixotic main characters, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, Bolano's
alter-ego. The "voices" of his characters, from the paranoid Heimito Kunst, whom
Ulises meets in prison and who worries there are Jews underground building
atomic bombs to the young, naive intellectual Juan Garcia Madero who wants to
join the Viscerrealists, a new poetry movement begun by Lima and Belano,
to the dancer/prostitute Lupe who is friends with the poet, Maria Font, and
loves to brag about the length of her boyfriend/pimp's member which he often
measures with a knife, are flawless. Bolano pulled out the sculptor's carving tools
when he created his characters.
The novel is full of adventure and travel, migrant workers sleeping in caves by
the sea, a sword fight, death, imprisonment, and more travel with poetry
weaving its way through each page to its grand finale in the north of Mexico.
An unforgettable, cinematic ending. I would recommend "The Savage Detectives"
to just about anybody who enjoys reading.