Why I love The Savage Detectives
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By Martin Glass
By Martin Glass I've devoted several articles to 2666 simply because it is a great novel and has plenty of material to cut, but my favorite novels is Roberto Bolaño Detectives are still savages.
mid-2001, I already had in Mexico City almost three years, had published my first novel, had a good job and just move to the street Bucareli. A fever I lay in bed in that department, huge and empty, I skipped work and I decided to only book that I had not read: The Savage Detectives. He had bought along with other books, on the recommendation of Maristain Monica (who later time would do to Bolaño his last interview.) Of these books, The Savage Detectives had been in the end, perhaps the most volume. Immediately, I was surprised that the story written by a Chilean who lived near Barcelona began, not in the City, but precisely in the same street that I had moved.
seduced me, of course, the domain of a Mexican language which I then lived, the evocation of a mythic chose Mexico as a fertile territory to fire the imagination ... but what caught me was the excess (which is not merely extension): a novel six hundred-odd pages, yes, but which takes place in a span of twenty years in many different cities, with over fifty different narrators (some of them taken from real life), with a lot of stories and voices ... Impossible not impressed.
Bolaño tells lifetimes: records all the "bandwidth" of life. In this is diametrically opposed to Borges, whose strategy was to encrypt the fate of a man at a time when the life of this man, as if narrating that one moment he realized the entire life of that person. Bolaño not removed the body to the details, the twists and turns, and thus life in his stories seem, indeed, life, whimsical, full of meanders and uncertainties, downtime, breaks, dizziness, changes shipments ... It is not only Borges has written stories and then, as a matter of synthesis, has chosen this strategy, while Bolaño can develop more because he writes long novels is not that, say, as it does only Bolaño in the novels, it is also the afford to make such an impression on many of his stories, such as in "Life of Anne Moore" (phone calls).
... With Detectives Bolaño is located in the genealogy of Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963), a novel that owes much to Adam Buenosayres Marechal (1948), which in turn descends from two intersecting lines, Joyce's Ulysses (1922 ) and the Comedy of Dante (XIV century), and thus of Virgil and Homer. A genealogical line that recognize various pleasures that define me as a reader.
audacity, extravagance; story coral alternating emotions, no sadness pure, not pure joy, humor, sometimes absurd, often ironic or playful, rarely simple, unadorned prose unnecessary, with long periods and cadences attractive, street poet, who does not deny the orality; metaphors overflowing Overdeveloped; certain structural risk (open structures) disjunctive descriptions - type "in the room was such a thing, or maybe just one, or perhaps there was nothing" - to build an atmosphere, not mere inventory, a good balance between the vital and metaliterary; the digression as a strategy and a power of fable enormous, a large chain of small and large stories: all that I found in The Savage Detectives.
That surprised me from the art, in a more intimate level, the novel moved me with their nomadic character, whose life seems sad because it fails to take root anywhere. That was exactly the sentiment that began to emerge in me in those years (I still have two more live in Mexico City). Travel as a search. Life away from the place where you were born. Later, that feeling grew and weighed heavily on the decision to return to Argentina, after a very short step for Europe. In return, the first thing published was World Map (2005), a book with seven stories, in different shades, they wanted to play that fiber. Today I know that life does not stop anywhere because it is everywhere.
My reasons for returning from Mexico to Argentina were many, and not all clear at the time of return, so I ask, how much have had to do a reading of Roberto Bolaño in that decision? Perhaps reading Bolaño has something to do also for what could have continued writing in the City, which could tell personal story or make up there after I had done my little "novel abroad in Mexico" (empty bars, 2001) and after reading something like The Savage Detectives? To go on with other stories of exile and immigration? Did the Mexican language not as a game, but as their own? Perhaps it was time to return, to discover my true place, and perhaps read Bolaño helped me realize that.
Roberto Bolaño died on July 14, 2003. Today marks six winters. This short article does not arise from mere desire to pay homage, but of pure gratitude.
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One morning beverage. Edgar Tarazona 