Category Archives: latin america

2666 IV: A Snowball in the Sun

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All roads lead to Santa Teresa: is that the “fate” of the “Part of Fate,” which inexorably leads us ever closer to “the killings in Sonora” first glimpsed by the critic Morini in an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. That article was written, we were told, “by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.” On reading this, it had 

struck [Morini] as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. [. . .] He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. (64/43)

Something similar happens to Oscar Fate, the protagonist of this, the third part of Bolaño’s novel. He, too, finds himself waylaid (in fact, repeatedly so) and inexorably drawn towards the US/Mexico borderlands, and the terrible crimes that seem to have impregnated the entire landscape there. He, too, arrives in Mexico for another purpose but ends up equally fascinated and horrified by these killings that hide (we are told, almost at the end of this section) “the secret of the world” (439/348). Perhaps, as the novel proceeds, we will come to have a better idea of the nature of this secret.

In the meantime, we continue to fumble our way onwards. Fate is a New York journalist, who writes for a magazine called Black Dawn, based in Harlem. His normal beat is “political and social issues” (354/279)–we are told that the first story he had published in the magazine was the last Communist left in Brooklyn, a story which resonates with a dream that Amalfitano has had about the “last Communist philosopher” (290/227). This sense that it is the end of the line for a politics of liberation, or at least that the forms in which such a politics took in the twentieth century are now almost unimaginable, resonates with the vision with which Bolaño’s Amulet ends. Politics seems to be in abeyance. No wonder that the Italian journalist turned from covering the Zapatistas. Nor is it too surprising that Fate is shifted abruptly to covering sport, and sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match between a promising heavyweight from Harlem and a Mexican counterpart.

Once in Mexico, however, various sources tell Fate about the murdered women. Tired of pretending to be a sports reporter–and in any case, the fight turns out to be a dismal washout–Fate contacts his editor back home to pitch him the story: “This is more important,” he tells him. “The fight is just an anecdote. What I’m proposing is so much more. [. . .] A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world [. . .] a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake” (373/294–95; translation modified). Yet the editor turns the proposal down, on the basis that this is a story about Mexicans rather than the Black men that are the magazine’s principal preoccupation. If there are no “brothers” involved, the editor is not interested.

Fate describes the boxing match as an “anecdote.” The irony is that 2666 itself often feels like a book of anecdotes, with its countless stories within stories. Here, for instance, we are reintroduced to Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar’s daughter, who meets Fate at a party and who subsequently tells him tales she herself has been told by a friend who was also at that same party, or recounts conversations between her father and her lover about a “magic disk” that, thanks to the brain’s habit of persistence of vision, can make two unrelated images appear to overlap. All these stories no doubt have some bearing on the novel’s broader theme (it is hardly a coincidence that the example given of a magic disk involves a “little old drunk [. . .] laughing because we think he’s in prison, [. . .] laughing at our credulity” [423/335]), but still they are surely anecdotal in nature, and they sometimes feel as though they were taking up time and space, postponing “the part of the crimes” that is yet to come.

At the end of this part, however, even though Oscar Fate has failed to convince his editor that he should be writing about more than a boxing match, he accompanies another (Mexican) reporter, who is writing about the killings, as she visits Santa Teresa’s jail to meet a putative author of the crimes, imprisoned awaiting trial. The suspect turns out to be a German-speaking “giant”–shades, in short, of the mysterious literary author, Archimboldi, of the “part of the critics”–who sits down in front of the journalist and tells her: “Ask whatever you want.” But as the very last words of this section recounts, “she couldn’t think what to ask” (440/349). All that suspense, but when we finally think we may be at the very heart of this Mexican darkness, words fail us.

Not that words fail Bolaño: by this point we have read plenty of them, and we are still not even halfway through the novel. (In fact, almost two thirds of it remains.) Elsewhere, when Fate first learns of the killings, he is told that “Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work” (362/285–86). Presumably therefore the question is how to produce words (sentences, pages, books) that will not simply melt once the sun comes out, words that will stick in the mind and perhaps even change something somehow. Does a longer book have more weight and heft? Or is it no more than a larger snowball, that will merely leave a bigger mess once it melts? And once it does, it flows back into what the novel elsewhere, in a critique of metaphor, calls a “sea of appearances” (322–23/254; translation modified). Is this every novel’s fate?

