Language still creates islands that the immediacy of modern communications has not erased. It remains possible for a writer to create a substantial oeuvre encompassing poetry, short stories and novels, to win a number of awards and be acclaimed as the most important figure of his generation by fellow writers, to die an early death, and be largely unknown to the English-speaking public. But for a review in the LRB I would probably still be unaware of the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano, and it took me six months to actually get around to ordering the Savage Detectives. It will be another seven months before Farrar, Straus and Giroux publish his other novel 2666 in translation. Now that I know his name, I start to see it in other places…another book, by Cesar Aira, with a glowing encomium from Bolano prominent on the cover. Still, there’s a faint air of unreality about it, as though he were a creation of Borges, somehow retroactively himself backwards into history.
The Savage Detectives is real enough, a big, sprawling, unpredictable book that took me three weeks to finish. It’s written in three parts – excerpts from the diaries of Juan Garcia Madero bookend the four hundred page middle section, an oral history of the lives of the visceral realist poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima told in a dazzling multiplicity of competing voices. Madero is callow, a young poet inspired by his induction into the ranks of the visceral realists, and his diaries reflect this – the writing is sometimes flat, sometimes jarring, but sets the scene for the flight of all three from Mexico City with a vengeful pimp in pursuit which ends the first section. Then the babel breaks loose – the glorious cavalcade of thirty or forty contending voices describing their encounters with Belano and Lima. What is interesting is that these characters, from the garrulous old poet Amadeo Salvatierra to the deranged architect Quim Font, become far more vivid than the men they are talking about. The stories contradict each other and as the different views overlay each other, the image becomes blurred. The history moves forward more or less chronologically, with increasingly large gaps in time separating the accounts, until finally there are no further memories of either Belano or Lima. The visceral realist leaders vanish from the pages of history, and the academic who is their self-appointed historian denies that there ever was a poet named Juan Garcia Madero.
Madero’s diaries describe the visceral realists as an incestuous tangle of poets, convinced of the revolutionary importance of their art, even as the politics of the group drive them towards scission. Yet as the book proceeds, Belano and Lima increasingly appear hollowed out: bereft of the conviction that fuelled their poetic fervour, they become melancholy, haunted figures, drifting the globe. When Belano finally disappears into the jungle in Liberia, facing almost certain death, he is as the walking dead, glad to meet his doom. The final section, Madero’s diary of their journey into the desert, gives one explanation of the riddle that nags throughout the book, the event that wreaks these devastating changes. But it can’t be the full explanation, just one possible reason, something that can be inferred from the words of one witness, who can have no presentiment of what is to come. I didn’t build up much momentum reading the Savage Detectives: days would pass before I would pick it up again, but it rarely seemed to matter. There was always more there than can be understood in a single reading.
