The Savage Detectives

Mexico, 1975. We are reading the diary entries of one Juan García Madero, 17 years old, law student, budding poet, and frequent attendee to poetry workshops. García Madero's narrative is conversational, self-conscious, sympathetic, almost unreliable, and frequently courting the cliché.
 

What happened next is hazy (although I have a good memory): I remember Álamo laughing along with the four or five other members of the workshop. I think they may have been making fun of me.

...

What happened next was a blur, but at the risk of sounding corny, I'd say there was something miraculous about it. Two visceral realist poets walked in and Álamo reluctantly introduced them, although he only knew one of them personally; the other one he knew by reputation, or maybe he just knew his name or had heard someone mention him, but he introduced us to him anyway.

 
The voice is honest, sincere, even if full of assumptions and self-confessed forgetfulness ("what happened next is hazy", "what happened next was a blur", "If I'm remembering right (though I wouldn't stake my life on it)", "Maybe she mentioned it, although I may have just made it up."). In fact, it was not only García Madero who could not be relied on 100% in his reminiscences here. The characters in the novel constantly alluded to their sketchy recollections of the past, their half-remembrances and hazy memories.

Translated by Natasha Wimmer, these diary notes began and closed The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, which appeared in translation in 2007. In 1998, five years before his death and six years before the posthumous publication of his other masterpiece 2666, Bolaño published Los detectives salvajes to great critical acclaim from Spanish readers. It earned for him the coveted Premio Herralde de Novela and Premio Rómulo Gallegos. The novel was a hit due to its totalizing scope and brave narrative techniques. Its themes were deeply personal and yet communal—life on the run, the passage of time, the reliance on memory, the faultiness of memory, poetry as a way of life, the search for meaning, the lack of meaning, madness, boredom, the uses of boredom, the uses (and misuses) of art, friendship, literature and books, the politics of existence, death.

     We talked about poetry. No one has read any of my poems, and yet they all treat me like one of them. The camaraderie is immediate and incredible. 

The two poets who crashed Álamo's poetry workshop, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, were patterned after the author Bolaño and his best friend Mario Santiago. They herded a group of young poets in Mexico City and formed a poetry movement called visceral realism, which was also based on Bolaño and Santiago's founded poetry movement called the Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia. Their group "wreaked havoc" in the '70s by crashing and disrupting poetry readings of established writers like Octavio Paz, exporting fear in the literary elite. They were, of course, not taken seriously by the establishment.

Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima took it upon themselves to track a female poet named Cesárea Tinajero, a predecessor of a similar poetry movement in the 1920s. Somehow, in the middle of the first part of the novel, García Madero and Lima and Belano became involved with Lupe, a young prostitute under the charge of a nasty gangster-pimp. As a result they had to escape the pimp and Mexico City in a white Ford Impala.

There's an inner seduction to the whole ride, the reader made privy to adventure, naiveté, nonsense, emptiness, senselessness, or a combination of these. The memorable events before and after the holiday celebrations of '75-76 acquired a surreal quality. Hysteria and humor mingled together; the high seriousness of the novel punctuated by the low. As begun and imagined by García Madero, neophyte poet and sex initiate, and as extended into various splinters of voices that populate the midsection of the book, the parade of stories resembled a long drawn out joke and yet the feelings engendered were authentic, deployed in spontaneous bouts of drunken speeches.

"The Savage Detectives", the second chapter, interrupted the first part to give way to the testimonies of a horde of writers, poets, and drifters—representatives from Bolaño's "lost" generation of literati and lowlifes. The interviewees were members, ex-members, non-members of visceral realism, speaking to mostly unknown interlocutor or interlocutors. Their stories tried to shed light on Lima and Belano's pathetic and peripatetic lives before and after their escape from Mexico City. Listening to these different streams of voices was like listening to jazz, raw and improvised. What emerged, partly, was a satire of the literary and intellectual life of poets and writers in Mexico, in the tumultuous and earth-shaking decades from 70s to mid-90s.

*

The structure of the novel invites detective work. The Rashomon-style confessions in the second chapter will strike some as an unsettling and infuriating technique. After the first chapter ended in a sort of cliffhanger of a chase, it was as if a precipice suddenly opened up in front of the reader. An abyss that, by the looks of it, would take a fair amount of time to cross. It was an explosion of voices that took control from and unsettled the calmness and controlled edge of the linear narrative and that dumped the reader into a desert with tiny oasis. These voices are singing nonstop, describing the social, political, public, and private aspects of living in the margins of literature and society.

