The Savage Detectives: A Novel

Get hip to Bolano. His short stories are electrifying, a real revelation. I am enjoying Los Detectives Salvajes right now. Bolano was an intelligent writer: nuanced like Dylan Thomas, suspenseful like Kafka, learned like Borges, but with a modern fierceness and humor. Bolano is the heir to the wealth of all the best writers before him. I am thrilled to be reading such a talented writer.

First of all, Natasha Wimmer does a great job with this translation. Considering the author's poetic style, I'm sure it must have been difficult. Bolaño tells the story of a fictional poetry movement, the 'visceral realists', an anti-Octavio Paz group based in Mexico City (apparently modeled on Bolaño's own experiences with a similar movement called the 'infrarealists' ). What's so great about this book , for me, is not so much the story but rather how the story is revealed: through so many unique voices (over 50?); one of whom being Juan Garcia Madero, a 17 year old student of poetry and one of the original anti-Paz "gang". His diary, which elevates the tale to a mythic quest, frames the novel in the 1970's. The middle section of the book reads almost like a documentary; a sort of literary verité. It masterfully patches together the experiences of the quixotic figures, Arturo Belano (Bolaño?) and Ulises Lima, leaders of so-called 'visceral realists', from the reminiscences of tangential characters in their lives. This is a novel you can read over and over and still pick up something new each time. I am looking forward to the upcoming Bolaño translation (thankfully by Wimmer as well) called "2666".

First, a note to those readers who found the book slow: well, it is and it isn't. The first part moves along at a fairly fast clip and ends in the midst of a car chase. The very long second part, called "The Savage Detectives," presents forty-odd narrators, some recurring, some not, who take us through about thirty years of life, love, madness, poetry, children lost in caves, Latin American poets lost in Africa, and people generally (even savagely!) lost in their own lives. About fifty pages into this section, I too was getting annoyed, wondering where all this could possibly be going and what the point could possibly be. Then, the slow accretion of narratives and themes began to reveal the grand melancholy at the multi-layered heart of this brilliant book, and I was enthralled. The novel's third and final section is brief and brutal. I'll avoid spoilers here, but the ending conveys an inevitable and exhausted disillusionment only comparable, to my mind, to that of Sentimental Education, although Bolano is perhaps not quite so cynical as Flaubert. Or is he? His poets seem to be either anti-heros in spite of themselves, or sincere and manipulative poseurs; and yet, for as much as we may know about them, some mysteries about these characters simply cannot be solved. Formally, the book challenges our expectations of a novel (and although Bolano is compared most often to Borges, whose work and image he praised in interviews, formally he reminds me more of Julio Cortazar, although without quite the same ludic bravado as in, say, Hopscotch); thematically, it challenges ideals we may hold for art, especially if we are artists. And if my review makes The Savage Detectives sound like a long and somber read, trust me--it is exuberant and heartbreaking in its pursuit of both comedy and tragedy.

NOCTURNO DE CHILE is a short book, 150 pages. Its text is presented without subdivisions: no chapters, no parts I, II etc. The book is the final confession of a dying priest Father Sebastian Urrutia , in essence, the story of his life. The events are presented in chronological order. The author often strays into metaphoric soliloquies and sometimes springs us with shower of strange, names. Beware, this eclectic bibliographies do very little to obscure a straight forward plot: While, still an adolescent seminarian, Sebastian receives and unexpected invitation by a famous critic, Farewell, to a week-end stay at a his country estate. More than ever, Sebastian considered himself now favored by the muses and his Christian God. All goes well: during the visit he is introduced by Farewell, to the Chilean Nobel Laureate poet Pablo Neruda. And he meets many other Chilean poets. After the official recitations and laudations of the night,the host invites Sebastian to secretely watch Neruda, reciting by moonligh in the garden, the entranced young man is abruptly brought back to reality, as he finds himself the object and subject of Farewell's sexual advances. No, this novel is not another case presentation of character disorders or about Gothic class injustice. Farewell's weaknesses are not much of the story. But maybe Bolano is introducing a portent, a foreboding for Sebastian's gathering storm. The communist revolution is due in Chile and so is the blood bath of Pinochet following in step. After having read four books by Bolano, I consider myself an initiated fan. I thus do not hesitate to recommend him as new genius. If you are concerned about buying a relatively expensive paper- back, by an unknown author, I suggest you may start with this book. NOCTURNO DE CHILE is easy to read, poetic and interesting, and equal to the best of Latin American prose styles. Happy reading

Not since Borges has a Latin American writer placed literature itself as the central concern of his fiction as Bolano so explicitly and touchingly does in The Savage Detectives. "Life put us all in our place or in the place that suited her, and then forgot us, as it should be," Bolano writes, and, by the time you finish this unique novel, you too will share the belief of its protagonists, that being forgotten is a fair price to pay for following your love of reading to the end of the world.