I finished the book, and I really liked it. I love how it’s a huge puzzle, instead of a conventional plot with the “introduction, rising action, climax, denouement, resolution”. In fact it’s a huge puzzle missing many pieces – Bolaño doesn’t give us all the pieces. What do Belano and Lima talk about with Cesarea Tinajero? I instinctively want to call Cesarea Tinajero the MacGuffin, but would that reduce her significance?

When the visceral realists met the teacher who taught Papágo, which seems to be an indigenous language, it dawned on me that “savage” would have meant “indigenous” at the time this book was written. Cesárea was human in Part II, but in Part III she’s a mythical figure. A shapeshifter. At one point she was a coral snake, though this was the period when she was a loving teacher who registered the neglected children in elementary school and wanted to reform the education system. Later she looked like “a rock or an elephant”, which was when the visceral realists met her. She’s associated with another animal — the bull. It seemed like she identified with the matador world enough to inscribe her name on the tombstone of Avellaneda. Cesárea is also a trickster, because she leaves “jokes” for her followers to decode, which seem like they are not meant to have meaning attributed to them.

What did you make of the final poem? It looks like the window has melted, and I’m thinking of this window as the one separating trickster-Cesárea and the rest of us. She’s a transcendental figure. She can see the entire world while we have a very limited field of vision. She’s on the outside, giving vague messages to the people inside (among which only the poets are looking outwards and trying to decode). And one day this window melted away, and we face the entire world! The intemperie, the dangerous entire world that we were previously protected from by the window. But this reading leaves so many questions. Who put the window there? How did Cesárea get to the other side of the window? (I think she used to be on our side as well, back when she was with the stridentists.) And when does this window melt away? February 15, 1976? Or the day she wrote this? Or the day we read it (thus varying for each reader)? If it’s the day we read it, then for us readers, it’s the same day we finish and put down this book — which is an act very similar to the fall of a window and entry into another world — we are re-entering reality. But I really don’t want to read the inside of the window as illusion and the outside as ultimate reality, like some kind of Matrix situation. I don’t love the illusion-reality dichotomy. So, even after all this analysis, I come back to the question: what’s on the other side of the window? I must have fallen into trickster-Cesárea’s trap!

Another character caught my attention in this section — Alberto. Isn’t it crazy that a pimp goes all the way into the desert, for a month, to look for one girl – Lupe? This is not just an act of jealousy at this point. The night he talked and drank beer with Belano, Garcia Madero said “they looked like they’re friends,” and I believed that for a second! I thought: Alberto is looking for something too in this desert, something that has to do with his ideals, his beliefs. He’s looking for something important to him too, and Lupe is the symbol of whatever it is he’s searching for, just like Cesárea is the symbol of what the VR are searching for… Then the jerk pulled out his gun again. But this “friendly” moment is what started to change my perception of him. I want to read him as a character with depth too, rather than a simble vulgar bad guy, but I couldn’t come up with much, other than what I wrote above.

I realize I didn’t have as much to say about bullfighting as I would have liked, now my awesome blog title goes to waste. Aww.

Ahhh. This was the easiest that picking up Bolaño has been all semester. I’ll admit I’ve done most of my reading early Wednesday morning and late Wednesday night this semester (so that I can write my blog before midnight and work on things for my two other Thursday classes that are due in the morning afterwards). This ended up being the case this week as well. So I’ll say, having to read 50 pages after mowing through a few-hundred-or-so some weeks felt GREAT.

Thinking about Jasmine and David explaining how they explained The Savage Detectives to their friends, here’s how I would describe the road so far (did anyone watch Supernatural? lol):

“Juan García Madero joins the visceral realists, a poetry group in Mexico in the mid-1970s, where he meets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and bums around Mexico City for a while. Then, the three of them, plus a prostitute Lupe, end up in an Impala (Supernatural again?!) driving as fast as they can out of Mexico City to complete a double-headed quest: both escape Lupe’s cruel pimp Alberto and start a pilgrimage to find Cesárea Tinajero, touted as a figurehead of the visceral realist movement. Then, we skip over their journey, and hear from a vast collection of closely- or loosely-related acquaintances of stories.”

