Before his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño was little known in the United States. Perhaps everything else makes its way easily across the Mexican border – people, drugs, manufactured goods, killer bees - but the border patrol doesn’t require a big fence to stop literary works at the Rio Grande. Indifferent publishers and a shortage of good translations are sufficient obstacles. Even Bolaño’s translator Natasha Wimmer admits that she had not heard much about the author before encountering The Savage Detectives.
But the tables have turned for Bolaño, who is enjoying a posthumous boom of dramatic proportions. Just six weeks before his death, at age fifty from a liver disorder, he was hailed as the most influential novelist of his generation by a group of his peers at a conference in Seville. A few months ago, the Colombian magazine Semana ranked The Savage Detectives third on its list of the greatest novels in Spanish of the past 25 years. And Bolaño’s last work, an 1,100-page novel entitled 2666 – not yet translated into English – ranked fourth.
Perhaps Bolaño would have been better received during his lifetime, had he not worked so hard at making enemies. He despised the literary establishment, and attacked even Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Octavio Paz with vehemence and venom. Isabel Allende, whom he denounced as a scribbler and guilty of kitsch, commemorated Bolaño’s passing with a succinct verdict. Recalling Bolaño as “extremely unpleasant,” she explained that “death does not make you a nicer person.”
English-speaking readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of Latin American literary politics will miss many of the subtleties of The Savage Detectives. The novel includes references, either explicit or thinly disguised, to more than 100 Latin American writers, and some (such as Paz) figure as characters in the narrative. The main protagonist, Arturo Belano, is based on Bolaño himself, and like the author is a Chilean-born exile from the Pinochet era who settles in Mexico, but also wanders in Central America and overseas.
Belano, along with his friend Ulisses Lima (based on poet Mario Santiago) travel farther, and even more aimlessly, than that other Ulysses of epic fame. And though they see themselves as poets and arbiters of literary taste, they publish little and spend their days selling marijuana, moving listlessly from relationship to relationship, and getting caught up in a series of violent escapades, ranging from robbery to dueling -- and eventually including murder.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
2 - Rodney Welch
Ted, my good man, what in the world did you see in this dreary stuff?
The action is chaotic, the writing is bland and uninteresting, and the final resolution is such a groaner that I almost expected to hear a rimshot from a drunken drummer in the background.
I wrote a review myself in which I just half-jokingly suggested that it's all a big post-mod hoax. (With your knowledge of jazz, you might at least like my opening paragraph.)
I respect your opinion and always read your reviews, but what did you use to keep going through this thing? Excedrin?
P.S. It's not correct to say "not a single line of verse appears in its pages." There's at least one poem in Juan Garcia Madero's journal -- the one that winds up making him so horny.
3 - Ted Gioia
Rodney, I checked out your review. Yes, we differ in our opinions on this book. But I am glad that someone remembers good ol' Buck Hammer. Someday I'd like to write a piece on the "Buck Hammer" syndrome in criticism. But that, of course, is another story . . .