The Savage Detectives III: A Joke Covering Up Something More Serious

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A little over half-way through The Savage Detectives (on page 369 of 648), it feels as though things may be starting to come together. According to Luis Sebastián Rosado, it is Luscious Skin who at last outlines the structure of this “unlikely story”: “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. [. . .] they’d gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero” (369). This, of course, is the journey with which part I of the novel concludes. At last we understand why Lima and Belano were heading out of town. And our knowledge (or our knowledge of Lima and Belano’s knowledge) of Tinajero is bit by bit being filled in as we read Amadeo Salvatierra’s testimony (which opens most if not every chapter in part II) about his drunken night with the boys, digging into the archive of the Mexican poetic avant-garde. We may be beginning to see why Lima and Belano should be drawn to track down Tinajero. But it seems as though something must have gone wrong somewhere in the Sonora desert.

As Luscious Skin puts it, “After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately.” This, too, we have seen, as reported through the various interviews or testimonies that comprise part II, and which relate the traces of the two friends as they pass through variously Paris and Barcelona, campsites and caves in rural Catalonia (which may turn out to be “the last time [they] see each other” [279]), then in Lima’s case Israel and Vienna before he is arrested and then returns to Mexico. In Luscious Skin’s account, Lima comes back home because he thinks the coast is finally clear: “Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again.” Hence it is that Lima takes a solidarity trip with other Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua, only to disappear almost as soon as he gets there.

But can there really be “killers” on the trail of Lima and Belano as a result of whatever happened in their search for an aged avant-garde poet? Rosado doubts it, and pushes back on Luscious Skin’s convoluted and conspiratorial story: “When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn’t know. You didn’t travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn’t. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who’d told him (he explained who María Font was), and she’d gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font’s father was in an insane asylum” (369). This is a much-mediated story whose original author, it turns out, is certified insane. This sends “a shiver up [Rosado’s] spine. And I felt pity too, and I know I was in love” (370).

But we of course know (as certainly as we can know anything in this book) that someone did indeed accompany Belano and Lima on their trip north: García Madero and Lupe, of whom we have still heard absolutely nothing in any of the proliferating accounts that have taken up now 250 pages (what would otherwise be a full novel in itself) of part II. If we could hear from them, perhaps more light would be shed on things.

What we do get, thanks again to Salvatierra’s accounts, is a better sense of Tinajero, as we finally read a visceral realist (at least, a first generation visceral realist) poem… “her only published poem” (397). Still, the fact that we can read her poem does not entirely dispel the suspicion, voiced also by Luscious Skin in an earlier passage from Rosado, that “Belano and Lima might have made her up” (373). For the poem, “Zion” (though the title here is untranslated: “Sión”), is wordless and looks rather more like a child’s drawing than a poem. It consists of three horizontal lines, in each case with a little rectangle attached. The first line is flat. The second is gently undulating. And the third is a zig-zag.

“It’s a joke,” the boys comment to Salvatierra. “The poem is a joke covering up something more serious.” “But what does it mean?” (398) insists Salvatierra, even though Belano and Lima have just told him that “a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that” (397). Readers push for significance even when they are warned not to.

Might similarly Bolaño’s novel also be “a joke covering up something more serious”? If so, what is it covering up? And might it, too, not “necessarily have to mean anything”? If not, what is it doing?

2666 III: Order with the Possibility of Suicide

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“The Part of Amalfitano” is, at almost exactly eighty pages, the shortest of the five parts that make up 2666. It expands on the character, circumstances, and history of Oscar Amalfitano, a professor at the University of Santa Teresa and “expert in Benno von Archimboldi” (150–51), to whom we have already been introduced in “The Part of the Critics.” He is, we could say, the fifth critic, though his part in no way advances our knowledge of Archimboldi, who is not even mentioned in this section of the book. It looks as though Bolaño is going to make us wait quite some time before the mystery of Achimboldi is resolved. . . if indeed it ever is.

Meanwhile, if this book’s first part was relatively disparate and uncohesive, then its second part is even more so. There are perhaps three main elements to it. First, there is the tale of Amalfitano’s wife, Lola, who, when they are living in Barcelona with their young child, takes off hitchhiking with a friend (Imma) in pursuit of a poet who turns out to be interned in an insane asylum in the Basque Country.

At the asylum, Lola (who is relating her adventures to Amalfitano via a series of letters) and Imma meet a doctor who tells them he is writing a biography of the poet. “Someday,” he explains, 

all of us will finally leave Mondragón, and this noble institution, ecclesiastical in origin, charitable in aim, will stand abandoned. Then my biography will be of interest and I’ll be able to publish it, but in the meantime, as you can imagine, it’s my duty to collect information, dates, names, confirm stories, some in questionable taste, even damaging, others more picturesque, stories that revolve around a chaotic center of gravity, which is our friend here, or what he’s willing to reveal, the ordered self he presents, ordered verbally, I mean, according to a strategy I think I understand, although its purpose is a mystery to me, an order concealing a verbal disorder that would shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it, even as spectators of a staged performance. (224–25; translation, page 174)

This description of uneven and varied stories that “revolve around a chaotic center of gravity” seems to be almost equally apt for the book (2666) that we ourselves are reading, though perhaps we are still unsure even as to what that center of gravity is for Bolaño’s novel. Are we being kept from it precisely because it would “shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it”? Is this why the true subject of 2666 (if indeed this book, or any other, can be said to have a “true subject”) has to be postponed so long?

