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Mexico City, late 1975: Crime is on the rise; the economy is starting to backslide; political upheaval looms on the horizon. This was a turbulent time for our southern neighbor’s capital. But, despite the chaos and uncertainty, it is a time marked by nostalgia, remembered fondly for its student uprisings and passionate popular protests.
 Watching The Savage Detectives: Roberto Bolaño’s newly translated novel is the summer’s first must-read. |
It is also the launching point of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, only recently published in English translation. In many ways, The Savage Detectives resembles the city in which it begins. Following a group of renegade poets—the visceral realists—and the far-flung travels of their leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the novel revels in the grittier aspects of life—sex, drugs and violence abound. And, like modern day memories of 1970s Mexico City, the novel colors everything with a romantic tinge, mythologizing the seedy underground. But The Savage Detectives refuses to be blinded by these mythologies and debunks them as quickly as it creates them—the human is rendered divine then human again; the ugly turned beautiful, then ugly once more.
It’s no coincidence that this style (which could itself be called visceral realism) sounds a lot like the reality of experience. A Chilean by birth, Bolaño spent much of his youth, during the ’60s and ’70s, in Mexico City, where, like Belano and Lima, he and the Mexican poet Mario Santiago led a poetry movement before becoming global itinerants for two decades.
The Savage Detectives is told in two ways. The journal entries of the new-minted visceral realist Juan Garcia Madero bookend the novel. Initially, he allows us only shadowy glimpses of Belano and Lima; in the end, he finds in them not the mysterious heroes of poetry, but two confused and searching young men. In contrast, the central 400 pages of the novel take the form of interviews with over 50 different characters who have known or heard of, befriended or rejected, made love to or reviled (sometimes both) Lima or Belano during their travels. Reading these two styles of narration is like watching a rocket go up then trying to follow the thousands of multicolored sparks as they fall back to Earth; it’s a challenge, but it’s breathtaking.
With its innovative form, compelling narrative and insistence on its own kind of visceral realist perspective, The Savage Detectives is a tremendous success. The reader cannot help but inhabit the world of Lima and Belano, crafted so handily by Bolaño before he died of chronic liver failure, in 2003. The Savage Detectives isn’t always pretty, but it’s a joy to read and a worthy addition to any summer reading list.
