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23.12.2008
From what I’d heard, I expected The Savage Detectives to be a rewarding slog; it was described to me as almost unreadably dense, and then both the short Bolaño novels I’ve read took me some time to get through. Instead I’m finding it brash and playful, with a brightness that persists no matter how dark the story becomes; even, say, when a teenage prostitute is being stalked by her sadistic pimp. Add to that ravenous sexuality, a relative deemphasis on language (his shorter novels took me a long time to read partly because I stopped so often to stroke the prose) and a spattered and unstructured but nonetheless fast-paced plot, and you have something resembling a page-turner. When I’m not reading it, as now, I slightly resent the fact…
It’s also (so far) a lot more conventional than the others I’ve read, without their will to dissolve time into simultaneity. In the first part of The Savage Detectives, the hero Juan Garcia Madero starts college and then stops going, regrets his virginity and then loses it (and then some), immerses himself in bohemian chaos, and hits a pimp, all in sequence. But still I think there’s something about the treatment of experience in The Savage Detectives that anticipates Bolaño’s later trickery with time. In Amulet there’s no distinction allowed between past, present, and future; in By Night in Chile, memory wicks up and drowns the immediate moment. In both cases, I suspect Bolaño was conveying a sense of time informed by his own illness and by the consciousness of coming death. But while there’s still sequence in The Savage Detectives, there’s also a peculiar equalizing of all moments. The wash of idle conversation weighs as much as sex, as much as wandering through bookstores, as much as a beating; causes may have effects, but just as often they eddy and go nowhere, or drowsily reverse themselves. The moments may still be ordered, but their order becomes almost irrelevant. Every moment is so saturated with presence that they’re all constantly on the verge of lifting free of the structure of time. Moments are bubbles of the absolute, each one its own emblem, and it’s easy to imagine that when Garcia Madero thinks about his life he might find himself in the same position as Auxilio in Amulet: subsumed by an infinity of layered moments, all of them still happening.
If it’s an understanding of time infused with death, it’s also a portrayal of sexualized time, in which all moments slide over and through each other. Moments become so vital that they’re almost living things, caught in a soft and constant interpenetration. Bolaño is playing with an animism of the instant.
It’s no wonder to me that Bolaño’s reputation is in such crazed ascent. This is literature like they don’t publish in the United States anymore; literature that has to be vetted abroad before it can appear here. People are so thrilled by this kind of writing because they’ve almost forgotten that it’s possible: that the structuring of a narrative, the texture of language, can be enough to reveal a fresh cult of being…
December 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[…] for a previous post on The Savage Detectives, try this.) « Even more Roberto Bolaño: starting The Savage […]