And now, Part III, the season finale if you will! Or maybe the second piece of sandwich bread if we think about Part II being a giant whopper of a sandwich – we’re looking at Scooby-Doo proportions here. Okay that’s enough random thoughts…

In Part III, we return to the first days of ’76 as García Madero, Lupe, Roberto and Ulises in Quim Font’s Impala driving out from Mexico City to escape Alberto and to find Cesárea Tinajero. I found Bolaño captured well the mundanity of a road trip, even one with life and death consequences, García Madero quizzing his friends on literary devices and his drawings of birds-eye-view sombreros. This had me thinking of how I spent time on road trips. I grew up in Vancouver but my family is from California (=American citizen, which we uncovered during one class. Not a point of pride) so I’ve spent a lot driving to California, which takes about two days. Plenty of time to pass: usually I read, zone out, or gossip with my mom – we usually have more to gossip about on the way home!

I enjoyed a literary reference I finally got! Hot on Cesárea’s tail (or rather, making something out of nothing), our searchers uncover Pepín Allevenada, a bullfighter, and refer to Hemingway’s sad matadors. I took an American literature class in my second year (uh no not American again) and we read In Our Time, which is a collection of short stories interspersed with little snippets of other stories, many of these of matadors – almost Part II-esque. Here’s a quote that felt Bolaño-esque about a bullfighter who had a poor fight:

“Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull-fighter” (p. 95).

Both aspects of the quest unite when the quartet find Cesárea and at the same time are found by Alberto. I was a little ambivalent about Cesárea’s death: on one hand, that’s sad both that she died for herself and also for the visceral realists, but at this point I was down for whatever Bolaño had written to get to the end. It felt like he was playing with his reader again though; all that just to have her die.

Going back to John v Ava on whether we like endings or not, I will yell it from the top of a hill that I am happy to have ended The Savage Detectives. My ritual of finishing a book: I put my bookmark in my bookmark tin, I mark it off as “Finished” on GoodReads, and then I decide if I want to keep the book or pawn it off to a local lending library. I think I would like to reread this book on my own time; having to cram it all in for late Wednesday nights was not optimal reading for me. But I’ll give it a year or two to simmer.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Even though I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy reading it.

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

First immediate reactions after reading Part III

First of all, I cannot believe that we are finally at the end! We’re finally done reading this 600-page something book! This has been one of the longest-awaited moments since the start of the semester. I have to say that part of me is relieved that I made it through all that wandering and searching.

However, at the same time, the ending did not give me the closure I expected. It was abrupt, violent and honestly a bit unsettling the way Bolaño wrote it. Cesárea’s death was unforeseen and unfair. I mean, like, common now, everything built up to this part and to find Cesárea, only to slip away at the last minute.

Overall, I noticed that I read this best in in-between spaces, such as on transit (especially on the #84 bus, which gives me 50 minutes to lock in and read), at home with a cup of decaf tea at night, and even while waiting in the dentist’s lobby. From Page 1 to the last page, I find myself consistently taking breaks and reading the assigned readings in parts, and I always find myself filling my time (like transit and waiting for the dentist) with The Savage Detectives.

General Reactions:

So, we finally get back to the end of part 1! The four of them, Lima, Belano, Lupe and of course García Madero, went to Agua Prieta to check around the cemetery for the bullfighter’s grave, who’s potentially connected to their search for Cesárea while being on the run – classic storyline! And guess what? It’s basically nothing, and so it is with many other towns they’ve gone through. After all that driving and sneaking around, I start to get puzzled about what is so great about this search for Cesárea? Is she real or is she a myth? Anyways, I feel as if the quest to find Cesára is less about her and more about chasing meaning, obsession and their own restless desires.

Afterwards, they reached Sonora, talking to old teachers and locals related to Cesárea. Honestly, I was getting frustrated, like, are we getting closer to finding her, or is this just a ruse while escaping from Alberto? Well, they finally find her… she is real. However, she is not what I expect her to be as described or expected from the words of Lima, Belano and Lupe. She was far from ordinary – super ordinary? It appears to me that she is this one great Mexican poet, but now she has detached herself from poetry and the world, as if she is in her own little world. Furthermore, the unexpected characterization of Cesárea challenges my assumptions, as the reader, informed and shaped by Lima, Belona and Lupe (all through the book), highlighting the false expectation implanted in the reader’s mind.

Suddenly, Alberto enters !!! This is it – the climax! And it was a climax that I did not see coming. I cannot believe murder was committed by Belano and Lima – they are truly unhinged. What is even more shocking, Cesára dies! SHOCKED, SHOOKED… So unfair, so abrupt, so unforeseen… like why!!!! Moreover, I find that the abrupt deaths of Cesárea and Alberto function importantly as a brutal commentary on fate, truth and justice, forcing me, as the audience, to confront the consequences, subverting my expectations and the buildup from the narrative tension.

