The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It took me a while to get into this book. Admittedly it’s thick, and while the headers have names, dates and places, the sheer number of outlying characters threatens to dissolve attempts to make a cohesive narrative anything but conclusive. What Roberto Bolano has done is to show how there is no unifying trend in a group identity. That something as erudite and ideal as poetry can create a group is but a sheer coincidence among youths. As time progresses the boundaries of what makes a group dissolve, leaving but a faint trace of what had existed.
This novel is bookended by a character whose entry into the group, the viseral realists, breaks the group apart. He falls in with a prostitute who runs from her pimp. Their fleeing is supported by the leaders of this poetry group, whose absence eventually unravels the group. We see this as the group no longer has contact with one another. We hear of people faintly by hearsay. Eventually a young academic even writes about the group, including a trace of influence. In that sense, the fantastic nature of the subplots, the vignettes is where Bolano is able to give us choice pickings as the larger edifice melts into time. We catch up to the modern era but swiftly, as a coincidence destroys what may have, some day, in another world, amounted to a mainstream group. We don’t even know what happened to break up the two leaders although it becomes clear that their lives become in an instant, inexplicably altered.
In this way, we can read this as a coming of age story of individuals, but also as a coming of age story of nations entering into the globalized market. The heaving of capitalist trends always rearranges people socially, so that they do other things, odd tasks, specific to their own abilities and ambitions. Ultimately we are shuffled like so many decks of cards as the different decades come and go, different fashions changes and different values highlight out collective experience. In our older age we may return to our ideals of when young, having exhausted our sense of market sensibilities, and found greater joy despite the monotony of change. So we then end, individuals of so many potentials, being effaced on the shores of history, some of us, never to achieve our potential, many of us to be minor players who contributed to movements but only as vanishing mediators. Bolano writes about life, and perhaps this un-covering is the savage detective work as what he examines is both viseral and real.
