Roberto Bolano’s “The Savage Detectives” is a book that is brilliant and frustrating in equal measures, the work of a genius on an ecstatic death trip. Most of all, “The Savage Detectives” contains is the Song—the same plaintive strains that Keats wrote about centuries earlier: Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter. The wordless, noteless song of both love and despair, the whispers of a pied piper, a troubadour leading the next generation of artists and writers away from a life of bitter complacency.
This is a song you either hear or you don’t. Only certain nervous systems are equipped
with the proper detection apparatus, only certain souls yearn for the rhythms
of this soundless music: the blue melodies
of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Paris
in the 20s, New York in the
70s. The urgent song of Garcia Lorca on
his doomed and damned journey back to Cordoba.
“The Savage Detectives” follows the doomed and damned
journey of the two leaders of visceral realists, an avant-garde poetry scene in
Mexico City in the 1970s: Ulise Lima and Arturo Belano. Although they are obvious stand-ins for the
author and his friend, the poet Mario Santiago—they are both really ghosts, rumors
turned to flesh. They are the shadows
that remain when artistic rebellion has been rendered insignificant, when the
latest literary insurrection is incapable of provoking a snicker, let alone
outrage.
The book is divided into three parts. Sections one and three are the
strongest. They are narrated by Juan
Garcia Madero, a young initiate of the visceral realists. Writing in the clipped sentences of a young
Hemingway, he offers vivid descriptions of his introduction into the bohemian
underground. It’s all there: the sordid but seductive characters, the
ferocious arguments about obscure poets, the wounded and wounding sexual
encounters, the pimps, the prostitutes, the mother of a previous artistic
rebellion rescued from obscurity. These
sections of the book resonate as a Latin American response to “On the Road” or
“A Moveable Feast”—a passionate insistence on the value of poets and poetry in
a world that has surrendered to MTV on the one hand and Fox News on the other.
It is the middle section of the book that makes the novel
both unique and maddening: 445 pages of
disorganized fragments following the exploits of Lima
and Belano after the action of the
third section has ended. It is a series
of first person interviews featuring dozens of characters, each with their own
fractured take on one or both of the literary rebels. Virtually all of the vignettes are
brilliantly written and composed—most could stand on their own as pieces of
short fiction. But the cumulative effect
of all these disconnected stories is one of exhaustion.
Although Roberto Belano cares passionately about his main
characters, he has given the reader nothing to feel equally passionate
about. Lima
and Belano are stand-ins for any number of great literary pairings—from Kerouac
and Ginsburg to Huck and Jim to Don Quixote and Sancho. They are meant to embody the last of the
great adventurers in a world where the only adventure remaining is a journey
toward your own destruction. But because
they are only embodiments—well-sculpted shadows—they give us nothing to care
about. Lima
and Belano are not engaging enough as personalities to make us empathize with
them and they frankly stand for nothing except their own sense of self-importance.
It is striking that in a book that is obsessed with the
importance of poetry, we never hear of line of original verse from either main
character. We never witness them in the
throes of literary composition, we are never even given the sense that their
work is in any way moving. They have managed
to create a scene out of nothing but their own impetuous personalities. They offer no hope, no comfort, and no
possibility of either transport or transformation. All they offer is the faded specter of a
thousand artistic movements absorbed into the ether.
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