The second element of “The Part of Amalfitano” comes when the professor has relocated to Santa Teresa and stumbles across a book in the boxes of books he has had packed up and delivered to his new abode, but this is a book that he cannot remember ever buying or owning. It is written by a Galician poet, Rafael Dieste, though rather than poetry it is a book of geometry, with the title Testamento geométrico or “Geometric Testament.” We are told that on its front flap the book is described as “really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’” (240; 186). Again, we may wonder whether, with this description of a book within the book, Bolaño is also telling us something about the book that we ourselves are reading. Are all books within books metaphorical in this way? Or would that be synecdochal: a part for the whole? Which may then make us wonder about the roles of the “parts” in this long book. What is the “whole” that is 2666? Is it more than its parts?

In the case of Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, Amalfitano comes up with a novel reading (or non-reading) strategy, albeit not quite so novel in that we are told that the idea comes from Duchamp: he hangs it up on a clothesline in his garden, exposing it to the wind and the sun, and presumably also to whatever rain may fall in these dry latitudes. He puts it to the test of everything that is summed up in the (very Bolañoesque) word, “intemperie”: “bad weather, the outdoors, the open sky, the elements.” As he explains to his daughter: “I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate” (246; 191). But this “just because” is already something more than a “just because”: hanging the book on the line also stages a conflict between literature and nature, perhaps between civilization and a (barbaric?) climate hostile to human habitation. Or as Duchamp is said to have put it of his own experiments in hanging books out on a line: “in its exposure to the weather, ‘the treatise seriously got the facts of life’” (246; 191).

Meanwhile, we are told that Amalfitano has other strange little ideas, beyond this one of treating a book like an item of wet clothing. He has some “idiosyncratic” thoughts about jet-lag, for instance: that people in other time zones in fact do not exist, or are at best permanently slumbering, such that 

if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. (243; 189)

We are told of such odd “ideas or feelings or ramblings” that they

turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. (244; 189)

Is this then another clue to what this novel is doing–or what novels do, on the whole, if they come to comprise a whole? They create “neatly structured stor[ies]” out of “incoherent howl[s] with no beginning or end,” but at the price of madness or suicide, freedom that turns out to be (a line of) flight? Is Bolaño trying to give us some insight into the process by which “order” is processed out of “chaos,” even as inevitably we look for that order and prefer to suppress or pass over the enabling substrate that is its chaos, which the order that prose brings both reveals and represses?

Finally, the third element (though in truth there are plenty of others) in this “Part of Amalfitano” concerns the university rector’s son, Marco Antonio, who appears out of nowhere on the street one day and takes Amalfitano to a rather dubious bar on the outskirts of town and gets him to try a brand of mezcal called Los Suicidas: 

drink up and enjoy, said Marco Antonio. At the second sip Amalfitano thought it really was an extraordinary drink. They don’t make it anymore, said Marco Antonio, like so much in this fucking country. And after a while, fixing his gaze on Amalfitano, he said: we’re going to hell, I suppose you’ve realized, Professor? (275; 215)

Los Suicidas: The Suicides. This oddly-named drink is, incidentally, the same brand of mezcal that, at the outset of the second section (or part?) of The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra serves to Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano when they come to interview him about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. But is this repetition or resonance only incidental? Is anything incidental in Bolaño? Or is, by contrast, everything no more than one incident after another, from which we are forced (as is our habit, as readers of novels) to find significance in their mutual interconnection, as we seek to fabricate a cohesive and unified story where in essence there is none?

2666 II: Machine Reading

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Upon reaching the end of “The Part of the Crimes,” it is hard to see how it could have stood on its own. And yet, according to the note that prefaces the entire novel, that was Bolaño’s plan, communicated just “days before his death” to his publishers: that the various parts of the book should be published separately.

To me, at least, it does not feel as though things have really started getting going, even by page 207. Perhaps that is because I do not feel truly invested in what is the ostensible plot of this part of the book: the relations between the various critics, Pelletier, Espinoza, Norton, and Morini. I do not much care about the love triangle between the first three, nor do I feel there is much sense of resolution or even surprise when (it ultimately turns out) Norton picks Morini over either of the erstwhile rivals bidding for her bed.

