It is as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, vivid portrayers in their different ways of Latin America's violence and visions, had become their own extravagant protagonists. Instead each has written at a certain alleviating distance, and perhaps it is the distance that art requires to achieve itself, just as it takes a few inches of travel for a blow from a fist to hurt.
The Chilean Roberto Bolano, who died three years ago at 50 and is perhaps the outstanding figure of the successor generation, uses no distance or alleviation whatever. He jumps in.
His fiction, which has only recently been appearing in the US, can be stylistically elusive, but in essence it is chokingly direct. In the novella By Night in Chile, for instance, Bolano created a glittering and terrible deathbed confession by a Chilean literary critic who supported the Pinochet dictatorship through acquiescence and the quietest of tiny actions. "One must be very careful with one's silences," he says, since only God judges them. His own, he adds, "are immaculate."
The key to Bolano's work is an insistence that the writer must keep no scrim of art or craft between him and the brute reality of the world he lives in and addresses. If there is a theme that runs through the complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable Savage Detectives, his first long (very long) novel, it is that the pen is as blood-stained as the sword, and as compromised.
Bolano grew up in Mexico and returned to Chile out of enthusiasm for the Allende government, only to be briefly imprisoned after it was overthrown. He went back to Mexico to write and to goad its several literary establishments and eventually moved to Spain. He has created a protagonist who borrows much of this biography, even much of the name. He is Belano, a writer and the savage detective of the title.
Bolano has given his novel an odd tripartite structure. The first part, narrated by a young would-be poet, tells of his initiation into Belano's Visceral Realist movement (a hit off the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and others) and some graphically visceralist sex. It ends with his departure from Mexico City by car with Belano, another writer, and Lupe, a prostitute fleeing her pimp. Belano is seeking traces of Cesarea Tinajera, a poet who long ago belonged to a similar movement and went off to the Sonora desert in the 1920s.
Skipping to the third part: the party searches through a dozens of desolate Sonora hamlets. Belano's visceral realism means evoking the obscure and humble — the children of darkness — while pillorying the children of light who flourish in the precincts of art, power and wealth.
Eventually the searchers come upon Cesarea, who dropped her writer's scrim to join the viscerally real world, harsh and extravagant by turns. Successively she had taken up with a bullfighter, taught school, sold herbs at country fairs and now, grown enormously fat, works as a village washerwoman. We read of a vengeful pursuit by Lupe's pimp, and a bloody showdown where Belano becomes a knife fighter.
Bulking between these two moving parts — one an amiable but distracted ramble; the other a tense, implacable advance — is a 400-page middle section, more than twice as long as the others put together.
Narrative stops. Or rather, giving way to many dozens of mini-narratives, it replaces forward motion with a kind of tour, the kind Dante took of the Inferno. In this instance it is a tour of characters and attitudes in a Mexican literary scene that is a fools' carnival of futility; one that Bolano uses to suggest a more general futility of such scenes in Latin America and beyond.
All manner of vanities and pretensions are on display: feuds, factions and privileged sterility. A voice or two cuts through the peacockery. Amadeo Salvatierra, a fellow poet of Cesarea's back in the 1920s, is reduced to typing letters and petitions in the public square. He and Octavio Paz, he notes mordantly, are the only two Mexicans who actually make a living writing. Paz appears briefly, more trapped by his fame than relishing it. (I think that's Belano's point.)
There is a portrait of expatriate writers living in squalid isolation in France. "I was suddenly overcome," one says, "by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world."
Interspersed through these innumerable, mostly brief narratives are a half dozen longer ones that tell of Belano in the years following the knife fight. Wandering in France and Spain he makes a series of appearances as a man of action (supernatural action in one story) coping, scrimless, with the world. Individually some of the episodes are powerfully suggestive; but there is the effect of a character making the same point too long and too often.
This whole middle section suggests, sometimes hauntingly, Bolano's theme of art's sterility when shielded from life. Some of the book's best passages are here; but the formlessness, the cascading miscellany, the pile of jigsaw pieces with some missing, the guiding box-picture (fictional as against intellectual) purposefully withheld: these can make the book, or at least the reader, founder. Many gleaming lights are displayed, but foundering nonetheless.
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