If there's anyone reading who's a big Bolano fan, please let me know what I am missing. Why is there such a - it seems - unanimous critical and public acclaim for his writing?
I read the first part thoroughly. A few pages into the second part my attention began to wander. By Chapter 5 I was starting to wonder whether it was worth continuing. At page 200 I decided to resort to the old student ploy of skimming. Part three I was back to good behaviour when - once again - I lost interest.
How to account for this? Overindulgence in poetry has atrophied my ability to sustain narrative development? Ignorance of Spanish - specifically Mexican - literature, politics and culture means that my reading is deprived of context? Just one of those things - the book, the time, the reader in misalignment?
I'll admit to being disconcerted. Might this be some sign of forty-something waning literary taste? The palate becomes jaded with age? A gradual mutation into a Kingsley Amis old fart perched on the bar stool?
Here, then, are some counter arguments:
1) Bolano's mythologizing of The Poet and Poetry. I'm immediately reminded of Kerouac - On The Road is so obviously a text haunting The Savage Detectives - and Jack Spicer - Lorca alone would justify this connection but I see John Latta is delving into subtler affinities.
However, with both Kerouac and Spicer you feel some genuine energy, the voice of and from Inside (accepting that Spicer would reverse this very term to Outside). In Bolano's case, it feels as though he simply asserts - almost as if convincing himself. Again, I have to counter my own objections - I acknowledge Bolano's personal suffering in The Cause of Art; I accept, too, that the premise of the novel is that of delusion and disenchantment. And yet ...
... what does Poetry come down to in Bolano's novel? Buying - no, stealing - books; listing titles and authors*; in Part Three a pre-Finals type of rhetorical terms cross-examination; and - above all - lots and lots of fucking. The narrative voice of Parts One and Three and the various Poet-types of Part two are so signally lacking in anything resembling a creatively interesting take on the world. And yes, maybe that's the point - he's exposing wannabes, failures, also rans. Yet to sustain that over 500 plus pages ... Is it worth the candle?
2) Part Two and the decision to work the narrative through multiple narrative voices. I thought that this was going to be interesting - challenging, conflicting points of view, subtle reframings. Sadly no. After a few chapters you realise that everyone sounds the same and pretty much thinks the same. One critic justifies this as the effect of "spoken language". That seems pretty lame to me - and special pleading for Bolano. Yes, there's the American woman - Barbara Patterson - who swears a lot but surely this voice verges on caricature?
Can this be put down to reading a translation - that nuances of language are lost either intentionally or unintentionally by the translator. Another 'and yet' ...
3) Bolano's style. Part One had some interesting features - the narrator's repeated dislocations and qualifications; some of the one-liners about writers and writing. However, into Part Two and the writing is - well - dull. Here again Bolano admirers rally to his defence: it's what he doesn't do that's so impressive ... it's deliberately 'anti-literary' ... etc.. The writing rarely lifts above the functional. Flat - that's my overriding impression. And that over 500+ pages ...
4) The drawings. Amusing Mexicans frying eggs and so on - but I'd guess known to most readers and the kind of thing you'd do on school bus trips. Four pages of them, though? Where was the editor? However, the closing two pages with the three squares are just embarrassing. A final attempt at pathos - or perhaps a deliberate final fling towards bathos. Either way it misfires (and badly).
5) A dawning suspicion that Bolano is writing the kind of novel people think they should like - a sort of literary shibboleth to announce whether you're 'in with it'. The kind of person who goes for Suffering (artistically speaking), identifies with The Marginal (safely on paper), keeps in with South American lit. (and the wines are good and so affordable, too), is broad-minded enough to read hardback novels with words such as "dick" and "blow-job" in them as this is Art (capitalised). And there's the added frisson that it's kind of breaking the rules (which have already been broken and broken better ...).
So where does this leave me? Yearning for the rhythms and energies of a Kerouac, the real grit and illumination of an Iain Sinclair, the ability to dislocate sentences of a Patrick Hamilton or Henry Green, the concision of a Beckett, the exhilirating sprawl of a Pynchon, the recondite knowledge of a Borges.
Yep, I remain mystified at the claims made for this novel.
Anyone ... ?
___
*Bolano name checks Sophie Podolski - a Belgian poet/artist I'm going to explore further ...
