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Summary
Summary
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times ), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
Author Notes
Born in Chile in 1953, Roberto Bolaño fled to Mexico after the military government took power in the late 1960s. There he helped found the infrarealist movement. He later settled with his wife and children in northern Spain, where he died in 2003. He received all of that country's highest literary awards, including the Romulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives . In 2004 he was honored by the First Conference of Latin American Authors as "the most important literary discovery of our time."
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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Booklist Review
This is the posthumously published English translation of the prizewinning novel that made celebrated Chilean Roberto Bolano famous. This highly stylized novel is ostensibly about two poets, leaders of the Mexican visceral realist literary movement, and their search for an obscure icon of the movement and its repercussions. The book spans a decade and follows the poets from Mexico City to the Sonoran Desert, Guatemala, Barcelona, Paris, Israel, Congo, Liberia, and the U.S. The narrative becomes secondary to the voices of the people who meet these poets as this long novel told through the personal stories--some humorous, some inscrutable, some tragic--of the eclectic assortment of characters they encounter on the way becomes less about the search and more about literature and language. For readers interested in a straight narrative, this book will disappoint, but those who enjoy voice and character will find much to satisfy them. As one of the characters notes, Well. In Latin America these things happen and there's no point giving yourself a headache trying to come up with a logical answer when there is none. --Rebecca Singer Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
OVER the last few years, Roberto Bolaños reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaños name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaños extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels - "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) - and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from "By Night in Chile," still his greatest work. The book is narrated by Father Urrutia, a dying priest and conservative literary critic, a member of Opus Dei, who comes to emblematize, by the novellas end, the silent complicity of the Chilean literary establishment with the murderous Pinochet regime. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there. This is where Bolaños imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama. Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the pests. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action: "Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter." MUCH of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence - impossibly, like someone punting a leaf - image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia. That long sentence is a poem, really, proceeding by foliation; in fact the entire novella is a poem of a kind. It will not surprise you to learn that Roberto Bolaño wrote poetry before he wrote fiction. Even in a long novel like "The Savage Detectives," his favorite unit is the discrete, Browning-like monologue, not the extended scene. He was born in Chile in 1953, but came of age in Mexico City, where his family had moved in 1968. Returning to Chile in 1973 to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested. He went back to Mexico, where he published two books of verse, and then began a long period of displacement and travel and drug-taking and odd jobs in France and Spain. He died of liver failure, in Barcelona, a far violin among near balalaikas (to adapt Nabokov's words on a fellow exiled writer). He knew time was short: the fiction that is currently being translated - there are more novellas to come, and a huge novel, "2666," will appear in English next year - was written in a spasm of activity in his last years. "The Savage Detectives" was published in 1998, but its heart belongs to the Mexico City of the mid-1970s, when Bolaño was an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas. Like much of his work, the novel is craftily autobiographical. Its first section is narrated in the form of a diary, by a 17-year-old poet named Juan García Madero who is on the make, erotically and poetically, and who has been asked to join a gang of literary guerillas who have named themselves the "visceral realists." The group is led by two young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a wild duo who appear elsewhere in Bolaño's work (in "Amulet," for instance). Lima is based on one of Bolaño's friends, the poet Mario Santiago, and Belano is based on ... Bolaño. Literature in Spanish and Portuguese, from Fernando Pessoa to Javier Cercas, from Cortázar to Borges, seems especially infatuated with alter egos. (José Saramago wrote an entire novel, and a great one too, "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," with one of Pessoa's authorial stand-ins, Ricardo Reis, as its protagonist.) A novel all about poetry and poets, one of whose heroes is a lightly disguised version of the author himself: how easily this could be nothing more than a precious lattice of ludic narcissism and unbearably "literary" adventures! Again, Bolaño skirts danger and then gleefully accelerates away from it. The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly, literal sensibility. His