Meanwhile, the other plot point, the search for the elusive writer, Archimboldi, which takes three of the four of them to Santa Teresa, in the northern Mexico state of Sonora, also leaves me cold. I did not expect them to find Archimboldi (and indeed, they do not), and always felt that at best the quest was what film director Alfred Hitchcock famously called a “macguffin”: “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” It was a gimmick that simply set the characters in motion. But it is not as though they found much else along the way: they stumble upon the femicides plaguing the city and its environs, but this theme has yet to be developed.

I am left still with the sensation that the key to this first part of the book may lie in one of the many smaller, apparently insignificant stories with which this part of the book is stuffed: the tale of the artist Edwin Johns, for instance, which recurs more than once. Johns’s obra maestra, we are told, is a piece in which he frames his own amputated right hand (his painting hand). At one point several of our critics, on a diversion from one of their unending workshops or conferences on Archimboldi, seek Johns out in the Swiss asylum in which he has been interned. Later, when Norton stumbles across a retrospective exhibition of Johns’s work, we discover that in the meantime he has apparently died. But it feels that this story of the self-mutilating artist, the artist who puts an end to the possibility of further art, still has more to give.

Or maybe the story that truly drives 2666 has gotten going elsewhere, for instance in one of the many dreams that the characters have. Certainly their conscious intentions and preoccupations hold relatively little interest, whether they revolve around hunting down Archimboldi or around finding a new partner with whom to share their otherwise (frankly) rather shallow lives. Perhaps instead it is to the unconscious, as revealed in dreams or mistakes, that we should look.

Or perhaps the error here is precisely the reader’s (this reader’s) own search for hidden meaning. For a “part” of critics, there is remarkably little said here on criticism, with one exception: a brief discussion of a Serbian critic’s proposal for a new approach to Archimboldi. He calls for an “ultraconcrete critical literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as guide, neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier” (79; translation, page 55).

The article in which the Serbian critic’s proposal comes catches the other critics’ eye: Pelletier sends copies to the other three. But what interests them is mostly a detail in which the Serb somehow tracks down an airline reservation in Archimboldi’s name, for a flight from Sicily to Morocco. They remain hung up on the biographical, and on their obsession to meet their author in flesh and blood.

But it may be worth pausing a little longer on this “ultraconcrete” and “nonspeculative [critical] literature free of ideas,” an “archaeology of the facsimile” and “of the photocopier.” Is this not the kind of criticism that AI might produce? Indeed, if we were to turn this suggestion away from the elusive texts of Archimboldi (about which we known next to nothing) and towards instead the very substantial text that we have in our hands: is Bolaño hinting (with a wink or otherwise) that his own work is best read not by a human, but by a machine?

The Savage Detectives II: The Limits of Heteroglossia

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The second part of The Savage Detectives is itself entitled “The Savage Detectives,” with the addition of the dates: 1976–1996. What then is the relationship between this part and the book as a whole? Is this the core, the essence of the thing?

If so, then at first glance at least it’s a rather fragmented and even inconsistent (incoherent?) essence. We move from the monologue of García Madero’s diary entries in part one to an expansive crowd of voices. Characters featured in the first part seem to gain voice, while new characters are added, all to tell us more about the visceral realists, particularly about Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and where they came from and perhaps where they went next.

As we might expect with this multiplication of perspectives, they do not necessarily see things the same way. Manuel Maples Arce, for instance, a venerable member of the avant-garde (and a historical figure, founder of stridentism) tells us of a visit from Belano, accompanied by “two boys and a girl [. . .]. The girl was American” (180). From Maples Arce’s point of view, the visit went tolerably well: he wowed his young visitor with a reference to his friendship with Borges; Belano wrote down a list of questions, to which Maples Arce later responded, handing his answers over along with a couple of his own books. The elder poet sees this as a paternal gesture of care to a representative of the lost younger generation: “All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father.” But the gesture goes unreciprocated or unnoticed: “He never came back.” Why not? Maples Arce can only conjecture: “these poets were meant to be orphans” (181).

Immediately we shift to the point of view of Barbara Patterson, who we soon realize is the unnamed American girl who had visited Maples Arce alongside Belano. She makes clear her disdain for the would-be father of the avant-garde: “Motherfucking hemorrhoid-licking old bastard, I saw the distrust in his pale, bored little monkey eyes right from the start” (181). He’s a “constipated grand old man of Mexican literature [. . .] Mr. Great Poet of the Pleistocene,” whom her companions (“ass kissers”) are wrong to give the time of day. So much for an appreciation of literary history . . . for Patterson, it seems, such history is bunk.