One of longest digressions devised in fiction, this section would take some time of getting used to. A receptive reader will have to submit and open himself to the artifice of structure that the author has adopted. What happened in between the multiplicities of singing was unclear. But somehow, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, the multitude of voices converged into a modern jazz opera. In the course of their telling, the characters ceased to be individuated voices and became one sustained song, a song singing across times and places, singing of their generation, their dreams, and lost causes.

 *

This being my second reading of the novel, I appreciated the novel's literary abandon that first endeared me to it four years ago. I varied my reading this time, skipping the second chapter and jumping ahead to the third chapter, the continuation of poet García Madero's diary. The intervening years of reading had added to my appreciation of the book, having acquainted myself to the works of Bolaño in translation. In the interim I've also read a couple of books by classic and contemporary writers (Borges, Jarry, Cervantes, Kafka, Rulfo, Marías, etc.) that Bolaño admitted as his influences, the writers he placed in his personal canon. Encountering them in his essays and interviews, several of the writers that were name-dropped like flies in the novel no longer sounded like Greek philosophers to me. Still, references to reclusive writers, like the "French" novelist J.M.G. Arcimboldi, could bring a certain amused reaction. Rereading the novel as a precursor to 2666 and his other books also brought into sharp relief the themes that Bolaño was mining in his writings. In a testimony by one Abel Romero in Café L’Alsatien, Paris, September 1989, Romero recounted a conversation  he had with Belano on September 11, 1983 (the dates in the book tell an interesting story):

Belano, I [Romero] said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us.

The echoes and cross-currents with Bolaño's other fiction and nonfiction are worth a look. The Savage Detectives rewards avid readers of his other books with hints of meaningful correspondences. There were mention of the lines, for example, from a French poet that said "the flesh was sad" and that the poet had read all the books and slept with all the women. A female bodybuilder asked Belano what the poet meant by that. An answer was given in the novel but a closer reading of the lines by Mallarmé was found in Bolaño's essay "Literature + Illness = Illness".

Part of the enjoyment of reading The Savage Detectives was derived from its satire and comedy. It skewered the inflated egos of Spanish writers and intellectuals in the academia or otherwise. It also paid homage to actual personalities. The character of Iñaki Echevarne, the critic Belano had a duel with, was a nod to Ignacio Echeverría who was Bolaño's friend and editor and whom he designated as his literary executor. The novel was not above a practical joke. Like Kafka's unfinished novels, it was a joke ("The poem is a joke, they said, it's easy to see, Amadeo, look"). It was also like an elaborate game.

He explained that there were similarities between his last book [The Skating Rink? The Third Reich?] and his new book [The Savage Detectives?] that fell into the realm of games that were impossible to decipher [Antwerp?].... All I could ask was: what kind of similarities? Games, Guillem, he said. Games. The fucking Nude Descending a Staircase, your fucking fake Picabias, games. 

In "About The Savage Detectives", one of the essays in Between Parentheses, also translated by Wimmer, Bolaño wrote that "there are as many ways to read my novel as there are voices in it. It can be read as a deathbed lament. It can also be read as a game." Whether as a joke, as a game, as a deathbed lament (like By Night in Chile), or as a cubist painting, the novel was determined to compose a tilting portrait of moments across the temporal axis. The chosen artistic medium would take care of the message. In an interview, Bolaño expressed his aesthetics of the supremacy of form and structure over the story.

[Plot is] not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

"A realm that's in constant turmoil". "Battle against death". "Precipice". These are the tropes that defined his creativity, his mad lit, his pellucid ravings, his literature of the abyss. But despite this apparent quarrel with plot, the novel was convulsed with the edge and energy of its prose.

     In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of lucidity. Then, nothing. My memory has always been mediocre ...

This passage is awkward, parenthetical, tentative, roughly hewn. And in a matter-of-fact gloss, memory was deemed mediocre; once again the story cheated with its acknowledged unreliability. And yet, despite the wrinkle, the passage is beautiful. It is propelled by a certain mystery, a certain kind of truth, poetry.