atmospheres are solidly imagined, but the tone is breezy and colloquial and amazingly unliterary - Gide's novel about writers, "The Counterfeiters," comes to mind, or better, a kind of Latinized Stendhal, whose characters just happen to be writers (Bolaño often warmly invoked Stendhal). He places us there, in Mexico City, and reminds us of the excitement and boredom, the literary pretentiousness and ignorance, the erotic ambition and anxiety of being a young writer or reader in the company of like-minded friends. The juvenile diarist who is our guide can write things that made this reader, at least, wince in painful recognition: "Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine." Or: "Then I read William Burroughs until dawn." Or: "Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it." One of his friends, a gay poet, grandly and absurdly classifies all literature as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual: "Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so." The same poet announces that at present poetry is enough for him, "although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories." (The pleasure we take in this, as readers of English, owes everything, of course, to the book's talented translator, Natasha Wimmer, who repeatedly finds inspired English solutions for what must be a fiendishly chatty and slangy novel.) THE visceral realists conduct "purges," steal books (I particularly liked the sound of the Rebbeca Nodier Bookstore, whose owner is conveniently blind), write and read and have sex and attitudinize. Life is a heaven's kitchen, with everything simultaneously on the boil. "It's incredible how much free time Mexicans have," one character claims. The young diarist falls in with a mad family and loses his virginity to one of the daughters, María Font. Meanwhile, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have become peculiarly obsessed with a poet from the 1920s named Cesárea Tinajero, a surrealist and modernist who belonged to the forerunners of the later visceral realists. Her work is revered by other writers from that period, but is nowhere to be found. She herself seems to have disappeared into the Sonoran Desert. Lima and Belano, accompanied by the young diarist and a prostitute, set out on a quixotic hunt for their equivalent of Quixote's Dulcinea. We are 120 pages in, and suddenly the book alters its form. The next 400 pages feature first-person interviews with scores of witnesses, friends, lovers, acquaintances and enemies of Lima and Belano. These are all people whose lives intersected, however briefly, with the two visceral realists, from 1976 to 1996. It is as if the novelist has taken a tape recorder and journeyed around the world, from Mexico City to San Diego to Barcelona to Tel Aviv, desperate to find out what became of the young, optimistic, but perhaps now doomed poets. Where did they go after the Sonoran Desert? What jobs did they have? What did they write? What became of all that ambition? Page by page, the novel begins to darken. An editor who met Lima and Belano before they set off for the desert says "it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there," and the novel precisely mimics this poignant presence and absence. Again, it should be stressed that this is not just a postmodern game about the fictionality of novelistic characters (though it is that, too). Movingly, no one seems quite able to get the two young poets in focus; Lima and Belano flicker in and out of other people's lives, and the news is not good. They are dealing in drugs, they are often high, they drift from job to job. Lima is living in Paris for a while, desperately poor. He once found a 5,000-franc note on the sidewalk and now always walks with his head down. Belano is spotted near Perpignan, looking for a "friend" who has disappeared and who is about to commit suicide. A painter, interviewed in Mexico City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima weren't revolutionaries: "They weren't writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either." Belano moves to Barcelona, and works as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Lima goes to Nicaragua, and disappears there; two years later he has returned to Mexico City, and is glimpsed by the secretary of Octavio Paz. In a wonderfully sad scene, Lima approaches Paz, and the two sit on a bench, talking. The impeccably establishment Paz had been the great bête noire of the visceral realists, but Lima now seems emptied of revolt. He meekly shakes the hand of the Nobel laureate - who has never heard of him, of course - and disappears. "We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness," are Wordsworth's famous lines, precious to a generation of American poets like Lowell and Schwartz and Berryman, whose lives ended in suicide or bouts of insanity. Curiously, "The Savage Detectives" is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family. For instance, it is at once very funny and oddly appalling that not once does Bolaño quote a single poem of Lima or Belano. We know their careers were not hoaxes (some of the witnesses speak of reading poems by the young men); but were they dreams? What kind of actual poetic talent inflated the ballooning ambition of these young writers? The terror of the MacGuffin always hangs over Bolaño's work. In "By Night in Chile," he tells the story of a rich shoemaker in the Austro-Hungarian empire who becomes obsessed with building a Heroes' Hill, a vast mausoleum dedicated to the heroes of the empire. When, decades later, Soviet troops storm the hill, all they find is a crypt containing the skeleton of the shoemaker, who gave up his life to the grand insanity of his dream. