RMST 495/520: Long Books

Hello everybody!

I am not enjoying this LONG BOOK for a few reasons. It is hard for me to stay focused. Even though , the ensemble of testimonies provide very rich memories that help us to put the puzzle together, i feel like i am becoming a puzzle. The novel keeps shifting to what people remember of the protagonists and it is putting me to work extra hard by going back and forth to figure out the plot and why this collection of memories is so important. However , i think Bolano is putting us to work for a reason , i must put all these fragments together as well , so i must continue.

You always learn something new of even from books that you are not very interested. Here Joaquin Font proposes that books fullfill a role in your life , even when you are desperate. It is telling the readers that books are more than just objects , they can be survival devices. They are friends in moments of crisis. There is a moment in our lives when reality becomes insufferable and we need a book to carry on!. I would like to find one for myself when my life becomes unbearable… Font seems to have particular information about the protagonists and it is a good hook to start this chunk of the book.

The scence between Laura and Arturo also caught my attention. i find it metaphoric the part when Laura throws Arturo’s bloody toilet paper and flushes the toilet as a way of expressing the idea that Laura is letting go someone that is not longer important in her life. After reading so many pages about memory and what people now about the VR , this scene erases Arturo’s presence and places Laura as someone with plenty of agency of her actions and ideas. She is not underminded by this male writer and that was refreshing to read…

Luscious Skin was one of my favourites and now he is gone. It is interesting how his death seems to not affect much the plot or the characters ( even Luis who was very intimate with him and tried to include his poems in Zarco’s book). But i guess thats the point Bolano is trying to make. This world of literature , poets and such never stops. You live your life to the fullest because not all young poets will find the glory and success that they dream about. There are young souls who die without accomplishing anything and thats part of the VR world…

discussion question:
Why doesnt matter that the poets in the novel do not accomplish their dreams/goals?

I took a break from reading during reading break, for better or worse, which has made for an interesting re-entry into the world of our novel. I caught up on reality tv and scrolled through way more Instagram reels than I should have, consuming all sorts of media that was not written by our beloved Bolaño. Though it was a bit slow to get back into our book, I do think the three (?) weeks between the last time we read The Savage Detectives and now was a good palate cleanser. I felt myself excited to get back into things, especially with the momentum, now that the end is feeling nearer and we’re officially over the halfway point, like when you’re on a kayak and the shore ahead is finally closer than the one you left behind and your arms start to hurt a bit less.

I don’t have much to add about the reading this week that I haven’t said in previous weeks, I think we’re all just waiting to figure out the point of it all and where the story takes us. I think I’m growing to enjoy the episodic narrative more than I did last time, now that we know what to expect a little better. I do wonder about the length of each entry we’re reading, as we talk about long books and why novels end (on a whim?). Our class discussions have made me now look at each mini story and think: why is this entry so short? Why does this entry need to take up twelve pages, what does this say that couldn’t have been said in two?

I highlight a few sections each week that stood out to me. An entry from this week’s reading that I enjoyed was Mary Watson’s, a travelogue of 1977 (p.253-269). It was relatively lengthy, but read like the kind of adventure a twenty year old (or however old, we only know she was older than nineteen) would have, and there were a lot of characters whose stories we only glimpsed from the section. I also loved how she was so infatuated with some guy for the summer only to move on immediately after term started back up, a true summer romance. It wasn’t even particularly interesting (similar to quite a few of the entries), so I’m not sure why it stuck out to me, I think it was the ominous “something bad is going to happen” feeling to keep the reader guessing about each character, and then how the end of the night watchman’s story is told only through someone else’s dealings with him (Hugh). Hugh was an interesting character, especially with his moment of loneliness when he realized there would be nobody to tell that he died now that his girlfriend had dumped him (268). I put a sticky note beside his words about not being able to voice this feeling or explain that loneliness.

Getting back into The Savage Detectives after about three weeks off was not as difficult as I had feared – I recognized the first voice, Amadeo Salvatierra, from his references to the Suicida Mezcal, and the rest of the pieces linked together from there. It helped that some of the chapters began to grow into pretty stand-alone episodes, for example Mary Watson’s journey through Europe starting on page 253, which could have just as easily been made into an Amulet of its own. This was my favourite narration of the section for this week, I found it the most fun and interesting to read. Like if On the Road were set in Europe and narrated by a young woman. If this were its own book, I might just check it out of the library!

