The Savage Detectives (1998) by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
(Picador, 2008, 648 pp.)

The Savage Detectives may be considered as Roberto Bolaño’s first “real combat,” a phrase he used in 2666 to refer to a “great, imperfect, torrential work.” It is perhaps shorter than the later novel but it certainly overwhelms in its attempt to expose quite literally an aspect of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. “The Savage Detectives” is the mid-section collection of stories recounted by different people across continents, from Mexico to US to Europe to Africa, and across decades, from 1976 to 1996; these narratives are trapped in between two parts of Juan García Madero’s diary entries, written from November to December 1975 (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”), and January to February 1976 (“The Sonora Desert”).

Despite some comic moments, I believe that this is a sad, sad novel. I would have argued that sadness might be the main temperament of most great works, even those that overtly intend to make us laugh (remember Don Quixote, and Rabelais, as recognized by Bakhtin and Kundera in their studies of the novel, although I’ve yet to read Gangantua and Pantagruel)—for what’s more sad than having to read a book just so that we can have a really good laugh—but I’d rather distinguish the sadness that’s peculiar to this work, in order to avoid the sad trap of hasty generalizations.

This is the story of bohemians Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as narrated by almost all of the people they got to know, some more intimate than others, with all their limitations and biases, from the time when Belano and Lima were very active as probably the remaining champions of visceral realism, a literary movement supposedly founded by one Cesarea Tinajero, whose disappearance led the two ardent poets in search of her. Did they get to find her? Yes. (There, I just spoiled your own reading of the novel. Or maybe not. Finding Tinajero was probably the most truthful, and because of it, heartbreaking, realizations in the novel, when Garcia Madero, in his diary, observed that “there was nothing poetic about her. She looked like a rock or an elephant.”) But what happened after they found her, we would realize in the end, was most likely what propelled Belano and Lima to just go away, and leave even their desire to be poets behind.

When Jacobo Urenda, a journalist, asked Belano why he wanted to die before, when they first met in Africa, Belano said that “he had lost something and he wanted to die, that was all. Then [Urenda] heard Belano laugh and [he] imagined that [Belano] was laughing about what he’d lost, his great loss, laughing at himself and other things, things [Urenda] knew nothing about and didn’t want to know anything about.” Was it writing, poetry, that he felt he lost? This is ultimately a story of two failed writers, failures in the sense that they were thrown by fate far away from writing. They could have been great writers, but how can we know now? (Speculation has its own well of grief: what is it for, especially when things are already over and done with?) In this sense, The Savage Detectives is in a way Bolaño’s response to Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere. When two promising poets had to live lives that did not allow them to write, was it really a waste? Or was it a blessing to this world that no longer understands poetry?