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, whose work we never see, drove off in 1975 in search of a poet whose own work was never published! Well, that's not quite accurate. The two men do eventually find a single poem by Cesárea Tinajero, published in a one-off magazine, and it's not even a poem but a hieroglyph. It is called "Sión" (i.e., Zion), and consists of three line-drawings. In the first, a square that looks a bit like a boat on a horizon, sits on a calm, straight line. In the second drawing, the line is wavy, undulating like a choppy sea, but the little boatlike square is gamely floating in the wave. In the third sketch, the line is stormily jagged, like a terrible EKG, and the little boat is barely clinging to the vertiginous wave. This "poem" might mean lots of things, but in the context of the novel, it surely evokes the difficult passage from the bathwater of youth and gladness to more treacherous adult waters. An Israeli friend of Ulises Lima's says that the importance of the poets' lives had nothing to do with visceral realism: "It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and what we can regain." He continues, and says that what we have lost we can regain, "we can get it back intact." Can we? Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car accident. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone remembers the visceral realists anymore. Many are dead. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico City. "About Arturo Belano," he says, "I know nothing." This is finally how the novel makes good on its playful, postmodern impulses. Roberto Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano, whose life so closely shadows Bolaño's own (night watchman and dishwasher, life in Paris and Barcelona, and so on), disappears from the story - to re-emerge, of course, as the man willing to "commit the vulgarity of writing stories," the man who triumphantly wrote this marvelous, sad, finally sustaining novel. Truly, it is as if he is there but at the same time isn't there. Bolaño's cultish young poets conduct 'purges,' steal books, write and read and have sex and attitudinize. James Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. His most recent work is a book of essays, "The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel."
Guardian Review
"A poet can endure anything." So begins one of the stories in Roberto Bolano's collection Last Evenings on Earth . "We grew up with this conviction . . . but that way lie ruin, madness and death." The poet's troubled odyssey is the dominant theme of both Last Evenings and Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives (both brilliantly translated). The latter begins in the 1970s in Mexico City, where two poets - Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima - are leading a literary movement called visceral realism. The first part of the novel is told in diary form by one of their young disciples - a puzzling figure not remembered by others in the movement - who interrupts observations on Belano and Lima to recount his early sexual encounters. This section ends abruptly with the poets, in the company of a whore fleeing her pimp, commandeering a car and heading for the desert. Their quest is to find a lost poet from an earlier literary movement, the wonderfully named "stridentists" (lost, missing, exiled and orphaned poets are - along with prostitutes - a key motif in Bolano's work). It is a shaggy dog story, but is the dog chasing its nose or its tail? The second part of the novel gives a dazzlingly different perspective (or multiple perspectives) on Belano and Lima by introducing a series of diverse witness testimonies from those who encounter them. These include descriptions of their behaviour on their return from the desert and the various roads of madness and ruin that they travel. In the final phase, we return to the first youthful narrator, who gives an account of the dramatic events during the quest for the lost poet. Bolano is not reticent about mixing his life story - or at least a mythologised version of it - with his work. He pops up in various guises, principally as the Chilean Arturo Belano, so it is worth pausing to consider his biography. Bolano left Chile when young to live in Mexico, returning briefly to his home country just before the Pinochet coup; he was briefly detained but then reverted to a nomadic, bohemian, heroin-fuelled existence as a vagabond poet before settling in Spain. He turned to prose to pay the rent, and there were times in reading The Savage Detectives when I wondered if it represented Bolano's revenge on the novel for this enforced career choice. Exercised by the "who's-the-daddy?" bickering that is a lamentable aspect of Latin American literature, he was not short of acerbic opinions on his peers. He was scornful of Isabel Allende, whose healthy sales figures and ability to smile on her book jackets have irritated more than a couple of his male contemporaries too. At times the obsession with the role of enfant provocateur , which surfaces repeatedly in Bolano's fiction, becomes tiresome. In the short story "Dance Card", he assumes the mantle of literary drama queen to demand rhetorically: "Do we have to come back to Neruda as we do to the cross, on bleeding knees, with punctured lungs and eyes full of tears?" And it is difficult to resist a shrug. Well, not if you don't want to, Roberto. It is also easy to become exasperated with the poets depicted in Bolano's work, who are of a particular type that treads dangerously close to cliche. They are itinerant, they steal books, they