Book Recommendations

Book Recommendation: The Savage Detectives

In Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, we read about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, two members of the visceral realist literary movement. Never once do we step into their minds. Instead, we can only watch from the eyes of others as the two youths, the two savage detectives hurl caution to the wind in the pursuit of their dreams. They are poets, that much must be taken seriously. Yet, the measure of their talents is never clear. It is not supposed to be. We are never meant to step into their shoes, know their thoughts, hear their internal voices.

The semi-autobiographical novel (in the sense that Arturo Belano’s life does in fact parallel Bolaño’s own) proceeds to cover the years from the Seventies to the Nineties, switching between a diary style and an interview or testimonial style that involves a cast of a dozen or two. The technical mastery here is evident. Not only is it an exercise in precision (given such a large cast of characters), the general tone is also a thing of beauty. It is often colloquial and undecorated, never at any moment perched at some lofty literary level and yet a marvellous thing to read.

It is through the masterful employment of tonal devices that Bolaño manages to conjure an epic tale that is at once humorous and sad. It is a tale of the brashness and stubbornness of youth, but also of its fragility and beauty. Is it about poetry? Is it about art? Perhaps, but more importantly, it is through art that we see these human aspects. It is youth that drives Lima and Belano, destroys them, and makes them again.

That it so closely mirrors Bolaño’s life delivers perhaps the novel’s most powerful image. Bolaño (and thus Belano)  presumably looked at the prose form with some measure of disdain. In the end, the writer and his character, poets to the death, end up writing stories. Yet it is an extraordinary story, this, vast and proud and poignant.

In the end, The Savage Detectives is at the same time a novel that is a very human and affecting affair, and yet also a sprawling and tragic heroic epic.

I enjoyed myself tremendously reading the book over the week, and thought that you might want to give it a shot too, if you haven’t already. You might want to note that the work is pretty long, but it certainly goes down easily with the fantastic translation by Natasha Wimmer. I don’t think there’s a reason to be intimidated by its size.

As I closed the book on the bus yesterday, having watched the strange quest of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano unfold with such interest over days, it occurred to me that, in spite of the great number of perspectives, we never actually see the world through the eyes of the titular detectives. Yet, detectives are watchers, observers, witnesses of the grand and awful truths oblivious to the rest of us; and as the world watches Lima and Belano, they too watch the world. One can only wonder, then, where that grand and awful truth lies.

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© 2008 a modest odyssey.