The Savage Detectives. Group Read Sans Moi

I tried. I really did. But, I abandoned The Savage Detectives on page 216. The first part grabbed me, at least better than the second part which had more or less random people giving snippets of their encounters with the central characters. Part One tells of Juan Garcia Madero, a seventeen year old poet relating his escapades with the two "visceral realists", Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, who walked into his literature class one day. He is entranced by them, as any seventeen year old would be, but that doesn't make them any different than others who entrance him. Especially the Font family with daughters Maria and Angelica. Or, any other female for that matter.

When I heard the word savage in the title, I assumed it mean savage as in fierce. I didn't equate it with savage as in undisciplined. I found it impossible to continue with a novel containing characters for whom I have neither respect nor interest. Reading about life in the '60s and '70s, the wild antics of teens who know no boundaries and have no goals, reminds me too much of the fools with whom I went to school. What's so noteworthy about the lost souls of a few troubled decades?

I do respect that this is considered one of Bolano's greatest oeuvres (although I far preferred Monsieur Pain and I'm very much enjoying The Third Reich). I do respect that he is paying homage to Latin America and avant garde poetry. I did find great interest in this particular passage:

Joaquin Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, January 1977. There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. Let's take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you're calm, but he an also read any other kind of books with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That's how I see it. I hope I'm not offending anyone. Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he's a limited reader. Why limited? That's easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who's unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. so I talked to them, told them, warned the, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they're exhausted! Why? It's obvious! One can't live one's whole life in desperation. In the end  the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitability he ends us becoming just plain desperate. Or he's cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly-as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives-he returns, as I was saying to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what's called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility! seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with  a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles, and yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damian, and so they didn't listen." (p. 185)

This is one of my favorite passages, ironically penned by a man within an asylum. But, it was simply not enough to cause me to continue, laboriously, through a book I found with little or no meaning to my life. Richard gave me permission to abandon it if it didn't work for me. So begging his forgiveness, I threw in my towel, frustrated with my failed attempts to appreciate The Savage Detectives.

(There will be many more thoughts about this book throughout the weekend, but I'll be in Florida and unable to update my post with fresh links or respond to comments left here. For now, let me link to Caroline's from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat.)