The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.

            Hard for me to imagine what my life was like before I took up my position as America’s preeminent Bolaño scholar. I don’t know what I was doing then, probably something sleazy and forgettable. But the minute I sat down for the first of many long interrogations of a Bolaño text I knew that my life would never be the same. The scales fell from my eyes and, now sighted for the first time, I was called to spread the message of Bob Bolaño. Reading Bolaño is like hearing the voice of a friend I never knew I had.

            This is the second time I’ve read The Savage Detectives. The first was a few years ago, right after I finished 2666. I remember I brought it with me on a camping trip, out in the Anza-Borrego Desert, a place much like the Sonora Desert that figures so greatly in the book, when the wildflowers were blooming and you could hear the bees throbbing, millions of them. A pleasant memory. We also went to the Salton Sea, which I had never been to before then, and found there as Bolaño-esque a place as any. You can smell it for miles. It stinks horribly. The shore is covered with the bleached bones of millions of dead fish. A mostly abandoned town slouches near the beach. Every other house has a “for sale” sign, but no one would ever buy a home there. I waver back and forth over whether this one or 2666 is my favorite Bolaño novel. Sometimes it’s even Nazi Literature in the Americas that takes the top spot. I can’t ever decide. Right now it’s The Savage Detectives, which I finished early yesterday, reading with my coffee, slumping over, I felt drained, as if I’d had a monster leech on my back, or I’d had ten orgasms in a row like a machine gun. Gave me a headache that lasted all afternoon.

            The book’s pretty simple. It’s divided into three parts. In the first (Mexicans Lost in Mexico) and third (The Sonoran Desert) sections we’re reading the diary of one Juan Garcia Madero, a university student and aspiring poet. Garcia Madero might be the greatest narrator in the history of literature, I shit you not. He’s funny, smart, extremely well-read and controlled almost entirely by his penis. He falls in with a clique of poet-punks, who call themselves the visceral realists and are led by Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, and who run around Mexico City smoking dope and causing trouble. Garcia Madero drinks, writes poetry, and screws a few different broads. Lima and Belano run the visceral realists like a revolutionary group, like the Zapatistas or something. They issue proclamations, release manifestos, and conduct purges. Much of the group’s activity centers around the Font house, where everyone wants to drain their nuts into one of the beautiful Font sisters, and where Garcia Madero meets the father, Quim Font, an architect who is slowly going insane. The younger Font sister, Maria, has a friend named Lupe, a prostitute who runs from her pimp, Alberto, and hides in the granny flat where the two sisters live. Alberto and some corrupt cops lay siege to the Font house, and on New Year’s Eve 1975 Lima, Belano, Lupe and Garcia Madero escape the siege and roar northward on the highway in Quim’s beloved Chevrolet Impala.

            The second and longest section (The Savage Detectives) takes the form of interviews of people who interacted with Belano and Lima from 1976-96. The pair split and go their separate ways, traveling variously to Central America, Europe, Israel, Africa. Visceral realism is dead. Belano works as a night watchman at a campground. Lima chases after a girl, but as she’s not interested and Lima is insane, it doesn’t work out. There are over forty separate narrators in section two, and they all have their own unique voice. Highlights include the visceral realist and single mother Xóchitl García, the institutionalized Quim Font, the sociopathic and possibly retarded neo-Nazi Heimito Künst, the foul-mouthed hippy Barbara Patterson, the bisexual poet Luscious Skin and his on-again off-again lover Luís Sebastian Rosado, the pretentious old poet Amadeo Salvatierra, the unbelievably pretentious old lawyer Xosé Lendoiro, the mother of Mexican poetry Auxilio Lacouture, the optimistic female bodybuilder María Teresa Solsona Ribot, and the war photographer Jacobo Urenda. All their lives intersect with Belano and Lima, sometimes only briefly, and these intersections invariably leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the interviewees. Narrators emerge and drift away like real people do in your real life. The tone here is of dismal failure, disappointment, poverty, dreariness, dead dreams and unfulfilled promises. Very little works out for anyone, just like in the real world. Lima spends time in an Israeli jail and ends up a drug addict in Mexico City. Belano challenges a book critic to a ridiculous swordfight on a beach and then travels to Africa as a reporter, where he wishes he could die.

            The second section is a beautiful, wonderful, traumatic, grinding piece of writing. It really took its toll on me, all the quiet human misery. I trudged through it, slowly, weighed down by all these depressing narratives. I thought long and hard about everyone’s story. Everyone’s story is pitiful, a chronicle of failure, desperation and missed chances, more than enough to make you jump off a cliff. Bolaño’s brilliance here is in crafting a distinctive voice for all of his characters. Some are absolutely unforgettable; variously funny, sad, angry, hungry, descending into madness or rising up from it. The book, like your sister, is very oral and Bolaño very obviously delights in his slangy, fierce monologues.