As the declamations of voices neared completion, the duration of their singing became longer and longer. The old familiar voices of the members, sponsors of the visceral realists, and other participants slowly gave way to new voices. The old ones were being muted, their owners dying or dead or forgotten. All except for the Amadeo Salvatierra's tenacious tipsy voice was constantly there to remind us of the mission of the visceral realists to find Cesárea Tinajero, constantly calling out from one of the earliest days of 1976.

The flash fiction pieces that bounce against each other in the beginning were now crowded out. The first long dramatic voice given early in the second part, the one by Auxilio Lacouture, the mother of Mexican poetry (probably the most powerful witness in the book), prefigured the cluster of lengthier testimonies. The immediate voices were still refracting each other, folding the novel's space-time continuum, and rounding up this anthology of dreams. Behind the scenes where the voices of the poets languished, a silent murderous protagonist (time) has also given her own deposition.

Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère, said Proust. Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language. In translation The Savage Detectives is a work of foreign beauty as its natural rhythms and its defiant otherness were quite distinctive in Wimmer's transposition of it into English. The colloquial, conversational, formal, visceral, and other high-strung and low-strung registers of English that the book exhibited may not totally correspond to the intractable types of Spanish inhabited by the original. But despite the obvious loss of the Spanish idioms and accents, that loss was turned into a beautiful noise. Into the music of a brave and beautiful despair.



With thanks to Richard for inviting me to co-host The Savage Detectives Group Read and to Jenny Volvovski for use of her book design as group read badge.

Detectives-Readers

Richard / Caravana de recuerdos 1 , 2 , 3
Caroline / Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Bellezza / Dolce Bellezza
Sarah / what we have here is a failure to communicate
Bettina / Liburuak
nicole / bibliographing 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Séamus / Vapour Trails 1 , 2

Amateur Reader (Tom) / Wuthering Expectations 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Gavin / Page247

Selena / luxe hours

Sarah / A Rat in the Book Pile

Scott / seraillon

amanda / Simpler Pastimes

Blood and sound

José Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders is turning out to be a detective novel of wit. A whodunit forged in pale fire. Caustic humor in the same mold as Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.

I picked it up yesterday after finishing The Savage Detectives, that book of monologues of hyper poets in a mock-up detective novel. I knew for some time that Bolaño has read and praised the work of Somoza. I'm a third into the book and it's becoming clear to me why this recommendation is a good one.

Somoza, born in 1959 in Cuba, is a writer from Spain. He is a psychiatrist by profession before becoming a full-time writer. The Athenian Murders, translated from Spanish by Sonia Soto, is his first novel to come out in English. The book was originally published as La caverna de las ideas (Alfaguara, 2000). The title should translate as "The Cave of Ideas", which, considering the milieu of the novel, is an apt title. The novel is set in ancient Greece, in the time of Plato and his school, the Academy. Plato's allegory of the cave is a philosophical sound that issues from it, bouncing and reverberating in its pages.

It's quite possible the English publisher wanted to market Somoza as a crime writer. (His second translated novel, The Art of Murder, was originally called Clara y la penumbra!) Nothing wrong with that except that it murders, in a manner of speaking, the self-referential elements of the story whenever the title itself was mentioned in the text, via footnotes. Yes, there are footnotes, it's that kind of book. The notes are provided by the fictional translator of the actual text (his supposed translation) that we are reading. As given by an extract from one of his more than a page long footnotes:

   The Athenian Murders, the novel I had just begun translating, was an eidetic text. She stared at me for a moment, holding one of the cherries on the nearby plate by its stalk.
   'A what?' she asked.
   'Eidesis,' I explained, 'is a literary technique invented by the Ancient Greeks to transmit secret messages or keys in their works. It consists in repeating, in any text, metaphors or words that, when identified by a perceptive reader, make up an idea or image that's independent of the original text. Arginisus of Corinth, for example, used eidesis to hide a detailed description of a young woman he loved in a long poem apparently about wild flowers....
   'How interesting,' smiled Helena, bored. 'And would you care to tell me what's hidden in your anonymous The Athenian Murders? [14]

Substitute The Cave of Ideas to the title in the above and one realizes it's more faithful to this 'eidetic' novel of ideas. Here is a striking passage from the "translated" text itself:

   There was a scream. Then another. For a moment, absurdly, Heracles thought they came from Itys' mouth, which was shut; as if she had roared internally, and her thin body were shuddering and resonating with this sound produced in her throat.
   But then the scream, deafening, entered the room; clad in black, it pushed the slaves away; crawled from one side of the room to the other, then collapsed in a corner, writhing, as if seized by a holy madness. At last it dissolved into an endless lamentation. [10-11]

I marked this up because I remember a similar passage of a sound's motion in The Savage Detectives.

