The Savage Detectives

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.