Discussion Question:

Feel free to answer it in any way =)

First question related more to the phenomenology or experience of reading The Savage Detectives:

How did your personal experience of reading the 600-page novel evolve over time? Did you feel immersed, entranced, repulsed,  frustrated, confused, lost, or disconnected when reading it? How did those feelings shape your interpretation of the story and its abrupt ending?

The second question is related more to our long-awaited ending:

How do García Madero, Lupe, Belano and Lima change throughout their journey? Which of the characters’ reactions to the final scene felt the most revealing to you?

Well, my friends, it’s finally over. But actually, I did not feel relieved or happy when I finally reached the end of the novel. In fact, I was wanting more. Not necessarily more pages of the book to read. What I mean to say is that I wanted more details as to what happened to García Madero and Lupe. But instead, it just ends. And it ends with a bunch of pictures, which are probably meant to represent García Madero’s drawings. I do recognize that Bolaño could have chosen to end the story at any point. As we discussed in class, the choice of where to end a novel is fairly arbitrary, and this type of ending demonstrates that. We all knew what the ending would be since we read the last page together in class (I had actually accidentally glimpsed at the ending prior to that day because I had wanted to see how many pages were in the book), so there was no surprise today when I reached the last page and saw the dotted outline of a rectangle with the caption “What’s outside the window?”. However, I was expecting there to be some sort of lead-up to this image of a rectangle, which I expected to provide context that would explain the author’s decision to end the novel in this manner. But no. Instead, we are provided with three short lists (VERY short lists if we were to compare them to the other lists in the book), each one as a separate diary entry on three different dates, followed by a couple other rectangles with the same caption for García Madero’s next two entries. So what does this all mean? I’ve been asking myself that question over and over, unable to come up with a sufficient answer. The ending is cryptic. As I said in one of my previous blog posts: “That’s Bolaño for you”. I will say that I enjoyed certain aspects of the final section of the book. As I was reading it, I thought about how we had finally entered the “detective” stage of the novel, as the characters were engaged in a thorough investigation of what happened to Cesárea Tinajero, similar to the work of detectives. To tell you the truth, I did not expect them to find her. I was expecting them to search in vain, and to eventually give up and return to Mexico City. For that reason, I was surprised and excited when they finally found her! I did find it to be a bit bizarre that Bolaño made a point to constantly remind us of how large she was. But we all know that Bolaño doesn’t shy away from unusual descriptions. His writing is anything but ordinary. And the ending of the book fully demonstrates that.

Even though we hardly get to know Cesárea Tinajero as a character, I was (surprisingly) very touched emotionally when she sacrificed her life to save Ulises Lima. It felt like how I usually feel when I become very attached to a character in a film, and then I watch them die in the end and I usually start crying. I didn’t cry this time, but I felt that stinging sadness in my heart. That was my favourite part of the novel. It was the part of the narrative that stirred up the most intense emotions in me. Honestly, I wish Bolaño had chosen to end the novel soon after that moment. It could have been a highly impactful, emotionally charged ending. And it’s not like García Madero’s diary entries after that actually provide us with that many details about what happens to the characters. Although I haven’t criticized the novel that much in any of my previous blog posts, I do feel the need to mention that I found the ending to be rather disappointing. And when I refer to “the ending”, I mean the last few pages (basically February 2^nd onward). What is the point of these last 14 diary entries?

Am I missing something here?

Questions for the class: How do you interpret the ending of the novel? What do you think these “windows” represent?

Hi everybody!!!
The end of SD did not really compel me or excite me. The novel was not for me and I often felt that it could have been shorter ( but i mean , its length exists for a reason). I remember there was a diary entry about buying toothbrushes and Lupe taking too long in the washroom ( 601) and i was like…. i need to finish this book ASAP.
I do command Bolano for the middle part which requires a lot of engagement but I think the ending is anti-climatic and even Garcia Madero confesses that finding Cesarea wasn’t hard ( 639) and then she dies three pages later. In my humble opinion , this novel is designed for people who like to submerge in fiction even if the plot is not interesting or not. In other words , i call it is just reading for reading. I forgot what was the term one of my classmates used during my presentation to describe the novel but I totally agree with it now.
I would have preferred to have Garcia Madero during the whole novel ( and less narrators) and watch his growth. I actually enjoyed THE FIRST PART ( despite GM being too much).Although , his ending was not that bad, as he becomes one of the last visceral realist according to Lupe (644) and this is the part that I found interesting about this book. He is introduced into this world of literature and follows Belano and Lima, explores his sexuality with many girls , shows to be very witty and perceptive and he looks for meaning in his life. He represents the movement through personal dedication, his sense of curiosity and his desire for adventure. His character was entertaining at times ( other times not ) but i am happy that he was able to find himself and/ or to have the chance to go into the desert with the others. People come and go during the story and they also die and there are no consequences or lessons after that. Even if that’s the future for Madero , he found joy in his exploring (not by literary acclaim or rewards). Being a VR might lead you to an ambiguous ending or failure but it is your persistence that leads you to success.