Along the way, I noticed a few links to the other book I’m reading, Les Misérables. It is directly referenced on page 208 by Quim on a tangent about types of readers – desperate readers, he says, cannot read through, it seems, long books, (the four books he gives as examples are quite long) including Les Misérables. I’d like to say here, although the Savage Detectives is a long book, I don’t think what Quim calls a desperate reader would have as much trouble with it. Even though he rushes through his explanation, I think the fast paced variety of Savage Detectives would appease this reader. Later, as the stories start to take place in France, one Alain Lebert tells of how he is to stand trial for “having ripped off a supermarket” (271) of a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a can of tuna, as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables is accused of stealing a loaf of bread. But Alain, instead of his fellow Frenchman, takes instead to poetry readings and drinking late at night than repentance.

Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima weave the stories together, alongside Amadeo Salvatierra and his mezcal, who opens and closes this section, providing touchstones for the why of some stories. I began to recognize other narrators, such as Joaquin, Angelica, and Maria, which helped tie this part of the book into that of the first. Something I have struggled with in the Savage Detectives is at what point is this a cohesive story. Perhaps it is a story, but I do not find it cohesive. Anyway, having a link back to characters I had more or less left to exist at the beginning of the book was helpful in making me feel a sense of completeness.

The question of translation is an interesting one. As one character mentions (rats I’ve lost the page) whether to translate Satin de sang as “satin blood” or “blood of satin,” and Amadeo discusses translating poetry with Cesarea from French to Spanish : “Cesarea in a slapdash way, if you dont mind my saying so, reinventing the poem however she happened to see fit, while I stick slavishly to the ineffable spirit as well as the letter of the original” (p. 282). I know we speak a lot of different languages in our class, so thinking about translation in the context of literature, what do you think is the best way to go about it?

To conclude, this section felt like an expansion: out from Mexico to France, Spain, England, Israel, with new characters, into the new decade of the 1980s, with almost infinite stories within stories that could be plucked out from anywhere. But I also a return to characters from the first part of the book, as well as the quest for Cesarea Tinajero, satisfying a desire I felt for less expansion, and more linear cohesion between sections of this vast book.

Anyway, my thoughts are not the most cohesive, so maybe it’s a little ironic to be out for Bolaño about it, but maybe they’re in his honour.

P.S. Canada shoutout! “Then I’d climb into my Canadian Impetuous Extraprotector sleeping bag…” (p. 270). One of the most Canadian experiences for me is getting excited about something like that.

“How long is this going to take?” (King Julien from the Madagascar movie). That is kind of how I felt reading this chunk of the book. Because there are so many voices and stories, that are coming from all ends of the world, and are semi-relevant but are also displaying the ways in which these characters pass time, ways that I myself could never imagine myself partaking in, I re-read a lot of pages. It was hard to put the picture together in my head of why all of these accounts were included. Every time Ulises or Arturo were mentioned, I thought okay, some relevance to the first part of the book that I read only around a month ago, yet it feels much longer than that. I think that is the point though, so while it sounds like I am complaining, I did still enjoy this part of the book. The sprawling of the story was very notable to me. We are introduced to more characters that are somehow connected to Arturo or Ulises, as well as new locations like Paris and Barcelona that tie together the uncertainty and fluidity of the visceral realists.

Furthermore, the sense of belonging or lack of is also continued into the book, which is one of my favourite elements of this book so far. For example, when Simone remarks on how she met Arturo, and then eventually Ulises, she states that Mexicans all have a funny way of just meeting one another, but then Arturo says “I’m not Mexican, Simone, I’m Chilean.” and she notices a hint of sadness in his statement, but the truth behind it (235). This stood out to me, because I think it ties very well with what we start to put together for the reasoning of leaving Mexico in the first place. The sense and feeling of belonging is a very powerful feeling, which is why for those who take poetry and the revolution so seriously, it is their means for finding belonging, and they would go anywhere to find it.