Belano and Lima, on the other hand, though they are not (yet, at least) among those to whom the novel now gives voice, are shown to be keener to explore the literary archive. They are particularly interested in learning about Cesárea Tinajero, another figure from the avant-garde of Maples Arce’s generation, about whom they quiz one Amadeo Salvatierra. What draws them to her? he asks. Because “she seemed to be the only woman” among that avant-garde group, “and there were a lot of references to her, all saying that she was a fine poet.” Salvatierra persists with his questions: “where did you read her work? We haven’t read anything she wrote, they said, not anywhere, and that got us interested. [. . .] no one published her” (165). A silent poet, then, has grabbed their attention.

Even though the number of voices multiplies, as The Savage Detectives proceeds, we are still reminded of the voices we do not hear, of the limits of what this novel that is increasingly tumultuous, ever more polyphonic or heteroglossic (to use Bakhtin’s terms), can possibly include. The Savage Detectives is getting longer and longer, with each passing page, but its essence (if it has one) remains elusive, and its gaps or fissures are becoming more apparent.

2666 I

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This blog post is something of a placeholder… I admit that for various reasons I have yet to get fully into Bolaño’s novel. I am a little past page 100, almost exactly halfway through the first of the five “parts” that comprise the novel as a whole: “The Part of the Critics.”

The first part of the novel features four critics, university professors, from four countries: Jean-Claude Pelletier, from France; Piero Morini, from Italy; Manuel Espinoza, from Spain; and Liz Norton, from England.

What these four critics have in common is that each is a specialist in an elusive, but apparently highly-regarded, German writer who goes by the name of Benno von Archimboldi. Of Archimboldi, little is known but much is (it seems) said, as Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton are endlessly meeting up at conferences and seminars across Europe (Bologna, Paris, Stuttgart…) to discuss his work, at times to take issue with rival Achimboldists whose interpretation of the object of their obsession differs in some way from their own.

Archimboldi is, we are told, a pseudonym, and at various points some of our critics try to track down the man behind the literary mask, for instance by visiting the offices of his publisher, but to no avail. Peeking ahead in Bolaño’s novel, I see that the last of the book’s parts (from page 795 on) is “The Part of Archimboldi,” so here I am not exactly expecting many revelations. 2666 will, I assume, make me wait another 700 pages before Achimboldi’s face is revealed. (And perhaps not even then, if I have learned anything from the somewhat similar quest that structures Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.)

In the meantime, then, the focus is on the relations between the critics more than what these critics may have to say about (or even see in) the object of their criticism.

These relations revolve around a sort of love triangle between Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza. (Moroni is an occasional confidante of all three.) For some time, both the Frenchman and the Spaniard were sleeping with the Englishwoman. By this stage of the novel, both these affairs have been suspended while Norton is (perhaps) choosing between the two of them, who remain friends despite their mutual knowledge (and continual discussion) of their rivalry.

For the reader–or for this reader, at least–the problem is to discern what if anything is at stake in all this off-and-on bed-hopping, conducted for the most part with remarkably civilized equanimity by all concerned. There are certainly passions beneath the surface: in a rather shocking scene, the two men take out their frustrations on an unfortunate Pakistani taxi-driver in London, leaving him half-dead in an incident that is compared in erotic terms to a displaced ménage à trois.

A little knowledge is dangerous. What I know about the book has to do mostly with its fourth part, “The Part of the Crimes” (pages 443-791), which is concerned, so I understand, with the femicides on the US/Mexico border. Should we then take this violence in London to be an anticipation of the violence (inflicted, however, on women rather than men) to which the novel will turn in another 300 or so pages? And what to make at this point of the very brief mention of “the Sonora murders” about which Morini reads in an article in Il Manifesto on page 64, but to which Bolaño’s novel has yet to return?

A long novel keeps you guessing. 

Similarly, what should we think of the brief stories that are embedded within the narrative, that seem at first sight to be digressions that take us nowhere in particular? The lengthy anecdote, for instance, about a husband and wife visiting an estancia in Argentina, that is told at a dinner at which Archimboldi was once present and relayed indirectly to the critics? Or the encounter between Morini and a London beggar who asks the Italian critic to read out the titles of recipes attributed to the Mexican poet Sor Juan de la Cruz?

Long books are inevitably full of stuff, and it can be hard to know what matters (or can it all matter?) and where to pay attention (or can we pay attention to everything?). They pose a challenge of discernment and focus.