discussion question:

I am curious to know , what means for you the concept of visceral realist? What do you think will be the future for Garcia Madero and Lupe?

Well we’ve finally done it folks, we’ve reached the end of The Savage Detectives! I’ve only had a few days to really digest it all, so as you read through my final blog post on The Savage Detectives, keep in mind these are just my first impressions on Part III – The Sonora Desert. Also, if you haven’t read my first blog post on Part I, I’m a lot more sympathetic(?) toward Garcia Madero relative to other people’s feelings about him (maybe not sympathetic but definitely less harsh on him than others as I tend to enjoy reading more “flawed” characters, so Garcia Madero’s naivety and faults don’t bother me so much, but you can read more about my feelings in that other blog post). Okay, enough preamble.

Now I don’t recall the exact discussion we had in class many weeks ago, but the general gist was on Garcia Madero and whether he would experience some kind of change in Part III and the professor said something along the lines of “spoiler alert: you’ll be disappointed if you do expect anything of the like.” I definitely didn’t think we would see any change in Garcia Madero for a couple reasons, first off Part III immediately follows Part I so it’s not like a long period of time has passed (with time, people have more opportunities to change, obviously) and also Part III is only like 60 pages (with more pages, people in books have more opportunities to change, maybe not so obviously). To no surprise (for me at least), we return to classic Garcia Madero basically quizzing Belano, Lima, and Lupe on several obscure poetic devices and forms as he sees it as a fun and entertaining way to pass time along their car ride. Now I can see how most people would find this insufferable but in my client’s defence, nobody actually tells him to shut up and they’re at least partially engaged by responding to him over and over, AND Belano says “Keep going” and “we’ll get one” so there ya go, case dismissed (595) (plus both Belano and Lima ask for more questions on page 600)! Anyways, I found it especially funny when Lupe turned the table by quizzing the others on different slang to which Garcia Madero is completely out of his depth. One of the more noteworthy slang was “entrado en la rifa” (which translates to “entered the raffle” according to Google Translate), meaning “you’ve already gotten involved in the problem, you’re mixed up in it whether you want to be or not” (599). Belano asks if they have entrado en la rifa which Lupe affirms, but if I recall correctly Belano and Lima volunteered to take Lupe, it was only really Garcia Madero who got “mixed up”? though maybe it’s referring to Lupe being “mixed up” in the search for Cesarea Tinajero? Something I find hard to believe that she has much interest in, but that’s a good segue to move on.

Ah the wild goose chase for Cesarea Tinajero, as soon as we got to this portion of Part III I immediately thought of how similar it was to Part I of 2666 where “the critics” search for the illusive author Archimboldi in, you guessed it, Santa Teresa. Now, very, very slight spoilers for Part I of 2666: they never ended up finding Archimboldi which made me believe our group’s search in The Savage Detectives would also come to the same conclusion. So, it was kind of surprising when they eventually did find Cesarea Tinajero. But… only kind of. It’s a bit ironic (? there’s certainly a better word to describe it, comical? lackluster?) because when they do find her, she doesn’t appear as some mythical legend, she just appears as a physically immense washerwoman: “there was nothing poetic about her. She looked like a rock or an elephant. Her rear end was enormous…” (639). Also, after finding her, we barely get to hear from her! Her conversations with Belano and Lima are unheard as Garcia Madero awoke in another room, and of course the only perspective we’re seeing is from Garcia Madero’s journal. He enters the room and they allegedly sit there for a long time, but nothing really happens… The only words she spoke to Garcia Madero, which he notes, was to not get out of the car in the confrontation with Alberto and the policeman. As the last cherry on top in a kind of twisted fashion (maybe there should be some expression related to a cherry stem tied in a knot), Cesarea Tinajero straight up just dies, which really comes as an indirect result of Belano and Lima who sought out to find her fully knowing that they were being hunted by Alberto. They themselves admit that “we’d f*cked up, that we’d found Cesarea only to bring her death” (643). And that’s that, Lupe and Garcia Madero split off from Belano and Lima who deal with the dead bodies and go on their escapades in Part II. Lupe and Garcia Madero return to Villaviciosa and even take over Cesarea Tinajero’s house for a few days before leaving to, I assume, the cities listed from February 10th to February 12th. However, we (and this blog post) are not quite done yet though… we get to the final page with the previously-observed dashed line rectangle and are asked the question “What’s outside the window?”

