I was able to finish reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano late last week. I haven’t been able to go back and organize my notes so I’m just going to wing it.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (Cover)

The Savage Detectives follows two experimental poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano, during the 70s in Mexico City and spans all the way to the 90s, following them on their journey through Europe, Israel, and back to Europe. It isn’t just about the two poets, but more about the poetry movement that they are considered the leaders of, “visceral realism.” The novel is filled with characters who live and breathe poetry. Their poetry is about their chaotic lives, the chaotic world around them. The novel features dozens of narrators, which can sometimes get confusing if you aren’t keeping track (this is why I keep a reading journal) and names of famous poets are dropped everywhere.

Within the vast ocean of poetry, he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”
Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Alexaindre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry….

The book is broken into three parts. The first part is narrated by Juan Madero, one of the members of the Visceral Realist movement, as he first meets Lima and Bolano and the rest of the members associated with the movement. The second part is a series of first-person “interviews” that follows Lima and Bolano on their journeys through Europe and Israel. The third part is a journal kept by Juan Madero, following a quest to find Cesarea Tinajero in a remote Mexican town. This section brings us back to the 70s, right before Lima and Bolano left Mexico.

After reading Infinite Jest and working my way through 2666, the 600 pages of The Savage Detectives didn’t bother me. It was an interesting read and worth my time, even though it took me months to finish.