2 comments:
Jonathan - I love Bolano! It's been a couple of years since I read Savage Detectives right enough, and over a year since I read 2666.
Both of them I loved - a mix of violence and understatement; long, beautifully constructed sentences juxtaposed with short, terser sentences (especially in 2666). Themes of art and atrocity, beauty and violence, sacrifice and redemption, again especially in 2666, seem particularly important as an overview of the 20th century, which is what I felt he was aiming for in 2666. The range and scope of the novel, the genuine counter-cultural feel of Savage Detectives, its sense of poetry, violence and escape - those references to Kerouac and Rimbaud whose spirits I feel he evokes.
Details I forget, but on the whole these two novels made quite an impression and were just plain enjoyable. Some of his other work is ok, particularly the short stories.
Funnily enough tho, like yerself I'm reading less and less fiction; nothing is "novel"; nothing excites or thrills like it used to - plot and characterisation don't interest me now: except perhaps the outsider novels where plot doesn't matter so much anyway - "Hunger", "Ham on Rye", and yes, "Savage Detectives" - the poet or artist at the edge, on the brink, in the muck, outside the pale.
I read Bolano before all the hype so feel justified in my liking of him, but as I say, it's been a wee while.
You are right to point out both the similarities and the differences between Bolaño's and Kerouac’s narratives. ‘On the Road’ is a mystical quest, and a hope is at its center; Bolaño’s novel is not without hope (hope lies with poetry), but it does not share the same optimism, or arrogant sense of unlimited possibility. Transgression in Kerouac is a positive act associated with creation. But Bolano's characters are not hippies, existentialists or beatniks, stirred by a promise of discovery, revolution and rebellion; the real visceralistas are poètes maudits, except instead of Paris, they have been condemned to live in Mexico City, whether as exiles or ‘in’-iles (to borrow Mario Benedetti’s term). They are ‘Mexicanos perdidos en Mexico’, Mexicans exiled in Mexico. Somewhere in the second part of the novel, Maria Font says that sofistication in Mexican life is a way to forget about having to live in Mexico. This phrase sums up the difference between this novel and Kerouac's narrative: this is not a journey of discovery (Mexico for Kerouac is a strange refuge from mainstream America, inspiring in him heroic leaps of poetic association), but rather an exercise in oblivion, a consolation or a distraction from a tedious and hostile world.
Clearly, Bolaño is opposing two worlds: the corrupt (in every sense) world of Latin America, and the preserved, academic world of America and Europe. Poetry is trapped between the stifling under-development of the one, and the sterility of the other. In France and Spain, our heroes are received with hostility by the literary powers-that-be of the day. In Mexico, as Garcia Madero says, no one wants anything to do with the real visceralistas: not fellow poets, not publishing houses nor magazines. The lot of the anti-establishment poet is either to languish in obscurity in Europe or die in the streets of Mexico DF.
Furthermore, the nerudian dream of a collaboration between the poet and the pueblo, of contact between literature and political reality, is long gone. Consider, in Chapter 14 of part two, the scene of the encounter between the sandanista police officer and the campesino poets from Mexico. The militant revolutionary and the artist are unable to collaborate even in something as trivial as smoking a cigarette. In ‘Los detectives salvajes’ the twin dreams of revolution and political engagement in literature have died out.
In such a literary and political world, to write subversive poetry is to charge at windmills, a self-destruction act which our protagonists never cease to attempt. Hence the apparent absence of a ‘statement’, a ‘quest’ (the search for Cesárea Tinajero is, afterall, more of a ‘quest for a quest’, a quest for an unknown goal, a self-exile minently poetic in nature), a ‘goal’ or ‘manifesto’ or even the materialization of a single poem which might validate in some socially or academically productive sense the dubious output of Lima and Belano. Like Maria Font’s unpublished writing, like the dead and forgotten texts and poets that populate the text Lima and Belano’s engagement with poetry is always (pre)conditioned by the potential missed encounter between reality and literature (consider the many references to Lautréamont, to Rimbaud, to Sophie Podolski, poets whose work has at one time or another barely escaped oblivion). In short, 'Los detectives salvajes' constantly associates poetry to futility and images of 'terre gaste' (the Mexican desert, war-torn Africa, poverty stricken Mexico DF, TS Eliots poem is referenced as well). This is not a Kerouacian anarcho-boudhist romp.
Post a Comment