Woes of the True Policeman

Woes of the True Policeman (2012)

Roberto Bolaño

            There was an exceptionally pathetic period in my life, which I now recall with great regret, when I, for painfully unsound teenaged reasons, fancied myself some sort of record collector. Somehow, beyond all reason, I was convinced music was really interesting and that I was really into it. Yawn. I’d rather have the money and the time back. Being really into music is a waste of both. Basically what I’m trying to say is that I had a notion that I was a teenaged punk and rock and roller and now I’m kind of embarrassed by it. The effort I put into finding old hardcore records would have been better spent on college. I haven’t purchased a record in years (thank god) but I remember that the riskiest wager was the B-Sides album, the B-Sides and Outtakes album. You could end up with a bunch of hidden gems or a bunch of garbage that went unreleased for a reason. I guess I’ve sold a lot of my records now, but I still have a decent collection of 80s/90s punk, hardcore, screamo, and indie records. They’re in my closet. I’ll probably unload them eventually.

            Woes of the True Policeman, by my best friend Roberto Bolaño, is very much a B-Sides album. It has some interesting tracks but it’s not nearly as important as 2666 or The Savage Detectives, his landmark double albums. I don’t know if I’d recommend it to anyone who wasn’t a diehard bolanista: it’s not really about anything, it barely has a narrative, it’s only sort of a novel, etc. It’s basically just a bunch of familiar riffs played at different speeds and with goofy drums. Lame vocal takes. Silly guitar tones. Basically everything that shows up in Woes shows up somewhere in 2666 in a better form.

            The book is supposedly about Oscar Amalfitano, the depressed philosophy professor who was slowly descending into madness in 2666. I was really looking forward to an expansion of his story as he’s one of the best characters in the book. However though they share a name, a biography, and a job, the two Amalfitanos are not the same person. It’s not an expansion so much as an alternate (and lesser) take. The Amalfitano of Woes would never hang a geometry textbook on a clothesline (like a sweat stained shirt) and he didn’t seem to care about where his daughter Rosa was going at night. This Amalfitano is less introspective and more crass, a man who has a homosexual relationship (his first) with a young student, a suicidal and brilliant poet named Padilla, who has AIDS and is writing a novel called The God of the Homosexuals. I can barely imagine the Amalfitano of 2666 being interested in sex at all, heterosexual, homosexual or any other way. Archimboldi makes an appearance too; only this time he’s J.M.G. Arcimboldi, a boisterous Frenchman instead of Benno Von Archimboldi, the moody German. Lalo Cura, the honest cop, also sticks his head in, though only sort of. One thing I didn’t realize before: Lalo Cura is the son of either Arturo Belano or Ulises Lima, the fugitive poets. Didn’t catch that during any of my other readings.

            This book is only sort of okay. It only sort of has a direction, only sort of has a story. It’s basically compiled from some of his last remaining files (computer files and files in his desk) and it really shows its seams. I think they were totally unrelated things and the editor welded them together. They were probably cast-offs not intended for publication, and I have the distinct feeling that somebody wanted to make money, and that Bolaño, a dead cash cow, would not entirely approve. While I was reading I found it better to think of Woes not as a novel but as a Borgesian collection of vignettes. Sort of like peeking past a dirty curtain into a dark hallway echoing with the meaty slap of flesh on flesh. It’s not much of a story, but it adds some nice adornment on to the black hole of Santa Teresa. The parts about Padilla were good. His love letters with Amalfitano were good. There’s a pyrotechnic sentence where Amalfitano recites his entire biography that was good, I’d read that sentence again. However, almost everything else appears in 2666 in a better and stronger form. This is really only for die-hard fans, I guess, and I wouldn’t recommend that you start here.

            Of course what I mean is that it’s really weak for a Bolaño book, the weakest by far. If it were written by anyone else, it would make their career. I felt roughly the same way about Amulet. It’s hard to imagine a book being more meandering than 2666 but somehow Woes of the True Policeman manages it. It’s directionless and lacks the force and violence and gutsiness of Bolaño’s best work. 2666 reads like hearing a drive-by shooting on your street. Woes reads like hearing a drive-by shooting on the radio.