He whispered that he loved me, that he would never be able to forget me. Then he got up (twenty seconds after he'd spoken, at most) and slapped my face. The sound echoed through the house. We were on the first floor, but I heard the sound of his hand (when his palm left my cheek) rise up the stairs and enter each of the rooms on the second floor, dropping down through the climbing vines and rolling like glass marbles in the yard. When I could react, I made a fist with my right hand and hit him in the face. He hardly moved. [194]

I was wondering about the resemblance between them. And then I came upon this passage from García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

Blood and scream, the sound of slap. What to make of their trajectories?

The Savage Detectives Group Read

For details, see Bifurcaria bifurcata and Caravana de recuerdos.

Just leave a comment to join.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me, says one Juan García Madero. A book is the best pillow there is, says Roberto Bolaño.

Richard of Caravana de recuerdos and I think one of these notable pillow books could be Bolaño's cult object Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer). We are hosting a group read of this novel in January 2012.

All are cordially invited – rebels, poets, bloggers, slackers. It's not poetry reading but it could have the same effect.

Savagery or previous experience as detective isn't required to participate. Nor is one expected to be a member of an avant-garde group like the visceral realists.

All one needs to do is sleep on the book and maybe join in on the discussion. Readers become "salvajes" in their own right.

Bloggers may post reviews and impressions anytime in January but "official" discussion starts on the last weekend of the month (Jan. 27-29). We'll link to your reviews.

About the book. At around 600 pages, it's a hefty pillow. We can't promise a wild poet chase, but wildness and unwieldiness shouldn't be in short supply. (Here's an excerpt.)

This early announcement should give readers plenty of headway. It's probably best to start early with the detective work. Or you can wait till All Souls Day, when our narrator began to write his adventures. Or the new year. It may turn out to be a firecracking yearstarter.

You can read this as part of the Bolaño Reading Challenge. It's supposed to end this year, but we'll count this toward your future Godzilla status.

"Detectives-Readers"

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

mel u, The Reading Life

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

Emily, Evening All Afternoon

Scott, seraillon

Frances, Nonsuch Book

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Anthony, Time's Flow Stemmed

Bettina, Liburuak
Gavin, Page247
Sarah, A Rat in the Book Pile 
Caroline, Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Jeremy, READIN
Becky, Page Turners    
Séamus, Vapour Trails
Amy, The House of the Seven Tails
nicole, bibliographing
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
Col, Col Reads
Selena, luxe hours
Claire, kiss a cloud





 

(Image design by Jenny Volvovski) 

The Romantic Dogs (Roberto Bolaño)

The first book of Roberto Bolaño that I have read was The Savage Detectives. I was impressed with a book review of it that I asked C., a friend of mine, to hunt me down this book of Bolaño in Manila. That was last year.


And like a drop of mercy, The Savage Detectives was found in a used book shop. When it arrived I did not start reading it immediately. It’s quite hefty. The bulk of it warned me it’s one of those tomes that you would need to be very committed in order to finish.


It was not a breezy read. It took me about 5 months to finish. But in the midst of reading the book, the simple sentences acquired an undeniable power. The narrative became more and more inevitable. Something was coming alive and felt in the guts. The multitude of voices crowded in my head and a poetic universe opened up. Something just clicked in my mind, rearranged the atoms in me, and crystallized a certain resolve. I told myself, I have got to collect all of this author’s books.


After a bit more of my friend’s sleuthing, a copy of Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth was spotted in a bookstore. It was an anthology of short stories. I must really be lucky as his books were sold out in bookstores at that time. There must be a few copies available in the first place.