Now here’s where things might get a bit rambly but I’ll try to make my thoughts as coherent as possible. Similar to Garcia Madero’s little picture puzzles from pages 609-613, we’re first presented with a rectangle with a little point on the left side, allegedly a star outside the window. Then just a rectangle, allegedly a sheet. So what’s outside the window in the final dashed line rectangle? To me, I feel like the window kind of represent us, the reader, peering into Bolano’s story of The Savage Detectives. The more and more I thought about it, the more I was reminded of the series of accounts in Part II that end in “everything that begins as… ends as…” Just as we each read The Savage Detectives differently (as seen from our many blog posts), we can each imagine something different outside the window, and perhaps that’s the beauty in it. The Savage Detectives and Bolano’s other works aren’t like other typical books where the plot comes to a neat and tidy end, I feel like it’s less about the destination and more about the journey. I mean, just take a look at the structure of the book, Part II taking up like 70% of the book is all “journey” leaving the climax of the “destination” with Cesarea Tinajero just a few pages long. I don’t know really, I’m rereading my thoughts over as I’m writing this and it doesn’t even make much sense to me so I don’t know how in the world it’ll make sense for you guys. Remember these are just my first jumbled thoughts. Instead of clarifying my thoughts though, I’m actually gonna double down and make things maybe even more confusing. Recently, I was on YouTube just watching some videos about who Bolano was and came across a short titled “Roberto Bolano: The Novel That Only Stands on Its Plot is Already Dead” Curious, I looked up the full interview and found the below video (the interview took place in 1999, The Savage Detectives was released in 1998):

Now it’s supposed to have English subtitles as the title suggests, but it cuts out like 20 minutes in so I had to rely on auto-translated English subtitles based on the auto-generated Spanish subtitles (we’re really going to get lost in translation here). The relevant section takes place between 33:20 – 37:06. I would be delighted if anyone fluent in Spanish could give me a better translation and what you understood from Bolano but what I understood is that he’s critiquing traditional linear storytelling structures relying on their plot while acknowledging that it will continue for years to come. However, he proposes that that form is exhausted and the future of the novel doesn’t repeat the previous authors of the world and take the easy way out. Hm, even if I were fluent in Spanish, I think I’d have a hard time comprehending Bolano. My understanding (and do tell me if you believe I got it completely wrong) is that through The Savage Detectives, through the polyphonic narration, through the countless short stories within the larger narrative, Bolano is writing what he thinks the future of the novel should be, whatever that is exactly, I’m still not 100% sure. Regardless, even when we may see things differently, we’re looking, we’re looking at Bolano’s work, we’re looking at his vision of the future of the novel, and that is what’s outside the window!

Okay, well, moving on, maybe that whole last part I was talking about was baloney. Let me just quickly go over some more miscellaneous thoughts I had reading Part III of The Savage Detectives. To start, another potential reference 2666‘s title was made here (the first one being in Amulet actually):

“But Cesarea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesarea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesarea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.” (634)

It would be funny if 2666 made a reference to the title The Savage Detectives, but I doubt it’ll happen. Also, please check out my postscript in my previous blog post on 2666 if you’re interested in some potential references to The Savage Detectives (Lupe mentioned? Belano or Lima’s potential child??). Anyhow, I found the amount of times Garcia Madero referred to Lupe, Belano, and Lima as his “friends” kind of funny, strange, and oddly endearing, I mean yeah, I would say they’re friends, but something about it stuck out to me. Finally, I know I mentioned earlier how Garcia Madero doesn’t really change, but in the end, even he laughs at the idea of visceral realism: “Lupe told me that we’re the last visceral realists left in Mexico. I was lying on the floor, smoking, and I looked at her. Give me a break, I said.” (644). To be completely honest, if the book ended right there and then, I wouldn’t be upset, and I would have found it very funny in fact (still is funny but even moreso). So, for my discussion question, I’d like to ask: “Where do you think The Savage Detectives should have ended? How do you feel about Bolano’s ending?” A bit generic of a question, but it is what it is, I’m sure we’ll all be discussing it on Thursday with the question of the window in mind. If you haven’t already guessed, I liked it, and I enjoyed reading The Savage Detectives. I hope that sentiment came through in my blog post, but I just wanted to conclude by simply stating it to be clear. I sense that I’ll be in the minority here, to each their own.

