The Savage Detectives

Continuing the Best 10 Books of 2007, as chosen by The New York Times Book Review, I turn to a novel by the late Chilean-Mexican writer Robert Bolano, The Savage Detectives. It is not an easy book to summarize, nor is it an easy book to read, but by the time I finished all 647 pages, I felt rewarded.

Bolano is a writer well-known in Latin American circles. He died in 2003 at the age of fifty, and founded a movement called infrarealism. Slowly his works have been released in the English-speaking world, and The Savage Detectives is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

The book has an unusual structure. It is bookended by the diary entries of a young man in Mexico City. He is a sometime student who becomes enamored of a circle of poets who call themselves the "visceral realists." The two ringleaders are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. This section is a lot of fun, as the narrator has some erotic adventures and the Bohemian slackers argue about poetry, drink, and sell dope. The section ends with Belano and Lima rescuing a streetwalker from her murderous pimp and heading into the Sonora desert to find a female poet who was in a similar movement some fifty years earlier.

The middle section, which is some 400 pages long, is a quilt of oral histories from dozens of characters describing their encounters with Belano and Lima, covering twenty years. The witnesses' accounts range from Mexico to Barcelona to Paris to Israel to Liberia. Some of these accounts are short stories unto themselves, such as an Englishwoman remembering driving across Europe in a van full of hitchhikers, or a woman professor in Mexico City hiding out from a campus siege by police in the ladies' room, or an attorney with a fondness for Latin recalling Belano when he was a camp attendant rescuing a child from a crevasse, but would end up having an affair with the lawyer's daughter. Some of these are quite funny, such as the story about Belano challenging a critic to a duel, and the two clash swords on a beach as their incredulous seconds look on, and some of them are dramatic or sorrowful, such as the experiences of journalists in war-torn Africa.

The only two characters we don't hear from are Belano and Lima themselves. Instead we form our perception of them through others. It's sort of like the five blind men and the elephant, only in this instance it's forty-some people. If the similarity of the name isn't enough to give it away, Belano is based on the author himself, and Lima on his best friend Mario Gonzalez. They are like the Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty of Mexico, and this sprawling narrative does recall the best work of the Beats.

The third portion of the book resumes the diary, as Belano and Lima track down the poetess in the desert while the pimp is on their tail. It certainly is no coincidence that the first names of the two characters, Arthur and Ulysses, are names from literature of characters who on quests, as these two are wandering in the desert in search of something without knowing quite why, although when they find it it ends up saving them.

The translation is by Natasha Wimmer, and it is masterful considering how difficult it must have been, given the vernacular and also the excessive use of poetic terms of art. It should be noted that a working knowledge of Latin-American writers would help, as at times they are listed for several paragraphs. I wasn't quite sure who were real and who were fictional, although I was helped by knowing who Octavio Paz is (the Nobel laureate is the kind of poet the visceral realists hate).

This is not a book for the beach (unless it is a Mexican beach), as it takes a considerable amount of attention, trying to keep all the characters straight. It wouldn't do well to stop this book and try to start it again some days later. In fact, the best way to absorb this book would probably be to read it twice, but that's something most people don't have the luxury to do.