The Savage Detectives is about a group of young poets traipsing around the desert landscape of Mexico. The first part of the book (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”) is in the form of a journal of one aspiring young poet. It introduces the major characters (all poets) in the book. It is a straightforward narrative charged with poetry recitations and with sex. Not a single poem of the characters is really written up in the book. And the sexual encounters are either awkward or interrupted. This part ended with the poets on a journey with a prostitute in tow to help her escape from the wrath of her pimp-lover.


The second part of the book (the novel’s title “The Savage Detectives”) is a series of interviews of dozens of characters scattered all over the Americas and Europe. The poets’ mission is revealed: to find a poetess who is believed to be the founder of "visceral realism," a literary movement that is being resurrected by the young poets. This section of the book spans two decades (1976-1996) of “detective work” and covered vast grounds of raw emotional feelings and mental wreckages.


The final part (“The Sonora Desert”) picks up the journal entries from where the first part left off, the poets still in search of the missing poetess while the betrayed pimp-lover is hot on their heels. The book which started on All Souls Day in 1975 ends here, in apocalyptic manner, a day after the Valentines Day of ’76. The unusual structure of the novel is something like a freestyle journal writing at the bookends with a chorus of tragedies and comedies in the middle. It's the stuff of poetry of high and low seriousness.


When I heard of another Bolaño book coming out, with the devilish title of 2666, I couldn’t let the first opportunity pass. I asked R., a friend of mine who is a book seller in the US, to secure a copy for me. It arrived beautifully, in a three-volume boxed set edition, just a few days after the New Year. I knew then that 2009 is going to be a good reading year for me.


2666 is a much longer (close to 900 pages) work and with a more non-linear plotting. Surprisingly, I find it an easier read than The Savage Detectives. If The Savage Detectives is a chorus, then 2666 is a concert. It is a concert of five subtly interconnected parts, whose fragmentation belies the singular design of its construction. At the time of its publication 2666 is considered unfinished, but a definitive version of each part is already prepared by the author before his death in 2003.


Yet again, in this brave book of visceral power, Bolaño plays with the novel form to populate a canvas with multiple characters. The characters are of different nationalities, they come and go like chess pieces, and they play against each other and against some of the darkest periods of twentieth century history. The book tells of another search for a missing writer, this time a novelist.


(This persistent theme of Bolaño, the obsessive search for a writer, is emblematic of his view of mythmaking and myth-breaking. It seems to suggest that the mere sight of the writer in question will cure the searchers’ obsession of the writer. As if the books read by the obsessives were not enough to produce the desired effects, as if seeing the writer of the admired books in full view, in motion, speaking to you, is the culmination of a literary journey. But we intuitively know this to be untrue. The search calls for something deeper than the satisfaction of literary curiosity. The search is only a metaphysical symptom of a lack of authentic experience. If Bolaño was still alive today, will readers have to search for him, too?)


At the start of 2666, we find four scholars in pursuit of the last traces of this vanished writer, again in the Mexican desert. The trail eventually went cold, and the book was suddenly flung in another direction. Defiantly digressive, the novel supplies new characters (all equally "lost") and new tangents of plot. The connection of each new part with the previous ones appear to be superficial at first, but it takes on a sinister shape once the novel completes its twisted knotting of the plotlines. The book's affinity with unspeakable and unnameable acts and silences is palpable. A monster is hiding in the barren desert.


What is remarkable with 2666 is its consistent standing in the large body of work that is Bolaño’s. The novels are for the most part concerned with writers and artists, and the characters appear from one novel to the next. They are recycled, reused, and reduced to different aspects of the same project. The books are self-referential and interlocking. Important motifs are given in one book and they recur or are amplified in the other texts. There are so few modern writers who are gifted with this ability to constitute an oeuvre that is its own complete universe. Who come to mind are W.G. Sebald and Javier Marías and, to some extent, J.M. Coetzee.


(To illustrate this allusiveness of Bolaño’s books currently available in English translations: The characters in 2666 appeared previously in works such as Nazi Literature in the Americas, the last chapter of which is expanded into the novella Distant Star. Amulet is also a reworking of a long monologue in The Savage Detectives, the characters in the latter also appearing Amulet and in Bolaño’s short stories collected in Last Evenings on Earth. The intriguing title of 2666, referring to a portentous year in the future, is also prefigured in Amulet and at the end of The Savage Detectives.


