I was really excited when my book club chose to read Roberto
Bolaño’s
The Savage Detectives. I had never
ready anything by Bolaño but I had heard so much about him. When I worked at Pages
(one of Toronto’s coolest indie bookstores of yore) I prided myself on knowing
what a customer might want to read based on what they looked like. There were a
lot of smart (and very hipster) looking people who would pick up either Bolaño,
Murakami or Miranda Hill. Those were the 3 heavy hitters at the time and every
time I recommended one of those 3 to a hip looking book lover I felt slightly
guilty that I hadn’t actually read the first on my list of “3 authors all
hipsters will love”. So here was my opportunity, years later with a group of
not quite hipster but very smart ladies.
Initially I felt very intimidated by The Savage Detectives. I have a rule when I read a book, I have to
get to at least 100 pages before I think of quitting or making any
generalizations. Well, I reached page 100 and thought to myself, “What the hell?”
I’m still not quite sure why this book is regarded so highly in the literary
community but I have a few ideas. (Maybe it’s all the sex.)
Maybe the truly confusing books are seen as genius works of
art, because people are too afraid to say they didn’t understand them? But
perhaps I’m not being fair.
The book is separated into 3 parts, the first is from the
point of view of 17-year old Juan Garcia Madero, a drop-out law student turned
amateur poet. Garcia Madero joins up with a radical group of like minded poets
called the visceral realists. His diary of the last few months of 1975 offers a
first hand account of the sex, drugs and confusing literary opinions that the
visceral realists had. Garcia Madero and everyone else in the group idealize
two men who seem to be their leaders. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the
leaders of the visceral realists are quite literally Bolaño
and his buddy Mario Santiago, in case you skipped the introduction by Natasha
Wimmer at the beginning of the paperback edition of the book. Also the literary
allusion to Ulysses is something you may have not picked up on but please feel
free to make the literary connections at your leisure.
The second part of the book is the longest and most
frustrating. It spans 1976-1996 and has numerous narrators who talk about
Belano and Lima on their quest for Cesarea Tinajero in the Sonora Desert in
1976 as well as their debaucherous lifestyles in Europe later on. Tinajero is
the poet that Lima and Belano idolize even though there is only one magazine
with her printed work, a magazine that no one has ever read and no one has seen
or heard from Tinajero in decades. Like their hero, Belano and Lima have a
group of followers who never talk about their work nor mention that they are
great writers. The reader never even really gets a good sense of what or who
the visceral realists comprise of. I think the very term itself is redundant
and meaningless. But perhaps that is a comment on life and art. Belano, Lima
and even Tinajero are demi-gods in their community not because of their work
but because of what they represent. But the fact that I had to read almost 400
pages of random testimonials to come to that conclusion is tiresome to say the
least.
The last section in the book is perhaps the most rewarding
for the reader. We go back to Garcia Madero in the first few weeks of 1976.
Belano, Lima, Garcia Madero and Lupe are on the run from Lupe’s pimp and also conveniently
on the search for Cesarea Tinajero, both of whom find them in the end. We
finally get some plot and excitement but reality is more visceral than any of
the characters can handle. (See what I did there?) The reader finally pieces
together the narratives they read in the lengthy middle section and understand
why Belano and Lima run away to Barcelona and Paris. But is their search worth
it in the end? What have they learned? What has the reader learned?
I left the novel with a general sense of disappointment and
fatigue. Did Bolaño mean for me to feel this way,
perhaps like his characters felt after meeting their hero and coming face to
face with reality? On top of everything, I got really annoyed with the constant
name dropping within the novel. This was a book about literary movements,
politics and Latin America. But as a North American reader I couldn’t quite
keep up and I wondered if perhaps some things were lost in translation. The
Latin American authors the characters were constantly referring to might not
even have been real literary figures for all I knew.
I wasn’t the only one in my book club who had issues with
the novel. But we all felt bad that we disliked the book because weren’t we
suppose to love it?! It was one of the 10 best books of the year according to
The New York Times Book Review, there was even a sticker on the front of the
book to remind us of the fact. Bolaño was an author we were all suppose to
read. And I’m not sorry I did read him but would I recommend the book? No!
Maybe I should give him another try with his poetry which
he’s more famous for but first I need a break. Maybe I’ll read something I
might actually like for a change. Is that so wrong? And no, I don’t mean a 50 Shades of Grey type book. Why can’t a
book be smart and entertaining at the same time?
Have you ever read a book that you were suppose to love and
had been heralded by all critics only to discover that you hated it? How did
the fact that you hated the book make you feel as a reader? I’m curious to know
what others thought of The Savage
Detectives and if anyone can convince me to appreciate it more.
