Reviewed by Jon Baskin
5.16.07

In 1974, soon after being detained and nearly killed by the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño arrived in Mexico City, “a vast, almost imaginary place,” he later recalled, “where freedom and metamorphosis were a daily spectacle.” There he met the poet Mario Santiago, and the two men founded an avant-garde group, the “infrarealists.” The group published magazines, shoplifted books, shouted down establishment poets (they were especially hostile to the establishment poet, Octavio Paz) and staged the equivalent of “happenings” on the Mexican streets. They were the Latin American counterpart to the American beats, or the European Dadaists, seeking to blur the lines between art, politics, commerce and everyday life.

Today hardly anyone remembers the infrarealistas (though they still have a web site), as Bolano called them, which is the same fate that has befallen the offshoot “visceral realists” in Bolano’s highly acclaimed but only recently translated novel, The Savage Detectives. The book begins as a series of diary entries by a 17-year old poet and new initiate into the group, Juan García Madero, and expands, in its long and masterful middle section, into a sprawling autopsy of a dead (or dying) literary movement told through a compilation of interviews spanning twenty years, at least 12 cities and four continents. The interviewees are Spanish-language literary critics, professors, poets, and, most of all, friends and lovers of the group’s founders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (respectively based on Santiago and…Bolaño).

The portraits that emerge of those two enigmatic figures are as ambiguous and contradictory as real life. Belano is alternately a sexual adventurer and an impotent “limp dick,” at one point “very polite” and at another “intense” and hateful. Lima is the more outgoing and “laid-back” of the two, but a friend in Tel Aviv recounts hearing him sob every night before bed; a Mexican acquaintance reports he’s become a “drug addict” and a “thug.” From Madero’s point of view, we see them as masterful poets (though he never mentions actually reading any of their poetry) and firebrand revolutionaries, but, according to one acquaintance, “Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets either. They sold drugs.” Likewise, the legacy of their literary movement is shrouded in mystery. When he is invited to join the visceral realists, Madero accepts despite being “not really sure what visceral realism is.” A professor remembers the movement as simply having been “against everything.” “[T]o be honest, of course, I don’t know what that means, visceral realist poetry,” admits the former visceral realist, Rafael Barrios. Laura Jáuregui, a former girlfriend of Belano’s, claims the whole movement was “a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless…”

Of course, a literary movement can both produce serious literature, and be “demented strutting” at the same time. Most literary movements are. This is precisely why it is possible for The Savage Detectives to be simultaneously a satire and a product of a movement (infrarealism) that seems to have boasted an agenda only glancingly concerned with the production of literature. Bolaño’s novel asserts that such movements are themselves dynamic and fascinating, worthy of study regardless of their published results. This is what keeps a nearly 600-page novel ostensibly about writers from ever feeling insular or solipsistic. The colorful collection of characters that populate The Savage Detectives—the poet-whore, Lupe, the poet-pornographer, Ernesto San-Epifano, the poet-sexpot, Luscious Skin—may claim to be writers, but their true “art” consists in how they lead their lives. Their collective comings and goings and doings gradually resolve into a distilled essence of contemporary urban existence—“freedom and metamorphosis” —sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but never dull.

Bolaño, perhaps simply because he’s from the same part of the world, is often grouped with Borges, Fuentes, Garcia-Marquez and other “magical-realists.” But while certain episodes in The Spanish Detectives—I’m thinking especially of a dual on a beach between Belano and a critic of his novel—could be transposed seamlessly into Labrynths, Bolaño is ultimately working with very different implements. His writing is not as pretty or evocative as that of the canonical magical-realists, but what it lacks in decoration it makes up for with momentum and precision. To take just one example, the sexual encounters (and there are many of them) in The Savage Detectives are completely straightforward; here is the British girl, Mary Watson, giving testimony about one such encounter with Belano:

The cabin where he spent the night was so small that anyone who wasn’t a child or a dwarf couldn’t lie down full-length inside it. We tried to make love on our knees, but it was too uncomfortable. Later we tried to do it sitting in a chair. Finally we ended up laughing, not having fucked. When the sun came up he walked me to my tent and then he left. I asked him where he lived. In Barcelona, he said. We have to go to Barcelona together, I said.”

Not just the descriptive minimalism (at one point, Madero says he “hates details,” which would seem an odd complaint for a poet), but also the dearth of sentimentality and overt drama are characteristic of Bolaño’s style. Although maybe it is better to say they are characteristic of Mary Watson’s style, for Bolaño’s prose alters depending on who is speaking. The common mode, though, of the interviews, is rapid and explicit, one might even say “savage.” His characters often express doubt about their ability to tell their stories right—“this is a hard story to tell,” they complain, or, “that wasn’t what I meant to say”—but they nevertheless speak quickly, concretely, sidestepping flights of fancy and prolonged reflection.

Happily, this leaves the reader the space to interpret Bolano’s multi-layered novel for him or herself. Who are Belano and Lima and what do their lives mean? The trick of The Savage Detectives’ inventive format is that it allows Bolaño to convey the extent to which his two protagonists are, like real people, not only knowable, but also unknowable. One interviewee, referring to the modernist poet and hero to the visceral realists, Ezra Pound, speaks of “the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And yet they’re words circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence.” This is as good a way as any to think of Bolaño’s novel, which “never stops delving into things,” though we know from the outset that the investigation will inevitably fail to close the case.