walk the city at night, they read in the shower, they screw and scowl and drink and brawl and pick up scabies from cheap dives. We rarely get any insight into what they actually write or think about poetry, beyond their railings against predictable enemies such as Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. This is accompanied by endless dropping of literary names, usually of French surrealists. And because Bolano identifies himself so clearly with them, one's exasperation extends sometimes to the author. He has described The Savage Detectives as a "love-letter to his generation". Fair enough, but it's a partly imagined generation that does not seem very broadly conceived; the uncharitable might describe the novel more as a love-letter to Roberto Bolano. All of this is redeemed, however, by the fact that Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable. Much of my frustration arose when I was thinking or talking about the two books (a good sign in itself), but I read them in great gulps. He also undercuts the obvious accusation of literary solipsism with sly humour, self-mockery and a wicked eye for pomposity. At one point in the novel, Lima joins a solidarity delegation of Mexican poets to Nicaragua, and Bolano gleefully sends up the often absurd nature of these occasions. He is extremely clever at switching mood and tone, so that even the comedy is interspersed with hints of catastrophe and loss. Bolano is both aware of and indulgent towards the futility of poetic rebellion, which is why so many of his characters carry a sense of doom with them. But he also succeeds in injecting his lost and wandering poets with nobility and pathos. Truth arrives in many vehicles; through nonsense, through endurance, through literary preening. It is the dance of literature and life in which Bolano participated so fully until his own untimely death four years ago. The most important test that Bolano triumphantly sails through as a writer is that he makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. His vision can be disturbing and dark but it is not cold: humour and compassion are never far away. Nowhere more so than in this elegy from the brilliantly disturbing story "Mauricio 'The Eye' Silva". "That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight." It is a shame that Bolano has no more evenings on earth - his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature is one that will be sorely missed. Ben Richards's novel The Mermaid and the Drunks (Phoenix) is set in Chile. To order Last Evenings on Earth for pounds 14.99 or The Savage Detectives for pounds 17.99, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-richardsbolano.1 [Roberto Bolano] is not reticent about mixing his life story - or at least a mythologised version of it - with his work. He pops up in various guises, principally as the Chilean Arturo Belano, so it is worth pausing to consider his biography. Bolano left Chile when young to live in Mexico, returning briefly to his home country just before the Pinochet coup; he was briefly detained but then reverted to a nomadic, bohemian, heroin-fuelled existence as a vagabond poet before settling in Spain. He turned to prose to pay the rent, and there were times in reading The Savage Detectives when I wondered if it represented Bolano's revenge on the novel for this enforced career choice. Exercised by the "who's-the-daddy?" bickering that is a lamentable aspect of Latin American literature, he was not short of acerbic opinions on his peers. He was scornful of Isabel Allende, whose healthy sales figures and ability to smile on her book jackets have irritated more than a couple of his male contemporaries too. At times the obsession with the role of enfant provocateur , which surfaces repeatedly in Bolano's fiction, becomes tiresome. In the short story "Dance Card", he assumes the mantle of literary drama queen to demand rhetorically: "Do we have to come back to Neruda as we do to the cross, on bleeding knees, with punctured lungs and eyes full of tears?" And it is difficult to resist a shrug. Well, not if you don't want to, Roberto. - Ben Richards.
Kirkus Review
The search for a missing poet is the nominal subject of the late (1953-2003) expatriate Chilean author's blazingly original 1998 masterpiece. This almost aggressively literary novel, which won major Latin American literary prizes and follows into English translation several briefer works (Last Evenings on Earth, 2006, etc.), evolves around the professional friendship of poet intellectuals Arturo Belano (an obvious authorial surrogate) and Ulises Lima. In the course of founding a literary movement they label "visceral realism," the pair undertake a quixotic journey hoping to find their predecessor, Mexican poet Cesárea Tinajero, known to have disappeared into the Sonoran Desert decades earlier. But before we learn of their progress, Bola˿o introduces the ardent figure of 17-year-old hopeful poet Juan Garc"a Madero, offering a wonderful account of the fledgling artist's plunge into Mexico City's artistic world, energetic discovery of the multitudinous pleasures of sex and hard-won solidarity with the visceral realists, once he has learned (through tireless networking) that unqualified poets are being rigorously purged from the movement. Juan Garc"a's breathless narrative then yields to a 400-page sequence in which various involved observers relate and comment on the shared and separate odysseys endured by Ulises (an adventurer prone to miscalculations and missed travel connections), Arturo (who becomes a war correspondent, as the novel travels to Europe and North Africa) and faithful Juan Garc"a. In a brief