Thursday, December 31, 2009

03:44 The Savage Detectives



The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño


While in his early forties, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño discovered that he had an incurable liver disease that would ultimately prove fatal; precisely “when?” was unknown. After this diagnosis, Bolaño seems to have turned away from his previous life as a combative enfant terrible and spent his remaining years focusing on ambitious literary works including The Savage Detectives, which details the failure of a literary movement made up of combative enfants terrible.

The above is not intended as gossip but as context. Bolaño’s life is discussed in detail in the excellent introduction by translator Natasha Wimmer. Knowing this, it’s hard to read The Savage Detectives without thinking of it as a roman à clef or perhaps a parody of Bolaño’s life. One of the main characters is named Arturo Belano, for example, and his misadventures seem to follow a pattern similar to his creator’s.

The overriding theme is failure, the wasted potential and the directionless lives of middle aged men whose youthful dreams never paid off. The book is made up of three sections; the first, “Mexicans Lost In Mexico,” is perhaps the most enjoyable. It consists of diary entries by Juan Madero, a teenager who has fallen under the spell of a loose collective of poets called the Visceral Realists, who are defined less by what they stand for and more by what they dislike. As I live in a country in which poetry is irrelevant and literature is just another entertainment option among many, it’s heartening to read about characters who take poetry so seriously that they get into brawls over it. This is the “youth” section of the novel, which captures the joy of discovery, the excitement of new ideas and the mixed blessings of being accepted by those older than you but also dragged into the soap operas of their lives. Juan’s coming of age tale, however, ends abruptly with a cliffhanger. His absence and the lack of any explanation is keenly felt in the second section “The Savage Detectives.”

This is the longest section of the novel and consists of first person remembrances by those who encountered Belano and his fellow Visceral Realist Ulises Lima in the years after “Mexicans Lost In Mexico.” It’s an oral history (similar to George Plimpton’s biography of Edie Sedgewick) about a literary movement that produced little in the way of literature because its founders were too busy discussing it rather than writing. Love affairs, jail terms, dead-end jobs, political turmoil: it’s all here and at length, which makes the breadth of this section problematic.* It seems churlish to say “Can you cut your life story down a little bit cause I’m getting a bit bored” to a terminally ill man, but I think the novel would have been stronger had this section been edited. I was talking to a friend of a friend who was having the same experience with the book: he loved the first section but was stuck in the long second part.** However, at that point I had finished the novel and could tell him the payoff at the end was worth it, just as in Joyce’s Ulysses you have to slog through the novel’s two most tedious sections before you can reach the transcendence of Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima’s final tales include moments of grace for each man, and one of the most moving depictions of the selflessness of true friendship I have ever read.

The final section “The Sonora Desert” functions as an epilogue, returning us to Juan Madero’s diary and explaining what happened after the cliffhanger at the end of section one. It also provides closure to one of the storylines in section two and relates an “original sin” that explains the end of Visceral Realism as a movement and why Belano and Lima were doomed to lives of failure.

There’s much in The Savage Detectives that’s impressive. Bolaño is address a variety of life’s basic experiences by examining the day to day stories of a number of characters. He doesn’t overdo either the contradictions between stories or the distinct voices within. Even living as failures, the experience of life, with its attendant joys and sorrows, comes through. The book is also very funny.




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* This is the first book I wished I read on a Kindle. I didn't take notes while reading and the ability to instantly SEARCH the text to access the myriad character names, places and incidents would have been a godsend.

** My nephew had the same reaction. While reading "Mexicans Lost In Mexico" I impulsively bought him a copy, thinking that, as he was going through some of the same things as Juan Madero, he would love it. He did, but then got bogged down in the second section's various monologues.

The Book I Read

My 2009 new year's resolution to read 44 books over the course of the year ended in dismal failure. In fact, I don't have a final count, but I know I did not even accomplish half my goal. Oh well. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I liked a number of the books I did read this year and will be posting about them in the days to come.

I'm not going to even bother setting a goal for 2010 for several reasons:

One: I have several big books this year I'd like to finish and I just don't see how I'm going to tackle Against The Day or The Complete Stories of JG Ballard and stay on a reading schedule.

Two: I have a couple of projects in mind for the coming year that will severely cut into my reading time. This means, of course, I'll probably read more in the coming year than I have in a long time because I am Mr. Contrary. Best way to get me to do anything is to tell me I don't have to do it.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Unfortunate Headline of The Day

Clueless Star Brittany Murphy Dies

It took me a moment to realize that she was in a film called Clueless. I know it's a Sunday before Christmas and a huge snowstorm has hit the northeast, but was no-one around to proofread or copyedit this?

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Tales of Uncle Chuck


My uncle Chuck's funeral was this past weekend, and Lyle Lovett summed up my feelings in a song he wrote over 15 years ago:

I went to a funeral
Lord it made me happy
Seeing all those people
I ain't seen
Since the last time
Somebody died

Everybody talking
They were telling funny stories
Saying all those things
They ain't said
Since the last time
Somebody died


I served as a pallbearer, honored to be asked. Pallbearers pay their respects to the deceased first, then wait in a room while the other mourners say goodbye. While waiting in the room, my cousin Chip told several stories about his father that I thought I would post, as I think they're too good to be lost in time.

My uncle was born to a wealthy, or once-wealthy but still pretending, family. He had a habit of getting expelled from the private schools in which he was enrolled, and it was during one of these enforced vacations that, rather than immediately tell his parents he was thrown out of school, Chuck decided to enjoy his freedom for a while. As a way of evading truant or police officers who might question what a teenager was doing driving around in a convertible all day, Chuck asked a friend whose late father had been a doctor to forge him a note saying that he had the measles. The ruse worked for a while until the unexpected happened: Chuck came down with the measles. Going for treatment, the inevitable questions came up: how does one get the measles twice? and how does one get treated by a doctor who's been dead for a couple of years?

I also heard the story of how my uncle messed up his nose. Apparently, he and some friends were having an impromptu kegger in the woods. They didn't have a tap but weren't deferred. They instead popped the cork and then poured all the beer from the keg into a small metal tub, dipping their cups into it punchbowl style. But the police raided the party and everyone scattered, with Chuck putting the tub of beer in the back of his convertible.

Trying to stay ahead of the cops, Chuck took the highway's curves at high speed. From the driver's seat, he reached back to steady the tub and keep the beer from spilling out, only to crash and smash his face against the windshield and break off (?)/ cut off (?) the end of his nose. He then dropped his nose in his cup of beer and drove to the hospital to see if they could reattach it. At the hospital, they put the nose in a sterile metal cup until ready for reattaching. This was in the 1950s, so plastic surgery was still fairly primitive, and from that day forward, Chuck had a nose that was always "off." Something else he had from that day: the metal cup from the hospital. It was used as the bathroom cup for many years afterwards.

"What?" my cousin Chris said. "I drank from that cup and it had his nose in it?"

"That's what he said."

"Keep in mind," my cousin Bill said "our father liked to embellish. A lot."

RIP, Uncle Chuck.