            Bolaño also plays a trick on you in the second section. It’s very subtle, a trick by omission. Since I’m not the kind of person who gives a shit about “spoiler warnings” and I can’t stand that kind of stupid internet nonsense I’ll go ahead and tell you what it is. Listen, if you want a surprise go plug your dick into a wall socket, you’ll get yourself a real shock. The trick is this: Garcia Madero, whom the reader had come to know and love in the first section, is entirely absent. His name is mentioned once and utterly dismissed. What happened to him? Did he die, murdered by the police or the narcos, or did he stop writing, or was he arrested, or was he just too insignificant to ever remember? Most people, upon reflection, aren’t worth mentioning. Our lives are small and sad.

            The third section returns to Garcia Madero’s diary and his terrifying road trip. It’s brief, rapid and tense, and I finished it in the span of an afternoon. They’re fleeing Lupe’s pimp while simultaneously hunting down the whereabouts of one Cesarea Tinajero, a poet who is sort of their spiritual successor, who only left one published work, a poem that is a drawing or a drawing that is a poem. Tinajero loves a bullfighter who dies in the ring, briefly teaches at an Indian school, goes insane from loneliness, and retires to Villaviciosa, a dirt village full of murderers and assassins that frequently appears in Bolaño’s work. They find her and finally Alberto catches up to them, Belano kills him, a cop kills Tinajero, Lima kills the cop. They split off, Lima and Belano bury the bodies in the desert and Garcia Madero and Lupe head to Santa Teresa, the setting of much of 2666, to lay low and screw. The book ends with some vague drawings.

            One thing that I really like about this book (and Bolaño in general, about whom I’m afraid I may not have many more things to write, that I have exhausted all I have to say about Bob Bolaño, though he is my hero and I will keep trying) is that even though it tackles really huge, profound themes it still remains very grounded and very human. Bolaño doesn’t surrender to cheap magical realism or flights of fantasy; he keeps things centered on people and their emotions and interactions. Characters may think that eerie or supernatural things happen but they don’t, it’s all in their heads.

            This book makes me wish I knew anything about poetry, but I’m almost completely ignorant. I haven’t read a lick since high school, I’m sure, and whatever that was I probably didn’t understand it.

            Another thing that really struck me was how well Bolaño captures the lazy arrogance of youth. Better than anything else I’ve ever read. There’s a point in a teenager’s life, where you know a little and you think you know a lot. Smoke some weed, get your dick sucked a couple times, start smoking cigarettes, and you’re on top of the world. You idolize your slightly older peers. You attach a lot of importance to your lame teenaged shit. Ain’t anyone who can tell you what to do. Man if I could take all the time I wasted on punk rock and reallocate it instead to a college education and a satisfying life, avoiding the shitty people and all the head-melting futility, yeah, I’d do it. In a heartbeat.

            The Savage Detectives is very much a book of secrets, codes, vague implications, coincidences and signs. Bolaño recites the names of people and places like the indecipherable idioglossia created by twins raised in isolation and never properly educated. Opening to some random pages, here are some random names: Sophie Podolski, Raymond Quenau, Michel Bulteau, Calle Colima, Carlos Fuentes, Paseo de Maritimeo, Tlateloco, Adrian Henri, Glorieta de Insurgentes, Lee Harvey Oswald (the magazine), Efrain Huerta, Gilberto Owen, Enrique Lihn, Calle Bucareli, and so on. I don’t know if these are real or fake or what they mean, but they sure mean something. It’s like I’m being invited into a secret world.

            A brief aside: one of the interviews takes place in San Diego, my hometown, and the interviewee mentions a street in the city that totally doesn’t fucking exist. It’s not real! C’mon, Bob, look at a fucking map. I take it for granted that everything else is real.

            For various depressing and stupid reasons I haven’t been reading or writing nearly as much as I should have. Been busy with community college and preoccupied by stupid life shit of varying degrees of severity, little of it worthwhile. Gripped in the miserable fist of poverty and stagnation. Surrounded by people I dislike. Missing out on things I wanted very badly. Not that anyone on Planet Earth, where we live, gives a flying fuck, and why would they? I’d like to read more since I don’t really have much else better to do, but sometimes it’s hard to screw up the motivation.

            Yesterday, when I wrote the bulk of this, was Veteran’s Day, the most important feast day in the American War Cult. It’s the single day out of the year we take the time to remember the widows, the orphans, the wasted lives and the years and years of pointless butchery. Naw, I’m just kidding, Veteran’s Day is when we give handjobs to the people who kill to maintain our constant flow of luxury goods, and everyone from the top on down will bug the shit out of you if you refuse to bow deeply enough before the War Altar. It’s a very difficult day to be an American with a conscience, an American who refuses to participate, an American who feels guilty about suffering. Though I suppose it’s not any more difficult than any other day.

            I guess that’s all I have to say about The Savage Detectives. It’s a fantastic book, and it affected my emotions and my frame of mind. That’s what the best books do, they seep into you, through your pores. Up next is The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe, a collection of short stories. The title story is about a young man fighting against the system, which is a personal favorite topic of mine. Should be great!

Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.