There is then perhaps an instance of this problem that the book poses in the telephone calls that we are told at one stage Espinoza and Pelletier (separately, sequentially, “three or four times each afternoon” and “two of three times each morning” [49]) make to Norton. “Both were careful to dress these calls up with archimboldian pretexts” before going on “directly to address what they really wanted” (50). But even the conversations that follow the achimboldian pretexts seem to be circling the main point, as they concern variously the men’s problems with their colleagues or with noisy neighbors. They appear still to be postponing any real revelation of their real desires and anxieties.

Likewise with this novel: it even takes some delight in stringing its readers along. Unless what matters has already been said, and we are (or I am) missing it.

The Savage Detectives I

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The first part of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, just under 140 pages (in the Picador edition) and entitled “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975),” is presented as a series of diary entries written by one Juan García Madero between the beginning of November and the last day of December.

García Madero (almost everyone calls him by his last names, rather than his first name, somewhat to his chagrin) is a seventeen-year-old orphan, though what happened to his parents we are never told, who lives with his uncle and aunt while he studies law at the university in Mexico City.

Yet we hear very little of his studies–in any case, he “wanted to study literature, not law, but [his] uncle insisted” (3). Instead, he wants to be a poet: or perhaps he is a poet; he is frequently hailed as “poet García Madero” and he is endlessly writing poetry. By December 27 he tells us that “since it all began” (i.e. presumably over the course of these two months) he has written “55 poems,” coming to 76 pages and “Total lines: 2,453 / I could put together a book by now. My complete works” (121).

Not that we ever see any of this poetry. We are not treated to a single line. The closest we get is one of the poem’s titles: “15/3” (97), which seems to refer to the number of times that he and (one of) his lover(s) orgasm in a four-hour session of lovemaking: she fifteen times (“I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack”), he three. I’m not sure this is a poem I would want to read, and I thank Bolaño for sparing us it.

What we get instead, then, is the life of a poet, or at least the life of a poet in the making as García Madero imagines it should be. In addition to skipping class and ignoring his legal studies, this involves a lot of cafés and bars, quite a bit of drinking and smoking, a perhaps surprising amount of sex with an equally surprising number of lover (García Madero is a virgin at the start of November, but very much not so any longer by the end of the year), visiting bookshops to chat to booksellers and steal their books, and above all hanging out with other poets or would-be poets who spend their time similarly, either in their homes or in the streets and bars of Mexico City.

Despite the almost total lack of evidence, at least some of those with whom García Madero associates (notably the barmaids at one of his favorite bars) are apparently “convinced that someday [he]’d be an important person in Mexican literature” (104). Like most of the other young Bohemians, he is a member of a group of poets that style themselves the “visceral realists” (the novel opens with his invitation to the group) who are determined, it seems, to shake up and dislodge the Mexican poetic establishment, here represented above all by (future Nobel prize laureate) Octavio Paz. Indeed, their ambitions run higher still: “what we’re trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale” (29), declares García Madero.

Not that it is at all clear what “visceral realism” is. One of the booksellers tells the narrator that the phrase is a contradiction in terms: “realism is never visceral,” he declares; “the visceral belongs to the oneiric world” (113–14). The movement seems to be vaguely avant-garde, and run along the lines of the French Surrealists (right down to the gesture of periodic purges or expulsions, which may or may not be in jest) by two rather shadowy figures, who sporadically appear in and disappear from the text: Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

As throughout these 140 pages the book weaves its series of connections and tensions–encounters and disencounters–among an expansive series of characters that include poets and lovers, prostitutes and pimps, booksellers and architects, it can be hard to discern what really matters, and where this scattered set of stories is taking us. An avant-garde looks to the future, but the future here is decidedly murky.

Then all as once, in the final pages of the section, something happens. García Madero finds himself holed up on New Year’s Eve (a time of doing away with the old and welcoming the new), as 1975 gives way to 1976, in the middle-class house of a family with whom he has become entwined. For complicated reasons (which may or may not be worth explaining. . . again, it is not clear what “matters” and what does not), they have given refuge to a young prostitute named Lupe, while her pimp and a couple of heavies patrol the road outside.

Suddenly, unannounced, Lima and Belano turn up and agree to take Lupe away, thus relieving the siege. They will take her in the family car, which they propose to drive north, destination unknown. García Madero accompanies Lupe to the street and impulsively punches out her pimp. With trouble brewing (and there has been frequent reference throughout to a gathering storm) and the car engine gunning, he equally impulsively jumps into the car with Lupe, Lima, and Belano as they set off out of the city.