What I also found interesting was Luscious Skin’s role and portrayal in this part of the book, compared to the first 200 or so pages we had read before. He is painted in a much more sensitive and complex light than before, and it is where we understand that this is where the journey begins and he is a key constructor of the events. The visceral realism aspect of the book was highly judgmental in the first parts of the book, where membership was limited and withheld from people that weren’t considered revolutionary enough. However, juxtaposing this judgement with this part of the book, we see the characters unfold much more and can be understood for much more than what they were initially. In this sense, Ulises, Arturo, Luscious Skin and the others, they are delicate and fragile, which is not the conclusion I would have drawn after the first 100 pages of the book.

I must say, I don’t feel that my title for this week’s post really captures my impression of the last 200 pages or so of The Savage Detectives. It’s striking me more and more that the search for Cesárea Tinajero is only the silvery thread tying the episodes of the middle section together; and for me, that thread is not hard to lose track of with everything else going on. Still, I find that there’s something freeing about being disoriented. I don’t know what Bolaño’s goal was, but I’m not too bothered by whatever this book is doing with/to me.

Out of all of the voices in the text, I’ve recently been enjoying Xóchitl García’s the most: her reflections on her relationship with Jacinto Requena and on raising Franz, the growth of her friendship with María Font, her development as a writer, and the way she seems to make the best of situations that could be considered disappointing. I feel like her story could easily be given its own book, although I don’t know if it’s the kind of book that Bolaño would have written.

Something that surprised me a little from the latest reading was the death of Luscious Skin. In retrospect, I do think there were signs that something was going to happen to him, or at least that he wasn’t doing entirely fine; but he still came across to me as the kind of person who lives forever. Maybe he came across that way to Luis Sebastián Rosado, too. Maybe that was the point.

On another note, one highlight from the week-long break was that I got to try out a bunch of different reading environments: busy airports, cold airplanes with shouting children, cozy shuttle buses, a hostel in Montreal that smelled intensely of fresh paint, and my parents’ house in Ontario. I definitely felt the most relaxed in the last two: I could lie in bed or sit on the floor and really lose touch with my surroundings (probably aided by the paint fumes). Also, I think reading while far from home made me feel almost like I was participating in the journey of the characters (without the knife fights and such), so that was cool.

For my questions of the week: What did you think of the “poem” by Cesárea Tinajero? How would you compare that work with something like the single-sentence poem that we read in class a while back?

It was a long break. I’ve decided to try an exercise, a writing exercise mentioned in the book. I am going to do some automatic writing. I know it is probably going to be horrible no idea how this is going to turn out. This might be completely unproductive. Why are we so obsessed with being productive? Anyways. Automatic writing. I’ve done it before. I don’t think I’ve ever done it in English. A fun exercise. How do you even write exercise? It is probably not show cause I’ll go back a edit just the typing of like grammar, how is it called? Spelling yes. Typing or spelling mistakes, I’ll fix later. I don’t really remember how to spell exercise. I probably spelled… spelt? Whatever. A thousand different ways. This is how I feel like Bolaño feels when being read. A jumbled mess. I saw a bunch of stuff in the section we read. Long section. It was a really long section, huh? I went on vacation, well somewhat of a vacation, mainly just being home in Colombia with mom and completely forgot about Bolaño. It was a really nice time. I did not expect to be confronted with a ship’s catalogue but this time a writer’s directory in Bolaño. Completely skipped it until the names stopped showing up.

I paused for a second. I have some notes. I don’t know what I am going to say about those notes but those notes do exist. I think we should do a cadaver exquisite (is that how it is translated?) either in the comments or in class. I don’t know. It might be fun. Just for the sake of it. Writing exercises are fun. Another time I wrote it wrong. Is this how Bolaño wrote? I don’t think so. I saw the photos and scans of his notebooks. I want to read on the shower. But books are expensive. I can’t spare a book to read on the shower. What would I read on the shower? I think the odyssey might be a good shower read. The ship’s catalogue might be more interesting and immersive in the shower who knows. I’m sure Homer (the abstract maybe not one person Homer) would not mind. Ernesto ya no es Joto, I have in my notes. It is one of the sections that was highlighted from my before times. Before times. What am I even saying, from the time I read the book for the first time. I have a note in the margin, with which I am going to end that reads (in Spanish, translation is not automatic writing, though, maybe transcription isn’t either):

“Aqui es preferible una vida miserable en una situación de salud precaria que la ‘enfermedad’ de la homosexualidad”

I hope Ernesto never stops being a Joto.