final sequence set in the desert, Juan Garc"a resumes the narration, treating the by-now brain-teased reader to a contest in which the poets display their knowledge of arcane literary trivia. The sad, surprising result of their quest for the elusive Cesárea is also revealed. One of the most entertaining books about writers and their discontents since Boswell's Life of Johnson. A brilliant novel, fully deserving of its high international reputation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The late Chilean writer Bolano's 1998 (U.S. 2007) novel begins with a 17-year-old's diary entries describing life in 1970 Mexico City. The narrative's second part is a meditation on the visceral realism movement founded by poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, capped by their search 20 years previously for the poet Cesarea Tinajero. This Latin American On the Road presents a dreamlike patchwork of Lima and -Belano's adventures from which to reconstruct their literary pilgrimage. Narrators Eddie Lopez and Armando Duran reinforce the novel's sense of place with their rounded pronunciations. Essential. [Bolano's final novel, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner 2666, is also available from Blackstone Audio.-Ed.]-Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
NOVEMBER 2 I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. NOVEMBER 3 I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I started class in the law school's hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio César Álamo's poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerealists or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Álamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Álamo would critique, another person would read, Álamo would critique, somebody else would read, Álamo would critique. Sometimes Álamo would get bored and ask us (those of us who weren't reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Álamo would read the paper. It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment. And I can't say that Álamo was much of a critic either, even though he talked a lot about criticism. Really I think he just talked for the sake of talking. He knew what periphrasis was. Not very well, but he knew. But he didn't know what pentapody was (a line of five feet in classical meter, as everybody knows), and he didn't know what a nicharchean was either (a line something like the phalaecean), or what a tetrastich was (a four-line stanza). How do I know he didn't know? Because on the first day of the workshop, I made the mistake of asking. I have no idea what I was thinking. The only Mexican poet who knows things like that by heart is Octavio Paz (our great enemy), the others are clueless, or at least that was what Ulises Lima told me minutes after I joined the visceral realists and they embraced me as one of their own. Asking Álamo these questions was, as I soon learned, a sign of my tactlessness. At first I thought he was smiling in admiration. Later I realized it was actually contempt. Mexican poets (poets in general, I guess) hate to have their ignorance brought to light. But I didn't back down, and after he had ripped apart a few of my poems at the second session, I asked him whether he knew what a rispetto was. Álamo thought that I was demanding respect for my poems, and he went off on a tirade about objective criticism (for a change), a minefield that every young poet must cross, etc., but I cut him off, and after explaining that never in my short life had I demanded respect for my humble creations, I put the question to him again, this time enunciating as clearly as possible. "Don't give me this crap," said Álamo. "A rispetto, professor, is a kind of lyrical verse, romantic to be precise, similar to the strambotto, with six or eight hendecasyllabic lines, the first four in the form of a serventesio and the following composed in rhyming couplets. For example . . ." And I was about to give him an example or two when Álamo jumped up and cut me off. What happened next is hazy (although I have a good memory): I remember Álamo laughing along with the four or five other members of the workshop. I think they may have been making fun of me. Anyone else would have left and never gone back, but despite my unhappy memories (or my unhappy failure to remember what had happened, at least as unfortunate as remembering would have been), the next week there I was, punctual as always. I think destiny brought me back. This was the fifth session of Álamo's workshop that I'd attended (but it might just as well have been the eighth or the ninth, since lately I've been noticing that time can expand or contract at will), and tension, the alternating current of tragedy, was palpable in the air, although no one could explain why. To begin with, we were all there, all seven apprentice poets who'd originally signed up for the workshop. This hadn't happened at any other session. And we were ner-vous. Even Álamo wasn't his usual calm self. For a minute I thought something might have happened at the university, that maybe there'd been a campus shooting I hadn't heard about, or a surprise strike, or that the dean had been assassinated, or they'd kidnapped one of the philosophy professors. But nothing like that was true, and there was no reason to be nervous. No objective reason, anyway. But poetry (real poetry) is like that: you can sense it, you can feel it in the air, the way they say certain highly attuned animals (snakes, worms, rats, and some birds) can detect an earthquake. What happened next was a blur, but at the risk of sounding corny, I'd say there was something miraculous about it. Two