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The
Savage Detectives
is a maximinalist masterpiece that will change the way we
think of Latin American literature. Chilean-Mexican author
Roberto Bolaño explodes the old Latin America literature boom
with this raucous, globe-trotting saga of two tough-guy poets
who are equal parts Dadaists, Beat poets, and Marx Brothers.
This uproarious escapade is a disguised polemic of old guard
versus avant garde arts, and how the biggest buffoons might
inspire legions of artists to break through artistic boundaries,
even while gaining no tangible success themselves. It's also
a cautionary tale on how time can dull our senses and our
dreams.
Juan
García Madero, a 17-year-old Mexico City law student and aspiring
poet, has been asked to join a gang of renegade poets called
the visceral realists by the book's anti-heroes, Ulises Lima
and Arturo Belano. The visceral realists, who have stolen
their name from an earlier Mexican poetry movement, vow to
change Latin American poetry; however, Ulises and Arturo mostly
bum around, disappear, and then re-appear to cause more trouble.
Ulises and Arturo invade García Madero's poetry workshop at
the university and start a near-riot, and García Madero refers
to the pair causing scenes at poetry events, bookstores, and
cafes. What the visceral realists stand for is almost anyone's
guess, other than general iconoclasm. As García Madero says
in his diary, "In one sense, the name of the group is a joke.
At the same time, it's completely in earnest."
The
Savage Detectives is a three-part book, with three months
of García Madero's diary entries from November 1975 to February
1976 sandwiching the meat of the book: a sprawling, glittering
cacophony where scores of Mexico City's poets tell, via interviews,
their stories of Arturo and Ulises and what happened after
the duo drove off in search of the mysterious poet Cesárea
Tinajero, the founder of the original visceral realists. Readers
learn about the duo in the same way one sometimes studies
poetry: through translation, as well as secondary and tertiary
sources. More often than not, the tellers reveal aspects of
themselves, their restless younger days, their love of poetry,
and their lost innocence and dreams. The interviews become
a threnody for the poets' lost youths. As Arturo's friend
Julio Martínez Morales says, "In some lost fold of the past,
we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats."
The story
of Cesárea is primarily told by Cesárea's friend Amadeo Salvatierra.
Although his narrative is dispersed throughout the book, it
all takes place in January 1976, immediately after Ulises,
Arturo, García Madero, and a former prostitute named Lupe
take off in a borrowed Impala to escape Lupe's pimp and to
search for Cesárea.They behave more like outlaw clowns than
poets. Ulises and Arturo remind fellow visceral realist Rafael
Barrios of Easy Rider; they're "like Dennis Hopper
and his doppelgånger: two dark figures moving fast and full
of energy… Two Dennis Hoppers walking the streets of Mexico
City."
Bolaño's
sense of the absurd is in play throughout the book, such as
when Arturo demands a duel with literary critic Iñaki Echevarne
for the honor of Arturo's book, which he's sure the critic
will review badly as a vendetta against another former visceral
realist. Despite the ridiculousness of the situation, Arturo's
second cries throughout the duel. Meanwhile, a lot of sadness
is also threaded into this rollicking journey. Relationships
end due to misunderstandings, people disappear for years and
then blaze back into their friends' lives like comets, family
members are institutionalized, and pets go missing. Sometimes
nothing happens, but a melancholic cloud still hangs over
the prose, such as when Norman Bolzman relates that, when
Lima was in Tel Aviv in 1979, he overheard Ulises and his
friend Claudia "listening to Cat Stevens and reading short
poems, deadpan and sad, luminous and ambiguous, slow and quick
as lightning."
Arturo
Belano is, of course, based on Roberto Bolaño, who, as a young
man in Mexico City, started a group of poets called the infrarealists.
Like Arturo, Bolaño is a Chilean who moved to Mexico as a
child and went back to Chile to support socialism during Salvador's
Allendé regime. The self-portrait is not flattering. In encounter
after sexual encounter, Arturo is impotent, which the reader
can take as a metaphor for his meager artistic output.
The
Savage Detectives has an uncomplicated, conversational
style that eases the reader through the multitude of voices
who have different ways of telling stories. And Bolaño has
an innate sense of knowing just how far out to take a reader.
For example, you may find yourself wondering, after 100 pages
or so, what has happened to a visceral realist poet with the
evocative name of Luscious Skin; a few sections later, Bolaño
obliges you. But just like real life, some people show up
briefly, burn brightly, and disappear just as quickly.
Transitioning
from the diaries to the interviews is easy. García Madero's
flat, no-nonsense, boastful and unintentionally hilarious
diaries suddenly fracture into a kaleidoscopic landscape of
voices and stories. But after 400 pages of some of the funniest,
saddest, and most poignant contemporary prose, the reader
walks into the last diary section in a daze. Suddenly, everything
seems quiet. But beyond the stylistic change, is one section
more real than the other? The diary is less complex emotionally,
which is no surprise since it is written by a 17-year-old.
García Madero is a bit of a buffoon, but in the beginning
of the book he seemed to be sincere. But after reading the
interviews, one may doubt the veracity of the diaries and
their author.
Perhaps
the most tragic thing about this book is that Roberto Bolaño
died in 2003, before this book was translated into English.
In Latin America, he had already succeeded in escaping the
shadows of the Boom authors, becoming probably the most famous
author in Latin America. No doubt this translation of The
Savage Detectives will only serve to seal his world-wide
reputation as a writer of tremendous talent.
(July,
2007)
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