This leaves us with By Night in Chile, with no apparent connection with the rest of the books. But then this novella (the first book of Bolaño to appear in English and in its compact form is considered his most perfectly constructed work) quintessentially tackles the ethical roots of collaboration with the Pinochet regime. Evil, Nazism, and their slippery intertwining with letters and poetry are the prominent arcs of Bolañoland. By Night in Chile is hardly a fluke in the author’s visceral universe as it shares with the rest of his works the perpetual struggle of poets against historical and personal circumstances. Besides, Pablo Neruda appears hysterically in this book, and Bolaño has this intimate love-hate relationship with Neruda.)


For posterity’s sake, Bolaño in 2666 has given us a credo, or more precisely an exhortation, in which to measure literary ambitions for the present and future practitioners of the novel:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Bolaño stretches the novel form to accommodate his fatalistic vision of men as self-destructing and destructive creatures. At the center of 2666 is the deployment of a brute force method of writing, to describe a series of murder reports on the violence inflicted against hundreds of women in the City of Sta. Teresa in Mexico. The gruesome mass-murder and rapes are based on the actual events in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The book unflinchingly depicts the graphic violence and its horrid details.


To see evil in the eye then, “amid blood and mortal wounds and stench,” is Bolaño’s abiding and dangerous preoccupation here. His poetic licence is devoted to the annulment of human complacence through numbness and a numbing experience of reading in discomfort. We are the missing witnesses of these heinous crimes and our testimonies are direly needed. It is cruel. It is offensive. And most important, it is human.


Horror is not the sole feature of the book. There are many facets to it that will feed a lot of bookish readers. Comedy is also present. It is potent and, well, comic. There are passages to incite horror, and forgiving passages to assuage the tedium. Sympathy, most of all, is not lacking. It is sympathy, tolerance, and human understanding that lift Bolaño’s book from the ruts of storytelling. It is the perennial absence of goodness that makes it more conspicuous. Albeit distributed in small measures, comedy and goodness functions like the lost poetry that is still remembered in the recesses of the mind.


In this matter, 2666 is comparable to The Savage Detectives whose non-inclusion of the characters’ own poems seems like an insidious joke. There are only three or four poems quoted in The Savage Detectives and the way they are delivered is probably timed to provoke a hoot. The first is a poem by Octavio Paz called “The Vampire,” after the reading of which, the narrator of the story couldn’t help to jack off. Another is a poem in French attributed to Rimbaud. The only "original" work in the novel is hardly a poem. It is a visual curiosity composed only of squiggles and lines. The joke, well-calculated, implies that surely there is really something serious and postmodern going on behind those lines.


Poetry in absentia functions like the hidden talisman that interprets everything that is lacking in The Savage Detectives. Poetry won’t save the world. And there is no indication yet that it can prevent the characters (and the readers) from completely becoming savages.






Which brings us to The Romantic Dogs, Bolaño’s first collection of poetry. This is a collection of nearly two decades of poems from 1980 to 1998. The translation into English is by Laura Healy and it came out last year. There are forty-odd poems presented in a bilingual edition, which makes it more transparent for Spanish speaking readers to deduce meanings that are otherwise lost in translation.


Bolaño was first of all a poet before branching out as a prose writer. This forced change in literary form was motivated by the practicalities of the writing trade. His stature as a novelist has somewhat eclipsed his outputs in verse. Despite the forced division between the two, the continuity in his literary projects can be viewed as occupying its proper niche. Whether in free verse or in free indirect style, his distinctive voice is heard in suspense. He may have articulated in The Romantic Dogs, for example, what his other poet-characters might have uttered in their romantic dreams.


The first poem, the title poem, speaks of a dream won by the poet, aged twenty, after having just “lost a country.” It announces a calling, presumably a poetic one, and hints that this collection will be autobiographical and will chart experiences of “growing up” which “back then … would have been a crime.”


Clearly this is a collection of love poems whose chosen emblem is a dog, man’s best friend but a lowly animal still. Politics and regimes, its cloak, are inescapable from the experience of poetry because the experience is a Latin American one. But at the same time, the tone strives for freedom from the ideological banality of history because the experience is also universal and, in the light of the poet’s path-breaking prose, bridges the global post-national territory.