visceral realist poets walked in and Álamo reluctantly introduced them, although he only knew one of them personally; the other one he knew by reputation, or maybe he just knew his name or had heard someone mention him, but he introduced us to him anyway. I'm not sure why they were there. It was clearly a hostile visit, hostile but somehow propagandistic and proselytizing too. At first the visceral realists kept to themselves, and Álamo tried to look diplomatic and slightly ironic while he waited to see what would happen. Then he started to relax, encouraged by the strangers' shyness, and after half an hour the workshop was back to normal. That's when the battle began. The visceral realists questioned Álamo's critical system and he responded by calling them cut-rate surrealists and fake Marxists. Five members of the workshop backed him up; in other words, everyone but me and a skinny kid who always carried around a book by Lewis Carroll and never spoke. This surprised me, to be honest, because the students supporting Álamo so fiercely were the same ones he'd been so hard on as a critic, and now they were revealing themselves to be his biggest supporters. That's when I decided to put in my two cents, and I accused Álamo of having no idea what a rispetto was; nobly, the visceral realists admitted that they didn't know either but my observation struck them as pertinent, and they said so; one of them asked how old I was, and I said I was seventeen and tried all over again to explain what a rispetto was; Álamo was red with rage; the members of the workshop said I was being pedantic (one of them called me an academicist); the visceral realists defended me; suddenly unstoppable, I asked Álamo and the workshop in general whether they at least remembered what a nicharchean or a tetrastich was. And no one could answer. Contrary to my expectations, the argument didn't lead to an all-around ass-kicking. I have to admit I would have loved that. And although one of the members of the workshop did promise Ulises Lima that someday he would kick his ass, in the end nothing actually happened; nothing violent, I mean, although I responded to the threat (which, I repeat, was not directed at me) by letting the threatener know that he could have it out with me anywhere on campus, any day, any time. The end of class was surprising. Álamo dared Ulises Lima to read one of his poems. Lima didn't need to be asked twice. He pulled some smudged, crumpled sheets from his jacket pocket. Oh no, I thought, the idiot is walking right into their trap. I think I shut my eyes out of sheer sympathetic embarrassment. There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. But as I was saying, I closed my eyes, and I heard Lima clear his throat, then I heard the somewhat uncomfortable silence (if it's possible to hear such a thing, which I doubt) that settled around him, and finally I heard his voice, reading the best poem I'd ever heard. Then Arturo Belano got up and said that they were looking for poets who would like to contribute to the magazine that the visceral realists were putting out. Everybody wished they could volunteer, but after the fight they felt sheepish and no one said a thing. When the workshop ended (later than usual), I went with Lima and Belano to the bus stop. It was too late. There were no more buses, so we decided to take a pesero together to Reforma, and from there we walked to a bar on Calle Bucareli, where we sat until very late, talking about poetry. I still don't really get it. In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it's completely in earnest. Many years ago there was a Mexican avant-garde group called the visceral realists, I think, but I don't know whether they were writers or painters or journalists or revolution-aries. They were active in the twenties or maybe the thirties, I'm not quite sure about that either. I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me). According to Arturo Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. Then Belano and Lima mentioned somebody called Cesárea Tinajero or Tinaja, I can't remember which (I think it was when I was shouting to the waiter to bring us some beers), and they talked about the Comte de Lautréamont's Poems, something in the Poems that had to do with this Tinajero woman, and then Lima made a mysterious claim. According to him, the present-day visceral realists walked backward. What do you mean, backward? I asked. "Backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown." I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it's no way to walk at all. Other poets showed up later on. Some were visceral realists, others weren't. It was total pandemonium. At first I worried that Belano and Lima were so busy talking to every freak who came up to our table that they'd forgotten all about me, but as day began to dawn, they asked me to join the gang. They didn't say "group" or "movement," they said "gang." I liked that. I said yes, of course. It was all very simple. Belano shook my hand and told me that I was one of them now, and then we sang a ranchera. That was all. The song was about the lost towns of the north and a woman's eyes. Before I went outside to throw up, I asked them whether the eyes were Cesárea Tinajero's. Belano and Lima looked at me and said that I was clearly a visceral realist already and that together we would change Latin American poetry. At six in the morning I took another pesero, this time by myself, which brought me to Colonia Lindavista, where I live. Today I didn't go to class. I spent the whole day in my room writing poems. Excerpted from The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
