Review: The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño 607 pages Vintage Español (1998)
Read this if you like: David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, Mexican culture and literature
Tl;dr summary: Two young Mexican poets go on a road trip that turns into a 20-year flight around the world.
Every summary you’ll find of this book—even the back cover copy—says it’s the story of two young poets searching for the elusive poet Cesária Tinajero. And this happens in the book, sure, but it’s far from being the bulk of the narrative or even, I’d say, the primary plotline.
To be fair to the writers of these summaries, though, I’m not sure how one would write a more accurate one. Some stories are too complex to be condensed into a couple paragraphs. Partly this is because it’s not one story. Savage Detectives is divided into three sections. The first and last (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico” and “The Deserts of Sonora”) tell a contiguous story spanning from November 1975 through February 1976, in the form of diary entries by teenage poet Juan García Madero. In this story, Madero meets poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the founders of a poetry movement called Visceral Realism. Along with other teenage Bohemian shenanigans, the trio decide to go searching for Cesária Tinajero, a poet from the 1920s who founded the original Visceral Realism movement. Along for the journey is the young prostitute Lupe who is fleeing from her abusive pimp Alberto.
A thread of this story connects through the middle section (“Savage Detectives”) in the narratives of Amadeo Salvatierra, a former member of the original Visceral Realist movement who’s interviewed about Cesária by Lima and Belano. The rest of the middle section picks up after the events in the frame, a fragmented narrative told from a plethora of voices spanning from 1976 through 1996. Together, they show what Belano and Lima get up to after their trip to Sonora in early 1976, but in glimpses normally recounted after the poet in question has already moved on to somewhere else. And Lima and Belano get around, from Mexico the US, Spain, France, Israel, Nicaragua, and probably a few other countries I’m missing.
The way Savage Detectives uses time and perspective is, to me, the most compelling aspect of this novel. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano serve as the joint protagonists of the book, and by the end the reader sees a good portion of their lives, but neither one ever gets passed the mic for a first-person narration. Instead, their story is told by others—often, people they’ve screwed over or hurt in some way, which leads them to paint a pretty unflattering picture, though scenes from the POV of friends show they’re not completely irredeemable. In many of these first-person vignettes, Ulises and Arturo are peripheral figures. The reader takes a side-trip into someone else’s life—and then, often, never hears from them again.
For me, the most powerful thing about this method of storytelling was that it changed the way I read the book. I’m not the kind of reader who usually flips back and forth when I’m reading a novel—I just jump in and go. With Savage Detectives, I found myself taking full advantage of the index in the back, or referencing back to Madero’s diary, plotting out the relationships between the characters and tracking the storyline of these side players across their appearances and mentions. The way scenes are interspersed and play off of each other encourages a less linear reading and I love a book that makes readers want to get more interactive with it.
The flip side of this is that Savage Detectives is not an easy read. There were times I flipped back to re-read less for pleasure than necessity because I was sure I recognized the name but couldn’t remember why. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, some of whom pop up once then disappear, others that come back around every so often. In that regard, it has a real-life messiness to it that complements the characters of Belano and Lima nicely. But, just like in real life, it’s not always obvious what’s going to be important when you first read it.
It wasn’t until I got to the third section that the core plot of the story started to crystalize in my mind. There are no narrative interjections from the author to guide the reader to major themes and plot points. Similar to how Lima and Belano are constructed of fragments, the reader has to piece the narrative together from the clues that are dropped along the way. This gives the book a feel of a mystery novel but instead of trying to solve the crime you’re trying to figure out what the crime was, or if one even happened.
A book that demands this kind of effort from its readers needs to have a solid payoff. In the case of Savage Detectives, I would say it delivers on this. The last section doesn’t offer a conclusion so much as it does a last twist of the focus lens, revealing the final details you need to bring meaning to everything that came before. From a craft standpoint, this is definitely a book to add to your reading list if you write non-linear or fragmented narratives, or long fiction with a broad scope. And, while it’s not an easy read, it is a fun one, and well worth the time and effort it takes to weave meaning from the story’s threads.
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