            Someone recently remarked to me that reading Philip Roth made them wish that they were Jewish. At times Roberto Bolaño makes me wish that I were Mexican, or Latin American, and that I lived the kind of life Bolaño wrote about. Drinking Mezcal in a bar with a group of other writers. Actually knowing other writers, writers who are worth knowing, who are worth talking to, who don’t have their brains corroded with sickening ideas. Writers who would actually want to talk to me and wouldn’t call the police. The corn smut tacos that sneer at you like a mouth full of infected teeth. Walking down a dark street when a guy in a white jacket trailing behind you (stalking, following?) says “hey” and you turn around and clock him in the nose or plug a switchblade between his ribs. The colonial architecture. The rich and beautiful heritage of animal cruelty. Assassinated poets who intellectually battled the state. Relaxing on the beach with a crisp Pacifico and watching the waves go in and out as tanned Latinas walk by in bathing suits. And then like all Latinas these Latinas end up dead, anally and vaginally raped, with a fractured hyoid bone and in an advanced state of decomposition. Of course I don’t actually want any of this to be true, for myself or for the Latinas (aside from the huitlacoche tacos, I would eat so many of those) but I wish I could realistically write about something like that. What else is there worth talking about, feelings? Give me a break. Feelings are awful. Feelings are boring. I’m just a suburban nobody, and my feelings couldn't be any less important, and I think that goes for most people. Of course I wish I were a fist-fighting poet living on the edge of civilization, on the hot ugly new continent, as far from the mainstream as Toledo is from New York, but it wasn’t meant to be.

            I wrote earlier that Bolaño is my best friend, which is true, but he’s more than that. He’s not exactly a friend and he’s not a buddy or an acquaintance. When I think about Bolaño the only word that seems appropriate is “homie,” which is a goofy and ridiculous word. But that’s what he is. Bolaño is my homie. His voice is the voice of a homie I never knew I had. I wish he were still alive.
            I also have a sneaking suspicion that Roberto Bolaño was a nerd, so that's even more that I love about him. The Third Reich is about tabletop wargaming (and it's hard to imagine anything more nerdy than that) and both that book and Woes contain offhanded references to roleplaying games in general, and Dungeons and Dragons specifically. He makes references to science fiction and David Lynch and heck, Woes is even dedicated to Philip K. Dick. Man, Bolaño and I really do have a lot in common. 

            I haven’t even read all of his books! I still have to read The Secret of Evil, Tres, Between Parenthesis, The Insufferable Gaucho, Antwerp, Monsieur Pain, The Skating Rink and The Romantic Dogs before I can officially be considered North America’s premier Roberto Bolaño scholar, a position which (and let’s face facts here) I basically occupy in everything but name.

            So, in summation: Woes of the True Policeman is barely a book, but if we’re going to call it a book then it is a book for die-hard obsessives only, the kind of people who would travel across continents to pass out on Bolaño’s doorstep, the kind of people who would dig through dusty and forgotten shelves for every last printed word they could unearth, who would stuff books in their pockets and huddle in coffee shops and eat cheaply or forgo eating altogether and just live on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and literature, desert pilgrims who sustain themselves on thoughts of a future literary revolution and the glory they’d find there, young teen poets with bruised knuckles and a rumbling stomach, so, in short, the people who would benefit most from a book like this are the people who reside in a book like this, which is probably the defining feature of Roberto Bolaño’s work. I liked the book but if someone asked me where to start with Bolaño then Woes of the True Policeman would be the absolute last place I would recommend.

            Up next is Neuromancer, the cyberpunk classic, by William Gibson. I don’t know why I haven’t read it yet. Major lapse on my part. About forty pages in so far and I’m already amazed. Can’t wait to write about it. Fuck that. I can't wait to live in it.