If this first part of the novel has been about “Mexicans lost,” we may wonder if they will find themselves (or be found by others) in the five hundred pages still to come.

Arguedas Tour: Andahuaylas

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To get to Andahuaylas from Abancay, we headed West and so abandoned the road towards Cusco, which continues East. Before embarking on this brief trip, we weren’t sure what the condition of the roads would be, but they were all uniformly good: asphalted and well maintained. We sped along in a minibus, taking in the amazing landscape, and occasionally picking up people who flagged the bus down from the verge. It wasn’t long ago, however, that the roads would have been of pressed earth at best. And in Arguedas’s time, travel would mostly have been on foot or horseback.

And yet none of these towns or cities has been exactly isolated and cut off from broader regional, national, or even global influences. In Andahuaylas, the town proudly projects its historic identity as Chanka, rather than Inca, but this is as much a reminder of the many waves of soldiers and administrators, merchants and missionaries, migrants and travellers who have passed through these valleys and over these mountain passes.

This is where Arguedas was born. His grandparents’ house, a two-storey structure of adobe with a large sign on the side, is just a couple of blocks uphill from the Plaza de Armas. In the plaza itself is a statue of the writer, on a bench, looking up from the open book he is holding out in his hand, apparently about to interrupt his fellow author, Ricardo Palma, who in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century wrote many costumbrista historical short stories that were collected under the title of Peruvian Traditions, and whose statue, apparently unaware of its surroundings, is somewhat incongruously at the other end of the bench.

There is a story that Palma was born just outside of Andahuaylas, in a place called Talavera. But Andahuaylas clearly belongs to Arguedas, whose image and name are to be found repeatedly through the town: an Avenida José María Arguedas, a Parque José María Arguedas, a Biblioteca Municipal José María Arguedas (with a comprehensive display of his books), a Librería José María Arguedas, the (relatively recently accredited) Universidad Nacional José María Arguedas. 

There is even supposedly a football team named after Arguedas, and we spent quite some time trying to track down and buy a shirt, but sadly to no avail.

And it is in Andahuaylas, too, that Arguedas is buried. His tomb is in front of a fairly large mausoleum, its walls decorated in relief with images associated with him or his novels (the yawar fiesta; the foxes from up above and down below). Next to it is a large statue, gold in colour, which portrays Arguedas in a suit and poncho, clasping a book, apparently declaiming to the city below. Across the street is another statue, a more abstract figure of what seems to be a peasant saluting back to the writer.

Arguedas’s body was not always in Andahuaylas. It was originally, upon his death in 1969, buried in Lima. But in 2004 it was semi-clandestinely disinterred (against the wishes of his widow, his second wife, Silvia, yet supported by his younger sister, Nelly) and transported by land back to the highlands. 

Upon its arrival, the body was put under guard in the town hall (to prevent it being taken back to the coast), and for five days there was pilgrimage and party as people from all around came, singing and dancing, to pay their respects. On the tombstone, when he was finally reburied, is the inscription in Quechua: “Llaqtaypinam kachkani”; “Now I am with my people.”

But of course, for all the fondness and affection Arguedas had for Andahuaylas, or for the southern highlands more generally, not only did he not in fact stay here so very long–he was part of those waves of movement to and fro–these were also sites of trauma and even horror, as both his biography and his novels attest. Arguedas’s tone is seldom sentimental, and if it is, there is always the threat of violence, the yawar mayu or bloody river, for instance, that could turn everything upside down.

Especially somewhere like Andahuaylas (for instance, on the sign hung on his birthplace), Arguedas is frequently referred to, in Quechua, as “tayta” or “taita”: father or dad. In the account of his re-internment, we are told that peasants came from surrounding communities “singing to Father Arguedas. [. . .] Arguedas was their father,” “cantando al taita Arguedas. [. . .] Arguedas era su taita.”

But in life, the writer had no acknowledged children. (In the 1990s, a woman, Vilma Victoria Arguedas Ponce, claimed that she was his illegitimate daughter.) If he had been a father, he would surely have been a stern one. Pictures of Arguedas seldom if ever show him smiling, with the exception of one photograph in which he is holding a cat. Statues in both Andahuaylas and Puquio have him instead lecturing or declaiming, book in hand: yet another man in Peru exhorting on the basis of the written word. “Tayta” also conveys the sense of authority or even boss.

There is something more appealing about the image back on the bench in the Plaza de Armas: of the writer distracted from his reading and looking somewhat quizzically at Ricardo Palma, as if to say not only “What are you doing here?” but “What are we doing here?” Perhaps this would be a moment of self-recognition or self-reflection.

