The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

So there's this writer. He was brilliant, restless, and died young while trying to maintain both his creativity and a stable life. Sounds familiar, right?

Not so fast. The troubled writer in question here is the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. His novel The Savage Detectives (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) was the most recent book club book, chosen as much for its unique perspective on modern Latin American literature as for the hesitance that 2666, Belano's posthumous, 900-page opus, instilled in at least one of us.

The Savage Detectives is a novel that spans the 70s to the 90s, tracing two young poets (and co-founders of a poetry "movement," the Visceral Realists) from their early shenanigans in Mexico City to nomadic lives in Israel, Spain, and Mexico (again). The young Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano gather a group of self-serious young poets to overthrow Mexico's reigning literary elite (mostly just Octavio Paz). And through them, we see the joys and pettinesses of poetic revolution--which happens to be high on drama here, and low on actual poetry and actual revolution. But they assemble a ragtag group of young writers who like the idea of literary godhood, even if they have no idea how to achieve it. So the group members mostly just drink, talk endlessly, sleep with each other and various hangers-on, and occasionally write poetry that no one publishes.

The first third of the book, which follows the group as it coalesces around Lima and Bolano, is written as a diary by Juan Madero, a 17-year-old who sees the Visceral Realists as his entry to sex, excitement, and more sex. Juan drops out of school to pursue poetry and waitresses, and sets his sights on becoming a Visceral Realist like Lima and Bolano. Juan doesn't really know what a Visceral Realist is, per se (and neither do we), but he knows he wants in. The section is a humorous, rather joyous coming-of-age set piece introducing us both to the Visceral Realists and 1976 Mexico City. The section ends on a bit of a dark note, though, as Lima, Bolano, Madero, and a prostitute named Lupe flee Mexico City in a borrowed car, trying to get Lupe away from her violent pimp.

The second section of the book is written in a completely different style--instead of one kid's journal, it's a series of documentary, first-person interviews with a parade of previously unintroduced characters. After a few pages, you realize each new speaker (whose recollections range from a page to several) is someone who came into contact with Ulises Lima, Arturo Bolano, or both, since their abrupt exit from Mexico City. The timeline unfolds more or less straightforwardly, giving episodic updates on the pair's travels. Ulises Lima becomes a drifter throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, seemingly content with a hard, very physical life of odd jobs and fleeting sexual encounters. Bolano is also a drifter, but he seems slightly more concerned with his intellectual and philosophical development. He moves around Europe for the most part (Spain especially), but ultimately becomes a freelance journalist with a penchant for African war zones. With both men, you get the impression from all of these different voices that they're haunted by something that changed them fundamentally, and that dimmed the youthful arrogance that held the Visceral Realists together in the first place.

The third section brings us back to Juan Madero's diary, and the poets' exodus into the Sonora desert with Lupe. The little group is not only hiding from the pimp, but also seeking out Cesarea Tinajero, a woman who had been considered the "mother of Visceral Realism" sixty years before. Cesarea left little (if any) poetry behind, and completely disappeared from the literary social scene. The traces followed by Lima and Bolano (with Madero and Lupe just kind of along for the ride) are increasingly sad, and the climax sheds light on why both men led such effed up adult lives after the fact.

This may be one of my favorites of the book club books--I loved Bolano's complexity of language and perspective, while he kept an unwieldy structure mostly under control. There were spots that could have been pruned (the middle section is approximately 400 pages, with some unnecessarily repeated speakers and themes), but overall I think he did an excellent job making about a hundred different speakers seem like unique voices and characters. And he does that while also developing Lima and Belano in a thoughtful and believable way. The language he uses is terse when it needs to be, lush and sensual when it needs to be, and absurd when he needs it to be. And one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that for a book about poets, there's extremely little poetry in it, making the story about the Visceral Realists and the motives behind them much more than the words any of them put on paper.

I think I'll still wait a while to tackle 2666, but in the meantime I'm glad to have finished out 2009 with this one.