Be gay, do crime.

If The Savage Detectives was a movie, we’d have seen “Ten Years Later” across the screen. Suddenly we make a jump ahead of time, bigger than any other so far, and no one remembers visceral realism anymore. Most people who were affiliated with the movement see it as an embarrassing past, almost like what we call “cringe” today — embarrassing things we said or did in high school etc. Barbara and Maria try to warn Rafael and Xóchitl not to mention this past in their meetings with potential publishers, but the subject of visceral realism keeps presenting itself, like a curse that follows the poor poets wherever they go…

I’m happy to see the central members of the movement going into the background now, and we get more light on the marginalized members. Xóchitl’s story is so inspiring, to the point that it doesn’t fit the degenerate tone of the whole poetry scene in the book, but I enjoy reading it! Her difficult road to publication is more of a realistic pathway for a poet who wants to make a living off writing, and I think Xóchitl reflects more or less what Bolaño observed in poets around him, female poets especially. Ulises and Arturo disappear and reappear. They’ve become the ghosts haunting the rest of the visceral realists. They’ve kind of turned into beat poets, and I’m surprised no one alludes to the Beats when talking about them. It’s difficult to see what exactly they are looking for abroad. Writing material? Someone mentioned that they have collected a life’s worth of material for writing poetry, but they are writing less than they do… questionable deeds. We talked about this book as a Bildungsroman, and the two leaders of VR have somehow grown on me, despite not having “grown” or matured. In the end, it’s a little saddening to see their effort forgotten.

Then there’s Amadeo’s records of January 1976. Did they come here immediately after they drove off in Quim’s car? I always thought so, until the group discussion where we tried to put together the timeline. I realized I was probably mistaken. But how did they know to come to Amadeo’s, for the “official organ of visceral realism”, that “only issue of Caborca left in the world” ? How did they even hear of it? If they’ve never read it, how could they know it’s the official organ of VR? Amadeo’s entire house, which he calls a “hell of memories”, is almost surreal, like from a dream. It has the last copy of Caborca and the last two bottles of Los Suicidas left in the world, what else has he got? The poets in Amadeo’s stories feel like a grown-up, more mature version of the visceral realists. They had jobs and even a sponso — the general whose dramatic death has the quality a Hollywood movie from the last century. And Cesárea’s poem! The most surreal of all (though nothing like Breton’s surrealist poems). I can’t help feeling sorry for the rectangle. It’s not having an easy time, but it’s definitely trying to go somewhere. Then, I had to search up the title: Sión means Zion. Put together the two, you get “go to Zion”. Is that why Ulises Lima goes to Israel later? Now that makes sense.

My question for this week is: why do you think of Amadeo’s sections? Did it give you any particular feeling? What could be its significance?

Photos: Front cover of the novel « The Savage Detectives » and image of author Roberto Bolaño

This week’s reading felt extremely long and dragging, and it was sometimes a gruelling experience. I had to stop, re-read, and return to certain passages several times over the course of two weeks just to begin to comprehend what was happening or to remember where I last stopped reading it. I found myself reading it best when I was commuting between places on transit. Knowing the approximate length of the journey to reach point B from point A, a direct 1.5 hr journey, somehow helped me anchor my thoughts and avoid distractions, eventually enabling me to finish this week’s long reading. To be honest, I have never read this many pages within a set time frame, especially on a book that is not the type of book that would interest me in the first place.

I have to say that I find the narrative is relentless! There are so many shifting characters and perspectives, so many problems, so many petty things, so many decisions! I often felt overwhelmed by the sheer weight of all the suffering that some of the characters face in the text: death, torture, heartbreak, abuse, and despair. Due to the sheer number of voices in the text, I struggled to follow and not mix up the different voices: Rafael, Barbara, Colina, Verónica, Pérez Camarga, Luis, Laura, and others.