P.S. I believe this has been my longest blog post for The Savage Detectives, but not my longest blog post (that would be the one for 2666‘s The Part About Amalfitano). Although, I would say this felt like the longest to write, I got caught up writing it while studying with friends even though in my mind I had dedicated a lot less time to write it, but hey, I want to get all of my thoughts out. So yeah, the fun fact is that this has been the only blog post I’ve written outside the comfort of my own room (I wonder if you could tell or if it sounds any different, probably not though).

Well, we did it.

The last few pages of part three of The Savage Detectives reminded me of one of those heist movies where everything goes wrong, and it’s stressful to watch, and maybe the characters involved aren’t even entirely likeable or competent, but you still end up feeling kind of bad for most of them when you realize that their lives have been messed up beyond repair. Part three also made me feel a little like a hostage in one of those movies—like I was stuck in the back of the Impala with my hands tied and a handkerchief in my mouth, and Juan García Madero was rambling directly into my ear for hours straight. Was that how the others felt? Did they regret taking García Madero with them? I’m imagining Belano and Lima joking about leaving him at the side of the road. But maybe I’m projecting too enthusiastically here.

Although I did think that the circumstances of Cesárea Tinajero’s death were tragic, I have to say, the absurdity of the situation in its entirety was darkly amusing to me. A character named Aurelio Baca said back in part two that everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy (513), and in this case, I’m tempted to agree. The Savage Detectives: A Tragicomedy of Errors. But then, does a descriptor like “tragicomedy” relate to the success or failure of the road trip? Can the trip itself be considered either a success or a failure? Cesárea Tinajero was found. Cesárea Tinajero was killed. Lupe’s pursuers were killed. We don’t know what Cesárea talked about with Belano and Lima. We do know that García Madero got to read her notebooks. Is that why he started drawing shapes again? And if he was taking inspiration from Cesárea in the end, should we view that as a positive outcome?

I know I’ve already asked a lot of questions here, but for my official question(s) of the week: Do you feel like the end of the book (in 1976) justified the rest of it? For those who were bored or annoyed during the first two sections, did you find the end satisfying, or did it only add to the previous negative feelings?

I felt fairly neutral about the ending, and about The Savage Detectives as a whole. I didn’t exactly have fun, but I wondered whether Bolaño did. Maybe one day I’ll read the Spanish version.

Hi everyone! I cannot believe we have all finished The Savage Detectives, it felt like this day would never come. I want to first reflect on the action of not only reading a long book, but reading it alongside peers that are having the same experience; this is something I have never done before personally. I think it is a very valuable experience because it really demonstrated how different each of our experiences and thoughts on the book were, yet at the same time we all shared a common ground of having read the book.

I will also say, I am happy that it returned to García Madero’s diary entries for the last part that we read. When the book first switched from the journal entries to the interviews, I was not happy. I found it harder to engage with the story and to bring myself to care about all these new characters and their escapades across the world. However, reading the last part of the book, it did not really bring back the structured style of story that I was craving, which I kind of came to terms with? In general I like satisfying endings, ones that make sense and we are left with a better understanding of the story, or something else. Having finished the book, I have a better understanding of all this ambiguity and uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen to García Madero, but considering all the adventures and the people around him, it would not make sense to just know. The lives of Arturo, Belano and everyone else are messy and complex. They cannot be tied in a bow to make a perfect ending, instead it can present itself authentically to us as readers, and we can task ourselves with the duty of wondering what it all means.

That’s not to say that there are no constants in the book. We can see that the pursuit of a poetic revolution remained extremely pertinent to Arturo, Belano and García Madero the whole time. It was also quite amusing when García Madero began spewing all his poetry knowledge to Arturo and Belano, which also showcased the constant feeling of belonging and how important it was in the book. Lupe’s being chased by her pimp and being in danger was another relevant constant in the book. It shows the uglier realities of being wrapped up in this kind of world, ones that may be covered with different artistic pursuits or adventures all over the place, but are essentially impossible to outrun. The book ended, but it left a lot of parts and people’s stories unanswered, will I be able to sleep at night? Yes I will, but I am excited to discuss with everyone because I think everyone will have a different interpretation of what the point of all of this really was.