The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño was a sick man, a spiteful man. He died young from liver failure in 2003; he wrote, like William H. Gass once said from himself, “from hate. Hard.” The Savage Detectives was written in the early years of his illness, but at the end of a life spent writing forcefully and furiously against every kind of obstacle. In his youth Bolaño was dyslexic and things he read twisted into a nest of confused associations. As a young man he wrote poetry that was for the most part ignored. Mature, he riled openly against every critic, jury or author he disliked, frequently reminding the recipients of his derision where exactly they could put their reviews, prizes and novels.

But this ill man could write. He was considered the greatest living Latin American writer at the turn of the 21st century, and the epithet was well-earned. Not since Julio Cortázar has a novelist/poet written such complex works, novels as dense as they are winding, filled with rythmic and extensive chunks of text that you’d hesitate to call paragraphs because they seem like whole stories in themselves.

The Savage Detectives is NOT a mystery, or a thriller, or any other pigeon hole, contrary to the labels above this review. It’s not really like anything. Parts are familiar: the first and third sections are written in the form of a diary; between these the bulk of the novel is told by a slew of narrators, fifty-two in all. But this familiarity is only-surface level. From the first diary we hear the voice of a young poet on the make in Mexico City who’s just joined a group of poets known as Visceral Realists. Guns and blowjobs and drugs and other kinds of hard-boiled fun fill this young poet’s head. In the middle section the narrator’s remember two poets: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, whose general vagabundeismo has enough pathos to fill every voice that recalls them with near-infinite sadness bordering on nostalgia. In the final diary section we find failure and disillisuion; nothing turns out like the poets hoped.

In every way that a genre novel would be simple, cliché and stock The Savage Detectives is new and complicated. The novel attacks the way we see the world and each other, and forces a reconsideration of how language and memory are connected: a breath of fresh air from so much of the soft-minded sentimentalism that passes for thinking-people’s literature these days.