Many of the characters’ stories and lives are finally crossing over like Marvel meets DC. Their lives intersect in so many different ways through chaos, danger, negligence, loneliness, madness, lust and intimacy. Despite it being a difficult read, I found myself deeply moved by some of the stories from certain journal entries. The text forces me to sit in extreme discomfort, to witness profound cruelty and absurdity, to understand that humour, tenderness, and pain coexist. I had to slow down, pause, stop, and reflect so many times that I stopped counting. By the end of this week’s reading, I was left shattered, raw, shaken in thoughts, but I am also profoundly more aware of the messiness and strangeness of the fragile lives of Bolaño’s characters.

Focusing on the last couple of chapters, « Luis and Luscious Skin: what a shocking turn of events! Bolaño must have a fixation with these characters because their interactions are so much more gentle, kind and well-written. Bolaño really wants us to contrast our own perceptions of Luscious Skin between Part 1 and Part 2 and form hypocritical judgements. Anyways, the phone conversation in March 1983, the hesitant reconnection, and the wait for Luscious Skin to arrive are emotionally charged with hesitant yearning and reserved longing, desire, lust and fear of intimacy and abandonment. Honestly, at the get-go, I find Luscious Skin a character who is both repulsive and magnetic. His long absence and surprised presence throughout the pages carry a weight of expectation, nostalgia and want. I hesitate to judge him as a character flawedly or intentionally designed to be so repulsive that he would eventually be well-liked by me.

The physicality of Luis and Luscious Skin’s reunion, the intertwining of sex, storytelling, and confessions, creates a sense of fragility and fleeting presence, even if the outside world is indifferent or violent. The narration of these two characters’ interaction removes my conscious mind out of all the other ridicioulness occuring at the same time, especially with Ulises, Norman, etc. To me, their story is a representation of impermanence, longing, memory, and the fleeting fragility of time and life. What struck me the most was the contrast between the intense intimacy and the brutal aftermath. Luscious Skin’s death was uncalled for and unforeseen! The grotesqueness of his body ended this week’s reading on a really bitter note.

Discussion Question:

Alright, a question for you all! Feel free to answer it in any way, related to the text or in your own lived experiences =)

In the vein of human condition, how deeply can we care for a « temporary someone » who may or may not vanish from our lives? And how do our memories, our stories, and our perceptions preserve the softness, the kindness and the gentleness of love, loss and truth?

I really enjoyed reading this section of Savage Detectives. It was maybe the first time I felt like I didn’t want to put the book down and also wanted to keep reading into the next section. 

While there are still new characters being introduced and I’m still wondering why some of them have a central role (like who is guy Amadeo Salvatierra and why does he matter? Does anyone else find him to be the most boring?), it does feel like we’re finally being given some more information about the visceral realists, like the fact that they are dealing drugs. I’m not sure why this had never occurred to me before but this makes a lot more sense to me how they were getting by without a job (and even though it seems that Ulises and his Austrian pal Heimito sometimes beat people up and rob them, this is maybe still not enough to live off of). I am wondering too if Ulises got tied up in something bad and this is why he stayed in Nicaragua for so long. And I still really want to know what happened to all of them when they took off with Lupe!

On page 369 we are teased with some information… “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City, together and then to Europe, separately.” But that’s all we get. We are left with a bit of hope that we will receive some more information about what really happened that night but then… nothing. 

Reading about Lima’s adventures in Israel were strange, especially since Heimito is such an odd character (on many of these pages I wrote why and yikes). I found myself laughing at his random accounts of how many Coca-Colas he drank in one day and how he kept referring to Ulises as “my good friend,” when I’m not so sure how good of a friend he really is from Lima’s perspective. It was hard to follow which parts of his story were in the desert and which were in the prison since they seemed to blend together, though this is probably the intention (since Heimito himself seems a bit out of it). I enjoyed reading about all of Belano’s adventures while he was in Europe too. 

It’s interesting how Lima seems to be disappearing though… María informs Xóchitl not to mention the visceral realists in her interviews and Jacinto also said that Lima was “dead as a person and a poet.” I wonder if Lima feels a bit lost without Belano and I’m wondering why they separated, or if that had been planned for some particular reason. 

I look forward to continue into the next section as the weeks follow…