Investigating literature

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES

By Roberto Bolaño

Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Picador UK

Available at select

National Book Store branches

In July 1994, the Spanish literary critic Iñaki Echevarne was found one day at Barcelona’s Bar Giardinetto, gnomically reminiscing the life and death of an avant-garde poetic movement known as visceral realism.

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace…then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone… and one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end...everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.”

In reality, there exists not a critic called Iñaki Echevarne, and neither is there a Bar Giardinetto in Barcelona.  The Visceral Realists aren’t real either, but the players in this work of fiction do hold parallels with the eccentric Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

With this novel, The Savage Detectives, Latin American literature’s enfant terrible has forged both a remarkable cornerstone of Spanish literature and a very personal and artistic reflection dwelling strongly on themes of death — personal, because the author had been battling with the hepatic disease that ended his life in 2003; artistic, because he realized that Latin American literature needed release from its cobwebbed traditions to survive as an art form. For the record, Bolaño didn’t exactly regard many of his colleagues highly, excoriating such notables like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa; fellow Chileans like Isabel Allende; and penny dreadful factories like the appalling Paulo Coelho.

While the title of this book reads like a mystery thriller, Bolaño uses the term “detective” to refer not to the sleuthing profession, but rather to loosely describe a speculative investigation into literature. On the surface, The Savage Detectives tells the story of two quixotic poets who spearhead the visceral realism movement. Both characters scour the globe for their fabled Doña Dulcinea — a surrealist and modernist “poet” named Cesárea Tinajero. Her only surviving work, Sión, assumes the very odd form of a boat resting on a straight line, a sinusoidal squiggle, and a jagged series of peaks. She also happens to be the mother of the movement. Although this admittedly smells a bit like a mystery, reading more deeply into it reveals Bolaño’s ambitions to reform a continental literature hobbled by its insular focus and anachronistic sketches of Latin American life.

Perhaps it is now obvious that this book is largely autobiographical: it mirrors various episodes of the author’s history, and even more importantly, his firebrand ideas on poetry and literature. For instance, the Mexico of the Seventies corresponds with the time when a renegade Bolaño was fomenting his poetic revolution in the capital.

That the author deliberately names his hero “Arturo Belano” is also a conscious attempt to participate in dialogue with the reader. Belano’s partner-in-crime, Ulises Lima, is likewise a carbon copy of his close friend, the poet Mario Santiago. Both of them, like their real life counterparts, traveled extensively around Europe and Latin America to observe trends in the art of verse. Curiously though, Bolaño chooses to cloak both in mystery by retelling their lives through their demented acolytes.

Although Bolaño’s poets dominate the body of the story, the novel begins as dia-rist entries written by a disenchanted Mexican student of literature. He criticizes his educators for their ignorance, the poets for their pretension, and the institution for its arrogance. That said, he clearly knows his stuff, duping professors and poetic pundits with his encyclopedic grasp of poetry’s techniques and forms. Recognizing his talent, Belano and Lima induct him into the realists and embark together on a journey towards discovering the mysteries of Síon.

The novel abruptly switches to the narratives of the visceral realists — a neurotic collection of rambling poseurs who run the entire gamut of madness. For all their quirks though, Bolaño’s characters are endlessly fascinating, entertaining, and even endearing — some are sentimental, others are cynical, but most seem to enjoy their drugs, sex, and slang as much as they love their poetry. One personal favorite is a foul-mouthed American named Barbara Patterson, whose eviscerating tirades read like a primer on balancing humor and hormones with four-letter words.

These realists are key to advancing the plot, vaguely chronicling the meandering escapades of Belano and Lima in tandem with the movement’s progress. Two decades later though, the poets realize that visceral realism is dying and that its ringleaders are nowhere to be found. At one point, the two are even labeled as hacks. The fiery revolution that they envisioned has been dampened, their dreams extinguished by the realization that their youthful idealism is irrelevant to the art. The obnoxious Lima, who once attacked the Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz, sadly and politely conversed with the man many years later in a public park.

Belano, like the author, becomes a silent drifter, taking odd jobs as a dishwasher and a night watchman. But we know that they are legitimate poets, because the visceral realists do affirm their greatness. It just so happens that Bolaño is frustratingly reluctant to give us their, or for that matter, anyone else’s poetry.

Well, that’s not true. We are shown Tinajero’s strange doodles of that boat riding calm, then undulating, and finally rough waters; whatever this “poem” eventually limns must be pivotal to understanding The Savage Detectives. Given that this is primarily a novel about literature, it becomes most tempting to interpret Síon as an artist’s voyage — the straight line depicting the easy sailing of one’s early years, followed later by a coming of age marked with uncertain twists and turns. Belano, and therefore we, too, gradually dawn on the painful understanding that the visceral realists and their high aspirations will do nothing to shift the foundations of literature. 

On that note, while this melancholy demise greets the poets at their crusade’s twilight, it is not death, but rather Bolaño who gets the last laugh.

Norman Bolzman, a friend of Lima’s, remarked that a poet’s relevance as an artist “has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it, and what we can regain.” But what is it exactly that we regain? Norman answers, “What we’ve lost, we can get it back intact.”

Bolaño, a poetic purist, once considered prose as the most flawed and “vulgar” of all literary forms. However, he eventually realized that art would not sustain him unless he conformed to its current aesthetic standards. To cheat death, and consequently, to preserve his vision, Bolaño acquiesced to writing prose — prose that nonetheless retains elements of his poetic decadence. Thus, while Belano the exclusivist poet had died, Belano the lyrical novelist was resurrected, thereby redeeming the author from the artistic death his character envisioned in The Savage Detectives. In fact, by immortalizing his vision in this captivating novel, Bolaño has proven himself merely not as an author who redefines the boundaries of his literature, but ultimately as that artist whose genius transcends the clutches of death.