And though the very notion of an Arguedas Tour may seem to be a sort of pilgrimage that merely contributes to the hagiographic regard in which Arguedas is held by many, within Peru and without, I hope it also puts the figure of the writer in motion a little, perhaps even destabilizes it a touch.

We saw so many Arguedases or signs of Arguedas: in bookshops and bars, plazas and parks, libraries and schools. But with all this repetition, do they really have to coalesce? Which Arguedas shall we take away with us, make travel, leaving others quietly where they are?

Arguedas Tour: Abancay

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To get from Puquio to Abancay, 300km or so further inland, on the road to Cusco, you have first to cross a long stretch of puna, or high-altitude moorland, that divides the southern tip of Ayacucho from Apurímac. Here, at 4,000m or more above sea level, the land is cold and desolate, unsuitable for most agriculture (except some potatoes), and sparsely populated. As we set off in the early morning, there was still ice on the slopes where the rising sun had yet to reach. 

But then you drop down into the valley through which runs first the River Chalhuanca and then the Pachachaca (which ultimately, via the Apurímac, leads to the Amazon and then the distant Atlantic), the climate and temperature change until, just before you once more start ascending to reach Abancay itself, you find yourself amid fields of sugar cane.

Here, too, straddling the river, is the colonial-era bridge (built in 1654) that features in what is perhaps Arguedas’s best-known novel, Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos), from 1958. As Arguedas’s narrator, Ernesto, describes it:

“The Pachachaca bridge was built by the Spaniards. Its two high arches are supported by pillars of stone and lime, as powerful as the river. [. . .] On the pillars of the arches, the river breaks and divides; the water rises to lap at the wall, tries to climb it, and then rushes headlong through the spans of the bridge. [. . .] I didn’t know if I loved the river or the bridge more. But both of them cleansed my soul, flooding it with courage and heroic dreams.” (62-3)

The bridge also features in the novel’s plot as the portal for key entrances and exits. Ernesto’s father crosses it when he leaves his young son behind in Abancay, depositing him in the local church-run boarding school that is the setting for most of what follows. It is across the bridge that the rebellious Doña Felipe flees, pursued by the National Guard, after leading an uprising in which she and her fellow chicheras (women who serve corn beer in informal bars) redistribute the salt hoarded in depositories to the colonos (Indigenous serfs) on the haciendas. 

And then the bridge is closed off at the end of the novel, for fear of a spreading plague, but the colonos from outlying haciendas cross the river anyway, advancing on the town to demand a midnight mass from Father Linares, the priest and Rector at Ernesto’s school.

The haciendas are gone now, though one has been turned into a museum. We were only able to see it from the outside, but it had pillars and verandas worthy of an antebellum plantation house in Georgia or Mississippi.

Otherwise, today Abancay is a thriving little metropolis with lots of new construction, both commercial and residential, and multi-storey buildings of concrete and glass. In the center of town, it was hard to reconstruct the geography of Arguedas’s novel.

There was a building a block or two from the main plaza that may have been the site of the school featured in the novel. If so, it is now an Art School, in whose massive atrium (possibly once a courtyard as Arguedas describes it) is an enormous mural featuring the writer (alongside also Micaela Bastidas, the wife of the legendary eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebel, Túpac Amaru) surrounded by scenes and images from his fiction: masks, condors, chicheras, dancing, and even the bridge over the Pachachaca itself.

in the evening we went to a restaurant on whose door, and above whose bar, was emblazoned the phrase “Todas las Sangres” (All the Bloods), the title of Arguedas’s longest and perhaps most fully-realized novel. But this was part of a kaleidoscope of décor–including, as I remember, pictures of both Che Guevara and (I think) Brigitte Bardot in the men’s loos–in an establishment that seemed to be trying to be the city’s trendiest or most Bohemian, and that was hardly traditional Andean.

All this, too, is appropriate. For though there is definitely a current of nostalgia that runs through Arguedas’s work, it is wrong to accuse him (as Mario Vargas Llosa does, in an afterword to Deep Rivers) of being stuck in the past.

On the contrary, Arguedas proudly called himself an “hombre quechua moderno,” a “modern Quechua man.” And in his fiction he is interested in what is new that arises from both the connection and clash of cultures, as for example here when young boys from different parts of the country find themselves together in a provincial boarding school at a time of maximum tension and instability. Meanwhile, the bridge over the Pachachaca may seem to incarnate stability when compared with the rushing waters below, but in fact it, too, is a vector for both heartbreak and escape, rescue and rebellion.

Faced with tradition and modernity, continuity and even violent change, like Ernesto he is never quite sure which he prefers.