The poems are about ceaseless and aimless wanderings, encounters with friends and lovers, casual sex, poverty, isolation, and dialogues with established poets. The existential baggage is delivered through the oblique telling of the anecdotes and loves of the twenty/twenty-something poet. The idealism and innocence of youth are being tested.


It is notable that the poet’s efforts at a conscious artistry, for such a highbrow subject as poetry and a dangerous calling as living on the edge, is peopled with individuals coming from low standing (prostitutes, vagrants, homosexuals, emigrants, and exiles), lowlifes who in their pathetic fates and decadence are pictured sympathetically in poetry even as they also took centerstage in the novels. Clearly the inner workings of Bolañoland are metaphorical identifications with the oppressed and their progress in this hostile civilization.


The backdrop of the poet’s romances is the dark undercurrents of history (Nazism, dictatorship, torture, kidnapping), which is often likened to a horror movie. The escape is often through sexual trysts but the comfort they bring is ephemeral, sometimes fake, and oftentimes they do not really bring comfort at all.

An unforgettable love
Beneath the rain
Beneath the sky bristling with antennas in which
17th century coffers coexist
With the shit of 20th century pigeons.
And in the middle
All the inextinguishable capacity to inflict pain,
Undefeated through years,
Undefeated through loves
Unforgettable.
Yes, that’s what she said.
An unforgettable love
And brief,
Like a hurricane?
No, a love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head,
The head of a king or Breton count,
Brief like beauty,
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world’s majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.
(“La Francesa”)

(“Shit of birds”: In By Night in Chile, we encounter several episodes where the blood of birds was literally falling from the sky after being preyed upon by falcons. This massacre of the birds is undertaken by falconers, who are priests, to prevent the birds from defecating inside the old Catholic churches.)


Another major theme in the poems is the figure of the “detective,” who fastidiously contemplates the scene of the crime. Frozen and lost, desperate and crushed, this portrait of the poet as a detective is also a romantic notion as it borders on obsession. The detective, in various guises, is always present in the novels and novellas. In Distant Star, a detective was hired to hunt down an assassin poet who has been killing other poets. And who else will assist the detective but another poet commissioned to track down the whereabouts of the assassin by identifying his works in magazines and publications? In The Savage Detectives, the detectives are unidentified, but they can easily be the interviewers of the many characters (witnesses) in the second part of the book, or the interviewed people themselves, or the poet-characters who were in search of the missing poetess. They may even be the readers of the book who can't help but attempt to decipher the layers of meaning in it. Also teeming with detectives is 2666, most notable of which are a neophyte detective who was accidentally plunged into the action of the novel, another who tracks down a notorious serial transgressor of churches, and the detectives who are investigating the serial killings and violation of women.


For Bolaño, poetry (and by extension, his writings) is not so much a political statement but an ethical one. He is establishing the roots of his fiction and his art in various ways: as a detective, as a poet, and as a romantic. Each of these figures is the face of the same individual who sometimes finds himself at a loss while contemplating the modern horror movie that is constantly unfolding in the theatre of the living. The poet/detective/romantic is always on the road in search of the completion of a lost humanity, his and those of his kind.


In poetry as in prose, Bolaño is first rate. The Romantic Dogs shows that the novelist’s essence dwells in his poetry. It is possible to dissociate the poems from his novelistic writings, but the writings take on new meanings when read side by side with the poetry. Even if the book of poems is intended to be self-contained, its echoes and reverberations in the novels gravitate toward the comprehension of an incomplete and unfinished poetic universe. It may be entirely justified to treat the poems without reference to the torrential works of prose. But to do so is to remove the fuel from the fiction machine, to admit the defeat of true poetry.

The defeat of true poetry, which we write in blood.
And semen and sweat, says Darío.
And tears, says Mario.
Though none of us is crying.
(“Visit to the Convalescent”)

Yet the defeat is still one of two options. With so much disappointments and lost loves, the book can choose to end with the lost idealism of youth, with the loss of innocence, or with the plain lost of youth. But one can feign to detect a positive note ringing in the last poem “With the Flies”:

Poets of Troy
Nothing that could have been yours
Exists anymore


Not temples not gardens
Not poetry


You are free
Admirable poets of Troy

Perhaps a declaration of freedom is the only necessary thing for the modern poet to survive damning upheavals. His lost possessions are irretrievable, yet his verses are still intact. Here to stay with the romantic dogs.